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Literary Review
In Conversation
On a new terrain
ANANTH KRISHNAN
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For Pepper and Christ, his first novel, tries to capture the epoch-making event of Vasco da Gama’s voyage, says Keki Daruwalla. Excerpts from an interview...
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Keki N. Daruwalla: Precarious balance between fact and fiction.
Keki Daruwalla, one of India’s foremost poets writing in English, has just published his first novel, a historical novel at that… He shares his views on historical fiction, and what it was about the world of the 15th century that caught his interest.
What brought you to the story of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India? What was it about the world of the 15th century that interested you?
I started writing and the research for the novel in 1996, and thought I’d finish it by 1998 on the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama’s voyage. A lot of things intervened, so it took its time. West Asia has been my focus for a while. It was a great time for voyaging and literature as well. And Vasco’s voyage was an epoch-making event and brought the East and the West closer — in trade, conflict and colonising.
You say in your introduction that historical fiction is neither history nor fiction, or it is perhaps both. A lot of your narrative is based on first-hand accounts, such as the anonymous account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, and features the lives of people who were indeed on Vasco da Gama’s ship. How do you strike the balance between history and fiction?
The big challenge for a historical novelist, as I see it, is to strike a balance. He or she should know, or rather have a feel for it intuitively, when and where history has to end and fiction begin. I suppose, you could still manage with less of history and more of fiction. But too many liberties with history, turning chronologies on their head — that’s a no-go area, as far as I am concerned... Most of this book is fictional — all the characters are, apart from Vasco da Gama, Cabral and the Zamorin... This is fiction, but slotted in a historical era. More of history and less of fiction would also make the novel redundant. Why write the wretched thing, if you are to write like Lane Poole or Vincent Smith or Romila Thapar (whom I haven’t read!).
One of the underlying themes to this book is how remarkably interconnected this 15th century world was, something we often don’t realise and something we think of as being unique to the last century. Your novel starts off in the streets of Cairo, visits Mombasa and ends in Calicut.
The world was, at the time of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage in 1498, beginning to become even more inter-connected which is part of the reason why it is so fascinating. You cannot tell the story of Vasco da Gama’s voyage, of him coming and fighting the Moors as they called them [the Muslims] then, without the context of Cairo, Alexandria and Ottoman Turkey. These are, after all, the areas through which the spice routes ran.
Another theme that runs through this novel is of the misunderstandings you get when different cultures meet. The Portuguese had a bad experience in Africa, which in a sense laid the context for their misunderstandings off the Malabar and the conflict. But there is also a lot of humour that underlies these interactions.
Despite assiduous spying along the Red sea and the Indian ocean, the Portuguese were innocent of the ground realities in India. The Europeans considered them backward at the time. The very fact that they took temples of Kali to be Churches of Virgin Mary shows this. The trouble or conflict started with Cabral’s voyage [in 1500] and the misunderstandings they had then. But we should remember they even suffered scurvy, and had a terrible time of it.
You also bring out the religious tensions that operated in this world — in Cairo, between the Muslims and the Christians, and also the tensions within Islam, when Ehtesham the artist runs into trouble for his work.
The memories of the crusades were still fresh and I bring that out through the ramblings of an old chronicler. It would be incorrect to say that I set out to bring out the tensions within Islam. It’s just the mindset of the fanatic fringe against painting (“image-making”) that I tried to bring out. That may, in a far fetched manner, work as a metaphor — fanaticism versus the creative process.
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