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Magazine
IN CONVERSATION
Triumph of defiance
ZIYA US SALAM
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Richard Crasta, whose The Killing of an Author was published recently, talks about his on-going battles with the literary establishment in India and the U.S.
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An insider’s tale: Richard Crasta.
It is not easy to catch up with Richard Crasta. Post-The Revised Kama Sutra, his fan club has become well populated. But, the author, who has spent more than a couple of decades in the U.S., is a little more elusive. However, his recent book launch in Delhi brought him back in the limelight for a while. Shortly afterwards, the seasoned man, known for his anti-establishment writing, was off to the U.S. again. Excerpts from an interview…
Autobiographical thriller. That’s what your latest book is called. Isn’t it a nice new genre you seem to have perfected?
Autobiographical literary thriller: something that is autobiographical, is literary in inclination, and reads like a thriller. It is also a compendium of information about the literary, publishing, and writing worlds, the insider information that our public-relations, celebrity-sycophantic media stories won’t tell you and may take years for a writer to get on his own.
As someone said, “All writing is autobiographical”, but this is a literary-personal autobiography, the story of a Third World Dreamer’s Quest in Bushland — which soon becomes a quest for justice and a battle against literary apartheid. Most of it was recorded contemporaneously and with such detail as makes it unlikely to be challenged. My only doubt in the entire first two-thirds is if I did indeed give Sonny Mehta a piece of my fish steak, and I am afraid we will have to leave the corroboration of this important detail either to Sonny himself or to the CIA, or historical sleuths from Yale or Princeton.
The last one-third combines autobiography with analysis, commentary, and satire. The thriller part of it comes from the roller-coaster ride experienced by the main character.
The Killing of an Author is, in many ways, a book that mocks the system. How did it all start?
Well, as for the mocking: the system started it! Or maybe I did. We’ll have to wait for the judgement of the big daddy-O in the sky as to who was responsible, and who needs to do one hundred sit-ups while holding their ears.
I think of it as an idealistic book, the kind that is needed for the system to cure itself, or correct itself, and that it was my destiny that I should be the instrument of writing this book. But on a literal level, you could say the inspiration for The Killing of an Author came while I was living in New York trying to sell The Revised Kama Sutra to American publishers. The book had been given high praise by a National Book Award winning author, and others, and I was sending out hundreds of letters dense with raw emotion, pain, desire, anger, a feeling of injustice, a sense of history, a sort of manifesto of the third world literary oppressed and manipulated. And I thought, “If I am going to have to waste so much energy trying to sell a novel that is far superior to their average book, then it is worth turning my experience into a book. All this writing and pain cannot have been in vain. This story must not be hidden, because others in my position will benefit from knowing what happened, and what can be done about it. These issues need to be discussed.”
Thus was born this one-of-a-kind book, a demon I had to expel before I could carry on with my life. There will never be another book like it, for me.
By the way, I maintain my position: even though things have changed dramatically since 1991-93, the issues still need to be discussed; and even post Tarun Tejpal and post-Arundhati Roy, our writing, the literary output of a one-billion strong nation with more than a few mega-billionaires in it, still continues to be dictated by the rules set by the West.
You have talked of Indians being too serious, even discussing a wardrobe malfunction with the same seriousness as the oil crisis! Where have we lost our laugh quotient?
Did you grow up, as I did, in a school where laughter was prohibited, where it could be punished by the teacher or headmaster? This is why I remember that when one or two rare teachers were funny, we were so grateful for them. The laughter of children is magnificent, and then, as we start to grow up, it becomes illegal; our role models or leaders are solemn, interminably boring and moralistic preachers, usually hypocritical. Perhaps it may be changing, with the American influence on television and cable television. I don’t know.
At another place, you have frankly spoken about repressed, even depressing, childhood, and a commoner for a father. Could you elaborate?
Ï have never used the word “commoner”, whether regarding my father or anyone else; it would be uncharacteristic of me, and would seem like class snobbery. If you read my introductory chapters in Eaten by the Japanese, an underappreciated book containing the story of my father’s World War II experience, you can see that I honour my father, having perhaps underappreciated him when I was a rebellious and callow teenager and in my early twenties. He was an admirable man, considering how with his humble small-town high school education, he wrote a memoir of his experiences as a Prisoner of War, which I believe should be prescribed in at least a few schools. But he did spend most of his life in the middle to lower middle class — an economic fact — and struggling with financial anxiety. And considering that he survived hardships greater than I did, and considering his humble background and education, I don’t consider myself an improvement on him.
After The Killing of an Author Richard Crasta is still alive and kicking. So, what’s next?
I am grateful for your noting the point: I am indeed partly alive, but still kicking. I have on my to-do list six books, three of them novels, three non-fiction, in various stages of completion. The main goal now is to be alive enough (meaning healthy enough) as to complete these books and see them published. The mere publication of The Killing of an Author is a triumph of defiance, of a decision to tell the truth, but if isn’t available in bookstores and read and discussed, then the outlook may be grim.
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