CONVERSATIONS
To find the right words
MITA KAPUR
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Well known author Vikram Seth muses about juggling with prose and poetry and what writing actually demands from him.
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Photo: Anu Pushkarna
Personal interactions: Vikram Seth.
How does 6.30 a.m. sound?” The hotel staff gave me funny looks as I asked for Vikram Seth; “Mr. Seth is expecting me for a meeting.”
“I thought I’d shake you off by giving you such an early hour,” Vikram said, as we settled into an animated discussion. I wondered how an author famous for such an expansive “unrestrained” work of fiction could cope with the restraint, economy and discipline that poetry requires. “There are some commonalities, the care for the choice of words, trying to get your meaning across but the rhythms of prose works very differently. In general, prose works best when it’s colloquial and has not too obvious a rhythmic tenor unless it’s really intended to in certain passages. In poetry, I was brought up on rhymed forms in English, Hindi and Urdu, and when I got involved with Chinese, which also has its traditions, the rhythms stuck in my head."
Indian yet international
How does Vikram negotiate internationalism in his books being an Indian writer? “I am a writer and I am an Indian; so virtually by definition I am an Indian writer. But if my muse or my inspiration to write comes from somewhere else, I’m not going to argue with it; that will be like telling the muse ‘go away, come back with an Indian subject.’ Different authorial voices work for me in the sense that every sentence I write is mine but it doesn’t mean (a) all my books should sound roughly the same or (b) that my voice should dominate those of my characters.”
He seems to write about families with ease, (refer to The Suitable Boy). Vikram laughs. “I have a very interesting and affectionate family. I find families to be tremendously complex; even the String Quartet in An Equal Music, is a kind of a family. I find that kind of personal interaction very telling.”
Writing prose and writing poetry, what happens if his prose takes on the complexity of his poetry? “Not of poetry. But its own. There is a lesson in there; I might write a long book like The Suitable Boy but then I might write a four-line poem.”
Poetry delights him, makes him think, it’s like life, but prose is “a different kind of nutrition you might say, a different kind of necessity for life. What I don’t understand is if you are so very fond of mangoes and they give so much pleasure in terms of feeling, smell, colour, taste, appearance, why on earth will you have dal and rice? I don’t think one should bifurcate one’s personality and one’s pleasures, and I feel literature can also be seen as a whole where prose, drama, fiction don’t merge into each other but coexist almost in the way as different food on the same plate.”
Is there a search for belonging as you travel through cities, countries? A long pause later, “This is a difficult question to answer, since I do think about it a lot. I know that, in terms of nationality and basic feeling, I am Indian but I don’t feel nervous about writing about other places if I know them well. A little boy had asked me during the session, ‘where do you think you are from?’ and my answer was that one doesn’t really get uprooted. If you see yourself as an Ashok or a Neem tree, that’s one thing; but you see yourself more like a Banyan with different roots, then it’s clear that there may be one main stem but there can be other stems.”
Political overtones
Having studied and read philosophy, economics, politics, how come no political fiction has emerged? “May be not overtly political but I have taken particular stances on particular subjects. I wouldn’t write political fiction, which didn’t come out of my characters. Like in The Suitable Boy, at the wedding feast, there were several political characters. It took place at the house of a minister of revenue and the complicated politics of land reform came up; it leadsto the post-Independence politics including the time Babri Masjid came up for the first time.”
Love, despair, passion....are they rewarding or destructive? “I’m grateful for the way you’ve phrased your question because I can’t give the end of any of my novels away. I can’t pre-empt the decisions of my characters. I have to go with their personalities. I might be very romantic at heart — you can tell from my poetry — but, for my fiction, what happens is the way the world goes and particularly the way those particular people go. It’s not often that I can understand the motivations of my characters and it’s not always that I’m very pleased with what they do; in fact, very often I am frustrated with what they do but then I realise that they themselves don’t understand what they themselves do, anymore than I do.”
Translating poetry, Vikram has a richness of experience unparalleled. “The creative aspect of translation and my attempting it was partly because of where my life has taken me. In India, I’ve worked with Hindi and Urdu. Later, I learnt European languages in order to go to university. Knowing German helped me translate my aunt’s letters for Two Lives. I chanced upon Chinese in translation. I loved what I read in translations, I absolutely had to learn the language. In fact, it was so moving and I was intrigued by it. In the case of Chinese translation, rhythm is almost impossible to maintain. Chinese is such a compressed language that each word is actually one syllable so it expands inevitably in English. However, as a result of studying Chinese and doing translations, some of my English poems have also become monosyllabic so the entire text of Soon or Walk is in monosyllables and certain passages in An Equal Music are also monosyllabic. I’ve got quite a lot from the translations; it feeds certain aspects into a lot into my own writing. In the Indian context, we can push people in regard to literature in other languages; I wouldn’t have read Shankar 20 years ago had he not been translated into Hindi long before he was translated into English and now that it’s in English it gets a wider circulation.”
Other strokes
For Vikram, writing “a novel in verse was a lot of fun; it was like getting onto a wild winged steed that would take you to for some crazy ride and you are not capable of dismounting so you go hurtling through the sky.”
The writer’s been painting for a while now. “Yesterday, I was painting at the Nahargarh, I thought I’d be undisturbed there. I saw five peacocks and jungle babblers; they were drinking from my water.” Painting with acrylic in a watercolour style. “It’s very interesting; I don’t travel with oils. It’s a hassle carrying turps and it smells up your room, but I like the richness and flexibility of acrylics because it’s a water-based medium. My interest came from Chinese calligraphy. Acrylics is such a horrible name, I wish they had called it something else. I paint for pleasure it’s great to be doing something you are not judged on. I’m doing this to get away from this whole literature thing.”
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