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Beyond Babel
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Kunal Basu’s stories are about civilisations touching each other in subliminal ways
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Photo: BHagya Prakash k.
Inside story Kunal Basu: ‘As a writer I am not drawn to lifestyle and family sagas of the upper-class, but to their maids’
“They listened to music — without translation; raw, on the rocks.”
From ‘Grateful Ganga’ in “The Japanese Wife” collection.
Kunal Basu was born in Kolkata but has spent the last 29 years in Canada and the U.S. teaching Management Studies at universities. He has also been a prolific writer with three novels and a short story collection to his credit.
If that background makes one expect his literary output to revolve around cultural conflicts and NRI angst reflected in much of the diasporic writing, one is in for a surprise. His last novel, “Racists”, was without a single Indian character. The 12 short stories in the just-launched collection “The Japanese Wife” have people crossing borders and striking relationships in the most unexpected ways: A Maths teacher at a school in Sundarbans marries a Japanese woman through letters. The wife of an American rock star falls in love with a Punjabi businessman of Karolbagh. And a jaded journalist in India suddenly starts getting letters from a young African woman who wants his help to trace her Tamil grandfather.
Basu does not want the label of an Indo-Anglian writer and the expectations that come with it to cloud his writing. He says a story is born simply when an idea keeps him awake at night and he gets up to see if he can “fashion a tale around it”.
MetroPlus caught up with Basu when he was in Bangalore to launch “The Japanese Wife” with Aparna Sen, who is making a film based on the title story.
Excerpts from an interview:
The stories in the collection are about situations where “accidents reveal more than the plan” as you put it.
The stories are about unexpected things that happen to us within the humdrum of everyday life. The humdrum drowns them out, and yet, they remain with us as dreams and deep memories. In “Father Tito’s Onion Rings” whenever the protagonist is faced with a conflict situation his mind goes back to the Palm Sunday bombing of Belgrade by the Nazis. His moral compass is determined by that event in his life, wherever he might be.
Your characters are ordinary people not highly placed or educated. Yet they are global citizens who step across barriers with élan.
The higher class travels with well-developed, honed notions about cultural stereotypes and interact with people through the screen of these theories. I am not excited by this NRI experience. I do not think there is anything deeply civilisational about it. I am interested in civilizations touching each other in deeper ways than in cultural conflicts. Ordinary folk don’t really care so much about the extended stereotypes. They are prone to interacting on a one-to-one basis and loving or hating at a personal level.
Do your roles as a management professor and a writer meet anywhere?
Consistency and convergence are somewhat overrated. Writing is the passion of my life. But being a middle-class Indian growing up in the Seventies, I had to pursue a career. I was a good student with high grades in Maths. As a Class VIII student I did not have the maturity to see that grades should not determine what you study. My professional life, I hope, shows competence. But the mainstream of my life is my literary activity. I have not made a conscious attempt to blend the two.
You were brought up in Kolkata of the Seventies in a politically-charged atmosphere in a liberal Left home. Was studying management an odd choice to make then?
I believe that good management is necessary irrespective of what kind of society you create. Trains have to run on time, cities cannot be as clogged as they are… For me personally Management was an infinitely superior degree than the engineering degrees I already had. It helped me move from the regime of numbers to the republic of books. It moved from digits on computer screens to consideration of texts.
As for the political atmosphere of the Seventies, it created a life-long commitment in me as a writer to the most deprived. That is a value I will not trade for anything. Being in politics in the Seventies took me out of my comfort zone. I could not spend my university life in cafes and libraries being part of the beautiful people.
Spending time in slums or with port workers was something I wouldn’t have done had I not been in politics back then. As a writer I am not drawn to lifestyle and family sagas of the upper-class, but to their maids and gardeners.
I am told you also write in Bangla?
My early writings were in Bangla. I like to see myself as a practitioner in both Bangla and English. I do plan to write a novel in Bangla at some point. I keep in touch with Bangla writings and writers. Indian writing in English is celebrated today, which is fine. But I believe that if people had access to writing in our languages they would simply be blown away.
BAGESHREE S.
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