REFLECTIONS ON THE WRITER AND THE SELF
Randhir Khare
February
2007
The
first strand of the story begins in the latter part of the 19th
century in India. The son of a zamindar in Uttar Pradesh finds his family
lifestyle and priorities unacceptable and leaves home to seek his own fortune
and educate himself. He becomes a criminal lawyer and dedicates his life to
fighting cases related to crimes committed by both the upper castes and the
colonials against poor agricultural labour.
During the course of his work he meets and marries
the daughter of an Irish settler. He is Hindu and she is Catholic. Since
neither wanted to marry according to the other’s faith, they become Buddhist
and marry under Buddhist rites. Later, Irish superstition drives them to
Catholicism. However, their inherent open mindedness encourages some of their
many children to embrace other religions by choice. Their eldest daughter
embraces Islam.
The second strand of the story begins in England early in the 20th century with a young man from a family of coach-makers. He doesn’t fancy the idea of ending up in the business so he runs away from home, enlists in the army and ends up on the battlefields of Mesopotamia. While engaged in one of the many disastrous encounters of the first Great War, he is riddled with shrapnel and sent crawling away over decomposed bodies, through slushy rat-infested trenches, until he reaches a medic outpost and is saved. When the war ends and the economy of the country is in a shambles, the young man comes to Tuticorin in south India to seek his fortune among the natives. He meets and marries the daughter of a Spanish silk and spice merchant.
What brings these two families together? Love.
The youngest of the brood of thirteen children
produced by the Indian lawyer and the Irish settler is a swashbuckling,
impetuous, young man who meets the daughter of the English private and the
Spanish senora in a department store in Madras, virtually sweeps her off her
feet and they soon find themselves married.
They are my late mother and father. As their third
offspring, I continue the story…of course in not so romantic a fashion!
With these varied veins crisscrossing inside me I
have always felt ‘different’. From a
very early age, perhaps four or five, in Calcutta, I was acutely aware that I
did not ‘belong’. Of course I was far too small to either understand the
feeling or let it affect me but nevertheless I did feel as if I was in a fish
bowl. Because family experiences of being in-between prompted both my parents
to have friends who were either emigrant settlers or fringe dwellers, we lived
amongst suspended social groups. But what persisted was a sense of family, a
memory of our varied beginnings, an awareness and acceptance of where we had
come from and who we were. In truth, we were the living debris of history, held
one to another by the sheer force of necessity and the need to belong.
In school whilst studying a chapter on Indian
Independence, a patriotic teacher made each of us stand up and clearly
reiterate our ‘identity’. She was appalled when she got mixed responses. One
Jewish kid said he belong to the Promised Land, an Armenian emigrant said that
he was Armenian, a lad from Midnapur said he was Bengali. When my turn arrived
I said that I wasn’t sure. When the surprised teacher adamantly prodded me I
proceeded to narrate my ‘roots’ story. She sent out of class because she
thought that I had been humouring her.
This feeling of ‘not-belonging’ persisted. My attitude
towards myself and the world around me changed when I was eleven. Thanks to a
brutal English teacher at school. I remember the man had asked us to write a
short story for homework. I did but absentmindedly left my work at home. When I
got to class he spotted the uncertain look on my face and instinctively asked
me to stand up and read. Terrified, I picked up a notebook, opened it and
staring at its blank pages, narrated a story. I can never forget the excitement
when I discovered that I was actually holding the class spellbound.
The newly discovered feeling of completeness and
belonging was abruptly terminated by the teacher when he discovered that I had
duped him. “Liar,” shrieked the man in his trademark high-pitched voice, and
slapped me.
One of my favourite writers Isaac Singer once said,
“when I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up,
they call me a writer.”
Looking back at that time, I think that two
significant forces were at play: the creative force in the making of the story
and the reactionary force of the teacher.
When telling the story, I lost all feelings of
otherness and difference as I became absorbed in the spirit of the story. This
spirit enveloped all of us – the storyteller and his listeners. The story was
the silver cord that connected me to others. Ever since then I think, the act
and process of writing has been for me the magical cord that has connected me
to the world around me. It is my way of bonding with life. And through that
bonding, reaffirm the very reason for my being. Perhaps this may also be one of
the reasons why ‘the self’ is often more obviously present in my writing.
The other significant force that was apparent was the
teacher’s reaction to what I had done and his inability to see the wood from
the trees. His tunnel vision shut out a wider and deeper reality. Like a
mythological hero before him, he saw only the eye of the bird and nothing else.
This narrowness of vision, purpose and attitude that the teacher displayed has
represented for me the arrogance, intolerance, shortsightedness, insensitivity
and oppressive attitude that I never cease to react to and resist in much of my
writing.
A combination of these two forces has I would say
instinctively driven me into areas of living that have stimulated me to write.
I write when I go through an experience intensely, seeing, smelling, tasting,
touching and hearing…yes, experiencing it first hand. Not reporting it for what
it is but ingesting it. Letting it lie inside me, fermenting, releasing its own
juices of reality. The experience is reborn as a story. Twenty years of
experiencing and ingesting and fermenting produced my translation of the Bhil
song-poems, many years went into the book on Kutch, likewise the book on the
Dangs or my short stories and poems and novel.
And what do I get at the end of the day? The
satisfaction from having crafted a story that has been born from experience.
Yes, the Self is very present in my work.
I’ve often been accused of being a fence sitter, of
not taking sides. “A writer,” according to Singer, is basically a story-teller,
not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”
By telling a story a writer keeps memory alive. “ The
struggle of man against power,” wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory
against forgetting.” It is perhaps this need to remember and never forget that
has stood as a challenge against totalitarianism and the force of violence. And
it will be this remembering that will be the single most powerful humanizing
influence that will pull us through in the end. The twentieth century alone saw
innumerable acts of barbarism, one quickly erasing the memory of the other. The
giant machinery of those in power whitewashing the memory. But on the frontiers
of the spirit, the power of memory still resists the onslaught.
In his poem ‘Time an Memory’, Horst Bienek writes,
“All that moves
can be changed
but not what is frozen
in our memory
this is meant to endure.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel Prize acceptance
speech said, “To reach this chair…I have mounted not three or four temporary
steps but hundreds or even thousands, fixed steep, covered with ice, out of the
dark and the cold where I was fated to survive, but others, perhaps more
talented and stronger than I, perished…Those with a name in literature who
vanished into the abyss are, at least, known; but how many were unrecognised,
never once publicly mentioned? And so few, almost no one ever managed to
return. A whole national literature is there, buried without a coffin, without
even underwear, naked, a number tagged on its toe. Not for a moment did Russian
literature cease yet from outside it seemed wasted.”
Another view of surviving was expressed in 1984 by
Primo Levi. Forty years after his return from the death camps, Primo Levi wrote
a poem, “The Survivor”, dedicated to his friend Bruno Vasari, who survived
internment in Mauthausen.
“Once more he sees his companions’ faces
Livid in the first faint light,
Grey with cement dust,
Nebulous in the mist,
Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep.
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, the jaws move,
Chewing a nonexistent turnip.
‘Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Go away, I haven’t dispossessed anyone,
Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread.
No one died in my place. No one.
Go back into your mist.
It’s not my fault if I live and breathe,
Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.’ “
In my youth I had had two near-death experiences.
That was by the time I was fifteen. By thirty I had encountered three more. The
collective intensity of the experiences left me asking myself, ‘why me? Why
have I survived?’ Instead of giving in to the impression that I had been
specially singled out for salvation, I chose to live with the experiences and
never forget them. Further, they have taught me about the preciousness of each
living moment of my life…the people that fill it, their lives, and the
aliveness of my own senses. This has strengthened my writing by giving it
muscle and immediacy.
This is perhaps how and why memory is so important to
me. It forms the very bedrock of my creative process. I draw material from my
storehouse of memory, distilling detail and spirit, crafting a work. It is
perhaps only when I am travelling do I keep a notepad for jottings –
impressionistically tracking the course of my journey with brief notations,
stray names and significant images. Later, much later, when I sit down to
write, these notations serve as small windows through which I can look into a
series of incidents alive with people and feelings. In the process I recall my
own feelings, attitudes and perceptions, following as it were a series of
associations that each in turn reveal their own truths. So then, reading
through my travel notations is akin to dipping into memory and unravelling
associated experiences. This then influences the very nature of my narrative,
cross-connecting and telescoping sensory impressions, feelings and ideas.
The impact of the Self is emphatically present in my
choice of themes, concerns, and issues. As I had mentioned earlier, my own
multi-cultural origins instilled in me a feeling of not belonging, of living on
the fringes. I unconsciously sought out and befriended other fringe dwellers.
Living in Calcutta, most of my friends were either Anglo-Indians, Chinese
settlers, Tibetan refugees, Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jews, Armenians and
displaced Burmese. And later, when I travelled with my father on camping trips
I found affinities with people from traditional communities living in and on
the edges of forests. They were Santhals, Gonds, Oraons and others.
My early writing found its expression through two
strands – both expressions of the Self and its search for belonging. The first
were fictional prose narratives exploring the lives of Anglo-Indians and other
fringe dwellers and the second was concerned with my own religious and
quasi-religious searching through poetry. This phase found expression through
volumes of poetry such as Hunger, Thirteen Poems, The Circle and Swimming Into
The Dark and volumes of stories such as Survivors, Return To Mandhata and
Notebook Of A Footsoldier.
The second phase, even though in similar vein,
widened its base. Narratives drew on themes that reflected the expanding
awareness of Self and the connections it drew from more varied experience. My
own professional work and personal travel preferences took me into remote
geographical areas of the country and exposed me to the lives of people from
traditional communities. I became increasingly aware that the forces of
nationalism were ironing out and mainstreaming individual community identities
and creating a characterless whole that lacked vibrancy, was intolerant and
narrow-minded.
I witnessed the Bhil, Bhilala, Warli, Katkari, Malhar Koli, Juang, Toda, Irula, Kurumba, Kota, Paniyar and other such communities losing their natural homelands, dialects and livelihoods; their sacred places either appropriated or violated, their identities steamrolled.
These experiences transformed the Self. Even though I
found points of empathy between myself and the people who I encountered, I was
overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of their predicament. The Self took on the
bardic role of witness and of storyteller. I was moving increasingly closer to
a state of belonging through my writing.
This phase was best expressed through books such as
Dangs:Journeys Into The Heartland, Kutch:Triumph Of The Spirit, The Singing
Bow:Song–Poems Of The Bhil, Call Of The
Blue Mountains, The Last Jungle On Earth and River Day.
The present evolving phase of the Self is far too
near me now to articulate clearly or objectively. What I can say though is that
one volume from my second phase set the tone for this present phase of
evolution .It was The Last Jungle On Earth, a fable that has triggered the
writing of my new novel The White Cranes Of Sundargarh. I find that the form of
fable or allegory will best be able to carry my fictional narratives as I dig
deeper to the very core of myth and legend. It is there perhaps that I will
find the true reality of my Self.