Bangalore Literature Festival: Two Conversations

Notes on New Writing

I’m writing this in the airport lounge before my flight back to New York. I have been busy promoting my new book of drawings and diary entries (I bow to thee, Udayan Mitra of HarperCollins India) and haven’t really had time to file a dispatch about my visit to the Bangalore Literature Festival. Before I have my say about new writing, first a note of thanks to the organizers of BLF and my agent in India, Hemali Sodhi.

My first extended conversation in Bangalore was with Vivek Shanbhag whose 2021 Kannada novel has recently been translated by Srinath Perur as Sakina’s Kiss. We agreed to meet at Koshy’s on St Mark’s Road. Sakina’s Kiss begins with a commonplace scene so characteristic of Shanbhag’s deceptively easy style: our narrator is describing his interest in self-help books: Don’t Climb the Career Ladder; Take The Elevator; Living in Harmony. An ordinary introduction to a middle-class milieu but an ordinariness quickly menaced by unease and mystery. A girl has gone missing. (There are shades here of Mrinal Sen’s great film, Ek Din Prati Din.) One after another, as the small crises unfold, what is revealed is the shame of family secrets and patriarchal violence. (“We have smeared ourselves with the ink of betrayal.”) Unlike Shanbhag’s earlier, highly acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar, which had confined its story to within a family circle, in the new novel, with the most unostentatious of touches, Shanbhag also portrays the State as the presiding patriarch. I haven’t enjoyed a novel quite so much in recent times. Why is this so? It is not just a girl that has gone missing; what has gone missing is the truth. Shanbhag said to me during our chat at Koshy’s that it wasn’t any single incident that had inspired the writing of the novel. Instead, he said, he had been bothered by the fact that we lack an understanding of what has been happening in India in the last ten or twenty years. We behave as if we do, but in reality we have no clue. We say it is politics, we say it is this party or that party, even while we know very little. We continue to use language to describe the world but the gap between language and the inner self is the real tragedy.

Another novel that I read recently is Quarterlife by Devika Rege. I had the pleasure of participating on a panel at the Bangalore litfest with Rege and I later sat down with her to find out a bit more of her aesthetic ambition—I had been struck by all that Rege had achieved in what is just her debut novel. Unlike Shanbhag’s recent book, she arrives at the current political situation more directly. A new right-wing party has come to power in Delhi. A large, diverse set of characters in Maharashtra, many of them young, with their distinct histories, but also gender, class, and caste differences, represent their separate realities in a series of rotating voices. While reading the novel I felt it was approximating in a bold way the idea of a democratic space populated by all kinds of identities. When I asked her about it, Rege had a more specific answer: she said that she had read a piece by Bakhtin (which she promised to send me but still hasn’t—tsk! tsk!) where he had noted the influence of newspapers on Dostoevsky’s writing: on a single newspaper sheet, news of a count or a ruler shared space with news about someone who was a poor person or a serf. The other enormous distinction that Rege’s book possesses is that it is very attentive to the dynamics of caste. I applaud this because this is a relatively rare feature in Indian writing in English. Quarterlife was for Rege an opportunity to explore this issue because, she told me, she doesn’t believe we even understand caste. My own enthusiasm for Rege’s novel is basically two-fold: on the one hand, she wrestles with deep ethical concerns like the nineteenth century Russians, and, on the other hand, she is inspired by the modernist impulse to play with the movement of consciousness and form. I believe a wonderful new voice has appeared on the scene. Aali re aali, major talent aali.

I hear the call for boarding and must hurry. Goodbye and thank you for reading.