You make an interesting connection in your book between violence and banality -- how violence in theultimate analysis is so banal and devoid of all meaning?
It's an extension of the famous phrase about the banality of evil. When I was talking of banality andviolence, I was speaking in relation to the riots in the sixties and seventies. Because in some way riotsdidn't change anything. You had this "disturbance" -- in those days it was always calleddisturbance. They would have them for a few days, then they would end, and then things would carry on much asbefore. Until the next riot. It was, in that sense, so horrifyingly banal. When you have a war, somethingchanges. There is a new approach to history, a new approach to international relations. To me that was themost disquieting aspect of that kind of social violence. But after September 11, something has changed verydrastically in the world.
And what is that?
Perhaps it is a symptom rather than a cause as such. The whole system of nation states, on which thenineteenth and twentieth centuries were made, is coming under increasing strain. It is coming under strainfrom two ends: one is at the top end of the scale where the rich countries are essentially more and more asingle unit -- they act as one unit, borders don't really apply between them. At the bottom-end of the scale,in countries like Pakistan and Burma, again borders have melted away and there's a general collapse of thestate. I think we are really at a point where one ideal of nationhood -- the nation as a way of organisingsociety, of organising international relations -- that system is no longer holding, and some other system iscoming into being. And what that system is, we don't know.
Post-September 11, what is the role of a writer, especially in a world where the threads of the old storieshave broken?
I think the stories are changed, they are fundamentally, radically changed. If I would make a claim formyself and my work, I would say that I've been aware of the way things have changed for a very long time.Because I've lived in the Middle East, I've been in Burma, I've been in places where the changes areoccurring. So that awareness has been a part of my fiction for a very long time. My fiction has always beenabout places that are in the process of states coming unmade, or communities coming unmade or remakingthemselves in many ways.
So 9/11 has posed the biggest challenge to writers of the west?
I think it is impossible for me or anyone to say that writers as a collectivity have a single challenge. Everywriter responds to this in his or her own way.
But there is no way a writer can't respond to this challenge?
Of course it is possible. There are a few writers who are writing tender love stories, and that has itsplace in the world. I think it is completely authoritarian to say everyone has to write about this.
Not that everyone has to write about this, but that everyone is changed by this, both in the decision towrite about it and the decision to ignore it.
I think it is in that sense a historical event that has become a huge block we have to walk around. But inthe long run it is also important to remember that it's only one event.
That is true. But personally do you find it becomes more difficult for you to go on writing after theevents of last September?
One of the strange things that I found, especially while putting this book together, and when I look back onmy life, is that somehow -- it is just a coincidence, I think, but whenever these eruptions have occurred,somehow I found myself in the middle of it. This was true of 1964, and 1984, and when it happened in New York,I was watching it from my window. My daughter was in school across the river. Two of our neighbours andfriends died. Two of my son's classmates lost their parents. So it was very immediate. For one week we hadthese two children living with us whose father had died. It was not something very distant and far away. Itwas just as it was in 1984 when the whole city was in turmoil. I must say that when it happened in New York, Iwas reminded really very much of 1984. Not because of what happened but because when a city is in that kind ofturmoil, there are always some similarities: there's the sense of terror, there's the sense of a mass ofpeople responding in a certain way. So I would say these are coincidental things, it's not for me to tellother writers what they should write or not write. This is my life, this is what I write about.
You mention that whenever in India we have a riot, we sweep it under the carpet, and go on as if nothinghas happened. Why does this continue to happen?
Yes, this is what really worries me. When I wrote Outlook that was one of the thingsI was really thinking about. If you go back in the whole history of these disturbances, the collectiveassumption has been that as development occurs, as change occurs, these things will become less, and therewill be an automatic social solution, as it were. But as Gujarat shows us, that is not the case. In fact, asmore development occurs, there will be more of these riots. We used to think development was the solution. Nowit seems development is the problem, it creates these riots in a way. Gujarat is the most developed state.
That's an interesting point of view--that development is the problem, not the cure.
I don't mean in a general sense. Of course, development offers many solutions. What I am saying is thatthere are aspects of it which clearly create, or rather exacerbate, the violence when it does occur. So that'swhy I think it is very important that we begin to think of some sort of institutional response to riots.Rather than just letting it occur, and then wringing our hands, there's a very emotional few days...the newthing about it now is that there is a new media spotlight on it. But it's exactly the same process that's beenoccurring since the early part of the last century.
But there is a difference in the scale of these riots?
I don't know if you can say the scale is any different. In terms of absolute numbers of people killed, morewere killed in 1984, especially in Delhi more were killed in 1984. But I agree with you that there issomething peculiarly horrible about the Gujarat riots. But I would say, rather than thinking of it as aquantitative change, what we have here is an ascending graph. In no way do I seek to mitigate the absolutehorror of what happened, but the temptation to think that every last occurrence is the worst possibleoccurrence is also in its own way a dangerous temptation. It is because we look at it like that, we don'tthink of an institutional response.
So what do you mean by an institutional response?
It is clear that politicians will always have the incentives to create riots. so we have to set up themechanisms mandated by the legislative body that makes it possible to create a rapid deployment force thatwould respond immediately during riots wherever they may occur in the country. That's my feeling, of courseit's not very realistic, but it seems to me that we do have to think of some sort of institutional response.Because think(ing) of these things merely in terms of lamentation and mourning, is not enough.
Do you see any big difference in India post-Gujarat?
Massacres like this kind have happened before, but I think this one has been taken into the nationalconsciousness, largely because of the presence of the media. Here again, you have to give credit to theheightened awareness in India, there's been a very much more intense engagement with what has happened inGujarat.
You have talked in one of your essays of the close connection between modernity and religion, how religionis often used as a weapon against modernity...
Yes, fundamentalists often use the word pseudo-secularist to describe those who are opposed to them. But Ithink it is they who are pseudo-religioists. Name me a single fundamentalist who has anything to say about thespiritual content of religion. They have nothing to say, they are interested in politics. And that's why somany of these young fundamentalists are actually engineers and so on who have the most banal ideas aboutreligion. They have no idea about it at all actually. And that is true of Islamic fundamentalists, it's trueof Hindu fundamentalists.
Would you say the Americans are responding to 9/11 in the same way Indians have to riots?
No, they are not. I think they are responding to it in a very different way. For one thing, the scale ofwhatever it is they've started afterwards is much, much larger. Also, the whole business of memorialising ithas become the focal point of the nation's constitution. September 11, immediately after it happened, has justcompletely entered the nation's consciousness there.
Considering the incidents of Indian visitors who are being harassed there, do you think that Americans havebecome paranoid against coloured people since 9/11?
I really haven't seen that at all. And I'm always astonished when I see these pieces (news items). I livein New York and have travelled a lot in planes since September 11, but I have never even been searched. Andit's not as if I look any different from any other South Asian. I think the thing over there is that they havelived such a safe life so long that when it suddenly happened, suddenly they feel that they are not safe, theydon't really know as yet how to respond. They are feeling their way. Besides, most of this is centred aroundairports. I would like to remind you that after 1984, for example, there was a whole range of anxiety againstanyone wearing a pagri on their heads. I'm not saying it is natural, but a certain amount of anxietycomes into being. The whole point of terror is to create anxiety. To tell you the truth, when I'm on a planein America and I see someone behaving in a peculiar way, I get scared.
You talk in your recent book about "our unwitting complicity in violence."
What I was saying is that in some way what we see with terror, what we've seen since the start of thecentury, is that the sort of performance that is required to catch our attention has grown increasinglyaccepted. So, say in Gandhi's period, just the sight of a man who was starving was enough to shock the nation.During the Vietnam war the most powerful image I have was the monk who burnt himself on the crossroads. Butnow I hear that because of the agitation in Jharkhand, people are trying to commit suicide, then some filmstarwas insulted, so his followers burn themselves on the streets, so from being spectacular acts these acts canbecome almost trivial. And in the gap between them you really see what humanity was and what it is now.
You also talk of the "aesthetics of violence"--how in writing about violence, writers sometimessacrifice truth and goodness for the spectacle.
I think it's a real problem when you have aesthetisation of violence. As a writer when you respond to it, Iknow there is always the temptation to make it all heroic. As a writer we have to resist that temptation. Forme the challenge came up when I was writing Shadow Lines: How do you write about violence in anon-violent way? When you just hold up a mirror to violence, all you see is more violence. The issue is reallyhow do you write about violence with a perspective. Is it possible to write about violence in a non-violentway, that's really been, in a technical and formal way, an important issue?
Modern literature seems to have moved away from its most profound concerns i.e. celebrating its emotionaland spiritual life, and that space is now being filled by writers of chewing gum spirituality. Why?
I don't disagree with the thrust of your question. Certainly in literature one of the things we see is anincreasing movement towards a very hyper-ironicised view of the world where everything is ironicised, allhuman yearning, emotions, all spiritual yearnings that create humanity as we know it. And I think it is a verysad thing. But I feel one of the things that is very strong especially in Indian writing is that it is notafraid to tackle those things. and that's why people around the world respond to it as well.
I could give you any number of examples -- in a way, The God of Small Things is a very emotionalbook. I think Michael Ondatje has been an incredibly intensely emotional writer, even if the emotion is not onthe surface. Or Agha Shahid Ali, the poet, has the most vaulting ambition, where he was looking at Sufipoetry, contemporary politics and trying to find a form that holds it together, and I think he was uniquelysuccessful. Similarly, over the last few years, in small ways and large ways, many, many South Asian writershave given me the feeling that -- they're not always successful in realising what they're doing, but theambition is there, of some sort of moralistic truth.
(Slightly short version of this interview appeared in the print edition)
