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A Conversation With Mukul Kesavan:
A Historian or a Novelist?
Mukul Kesavan's first novel just published here in the U.K. by Chatto
& Windus, Looking Through Glass is
a long and sustained dream of a virtual past by a 1990s young photographer
from Delhi falling inadvertently into the pre-independence 1940s. The
nameless protagonist is a career hungry young man, who acquires an expensive
camera with all the telephoto lenses by borrowing his Dadi's pension
from the State, given to her as a thank you gesture to all the freedom
fighters. Proud Dadi however has a secret guilt about her own inadequate
role in the independence struggle. A great book-keeper of all manners
of human conduct, she initially refuses to accept this pension, then
accepts it only because this enables our hero to purchase his camera
on credit linked her pension. Dadi is now an institution full
of uncertain memories. After Dadi's death, our protagonist volunteers
to take her ashes, not in a traditional urn, but a Thermos flask, strapped
dutifully across his chest to the confluence of the Ganges and its sister
rivers in Benares for a very Hindu prescriptive ritual. He also has
an assignment from a Delhi Journal to photograph the stucco work of
Mughal buildings in Lucknow. Our public school educated 90s Delhi-ranger
however falls off the iron girders of the railway bridge near Lucknow,
clutching symbolically his Dadi's ashes, and his camera (another trite
and archaic symbol of an uncertain voyeur) into a ten cent worth of
a slide show of 1940's India.
The adventure begins, as historian novelist Kesavan who teaches Islamic
history at Jamia Milia University in Delhi plays the puppet master and
frets and agonizes over alternative versions of India's history and the
imperatives and untruths that led to partition. Our time traveller is
now beached in his Dadi's time. The theme is spectacularly potent. The
device breath-taking. This is no magic-realist attempt to exhume the
bones of history or to perform a magi's post-mortuum resurrection.
Kesavan deserves the highest praise for his 10 year long struggle at
dreaming this landscape and giving it some sort of life. But repeatedly
his glib language on its flat bed of enumeration fails his theme; his
technique like an out of control toboggan deserts him. A short sabbatical
at a creative writing course at any one of mid west American universities
would have demonstrated to Kesavan why even important and accomplished
novelists like Updike, and Patricia
High Smith gave such importance to technical problems of credible construction
in fiction: the art and craft of constructing a plot, of investigating
motivations, of narrative consistency in tone and language; of not losing
control through inadvertence. Kesavan's plot meanders, taking the alluvium
with it. In his wandering this North Indian landscape, the protagonist
is painstakingly in search of characters and an entertaining storyline
to explicate Kesavan's search. The search is for a validation of his
historian's hunch about the Congress party's relationship with the moslems
of North India. This is not a Hogarthian fable, with a fable's
generic freedoms and devices of linguistic sorcery. Ultimately the device
of our hero falling into the past with his secular agenda that repeatedly
prevents him from asking questions, or declaring a post temporal interest
in the events unfolding around him, prevent him from interacting with
his past that becomes his painful present. He is unable to change direction
or abandon his quest or declare his identity.
My first encounter with Kesavan was at the launch of his novel by his
publishers Chatto & Windus in London. At such events, the author
who is in the full glare of publicity, having to read a chapter to a
sniffy audience and answer often irrelevant questions has a daunting
assignation. At first it seemed as if Kesavan was pointedly casual, even
down to his clothes: corduroy jeans, open neck
shirt, a knapsack on his shoulders, accompanied by his young children,
family and friends. His performance was public school-confident. However,
instead of concealing, it starkly magnified what another novelist in
the audience sadly called a "pedestrian narrative" (at least
on the evidence of the first chapter that was read aloud) that failed
to get inside the characters and hint at motivations. It seemed, unfairly
perhaps, that were hitching a ride on a wagon without an engine. The
use of first person singular made this even more difficult.
I met Kesavan at his literary agents and adjourned to a nearby pub for
a conversation. Kesavan, I realised was not just public-school confident;
it is his natural display of well-formed views on politics, writing,
and fellow writers which he offers in a non-polemical tentativeness.
Addressing my disquiet about a sense of not being able to see in to his
characters, he admitted that they had no" explicit inner lives,
no reflection, no sense in which action is seen as issuing from the characters
or from the internal constitution of a person."
Kesavan is lightheartedly firm about his conviction that what we can
know about people "the way they know about themselves" is not
tenable.
I asked him why he chose fiction as a medium; if he was a compulsive
writer. As an admirer of the Paris Review style of literary interviews,
I was particularly pernickety about Kesavan's writing habits, whether
he had an easy passage; if he wrote longhand. He started his novel when
he was 26 and took five years to complete the first draft. The story
did not form itself; his motives for pushing on with the writing, he
admits frankly were completely "un-exalted." He wanted very
much to see his name on the spine of a book. He managed to salvage just
about two chapters from the first draft for a further stint of five more
years.
The central theme, it had seemed, was not adventure for its own sake.
It was a second guess at the history of India's troubled decade leading
to independence and the way the gulf between the moslem and Hindu India
widened and political opinions polarised enabling personal destinies
to be predicated. Kesavan is ambiguous if the novel is about the dynamics
of the partition of India. " It is about people in the midst of
great change" he says, "about ordinary people who do not have
any great lasting convictions, people who are attached to the lives they
lead."
The dynamic of the novel implies, through a series of incidents where
moslems once nourished on the idea of a Congress Party that was aware
of the realities on the ground, turn into one-dimensional beings, mere
wall posters on hearing the new and eclectic secular agenda of the Congress
Party. If Kesavan's interpretation of history is right, millions of moslems
did not know if demographic displacement through migration was what they
sought. Their identities were firmly secured in the multi-religious societies
in which they had lived for generations. Congress Party by disregarding
their unspoken appeal for a direction had marginalised them. They had
been greyed out. They felt increasingly insecure. Kesavan's novel, then,
is about people who were moved by these " ideological fantasies." Kesavan
says that Nehru's idealism and a brand of touch-me-not secularism, his
unwillingness to attend to contingencies often in the name of anti-racism,
anti-fascism, anti-imperialism and socialism drove a wedge between a
people who did not want to trade their secure fastnesses for a world
that did not exist. Jinnah appears in the novel as a panjandrum figure,
a dandy-ascetic fastidious down to his two-tone brogues and attended
on by an overweight Liyakat Ali Khan, fussing over his political master.
These sepia vignettes are wonderful magic-lantern items; you do not wish
to see them in three-dimension or colour. The protagonist witnesses this
historical slide show of strongmen of the Congress Party like Vallabhai.
Patel and Pant come and go. The temptation falls short of
hitching a ride on the Nehru-Gandhi bandwagon, or playing a wallflower
to Nehru's historical speech at midnight hour on the 15th of August. Kesavan
then abandons all attempts at tying up technical loose ends, and offering
a probable solution to a time traveller's classic paradox of approaching
his own birth.
Kesavan is at his best when through sheer accumulation of minutiae, he
reveals layer upon layer of half-told stories, each one of which would
merit a separate unzipping. Hasan, the Coffee house manager, born a Hindu
Brahmin in South India, marginalised by the constraints of his upper
caste imitates a migratory life-style of thousands like him in India,
and acquires worldly competence through a moslem name. These half told
stories have echoes of R.K.Narayan's subset of characters. Once again
some of these excursions like the attempt to summarise the history of
Ganjoo clan, who play hosts to our hero, races unsatisfactorily to a
footnote ending. If the novel has succeeded, it could be said to have
succeeded through its finely focused attention to mundane details. Often
Kesavan is openly experimenting with form. He is like a Scout trying
to light damp tinder with a flint; after repeated public failures, has
a wonderful fire going.
It occurred to me that Kesavan's literary sensibilities worked strictly
within a social and political context. There is no demon driving him.
He would make a successful Victorian biographer, like Gissing and Gaskell,
fussed by the social conduct and the mores of their peers, irritated
by their ignorance of their destiny within history, but not touched by
the magic of language.
I asked Kesavan about his literary influences. We talked about contemporary
writers. Unsurprisingly, the novelists he most admired were the ones
with a social-political agenda. Gunter Grass, Gabriel Marquez, Mario
Vargas Lhosas. I mentioned William Styron, a direct inheritor of William
Faulkner's tradition of Biblical rhetoric. I mentioned Nabokov, arguably
the greatest novelist of the 20th century. The appalling central dilemma
in Styron's Sofie's Choice might be a great idea, says Kesavan, but Styron's
writing is not his taste. Kesavan's novel, it is worth reminding, has
been described first and foremost as a "picaresque" work. Saul
Bellow to whom Kesavan might be hastily if inadvertently compared, because
Bellow's Adventures of Augie March was a genre-setting "picaresque" novel
had not worked his magic on Kesavan. Kesavan says that Bellow moves
between Chicago demotic and a high Mandarin manner. This switch between
these mandarin reflections and streetwise confessions does not work for
him.
Naipaul, flagged more than once for a Nobel prize for literature, seemed
an obvious subject. I had just ben reading A Bend In the River, almost
fancying it to be a 20th century postscript to Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
The definitive context to me was the use of language by Naipaul's protagonist,
Salim, who is an Indian shopkeeper in West Africa; not greatly gifted,
a consciousness that is not necessarily cultivated, and yet there was
this subtlety of thought that through observation translated itself into
a penetrating text of considerable beauty, beguilingly getting greater
as the story evolved. Firstly, Kesavan dismissed Conrad simply, whom
he found irritating because of his trick of a bunch of cronies telling
stories to each other. The historian in Kesavan however finds Naipaul's
images of black people divided between the bush and the civilization,
the obsession with the idea of a world of culture threatened by barbarism,
a systematically offensive metaphor. He finds the strange images of Africans
canoeing up the river from the bush as cartoon figures.
If there is a context in which Kesavan has found his literary roots,
they are in the kind of new writing that his friend and fellow writer
Amitav Ghose exemplifies. His work, Kesavan finds "hugely enabling
of new writers", breaking mental frontiers "like Roger Bannister",
the sprinter: an odd simile from the world of competitive sports.
I told Kesavan in parting for what it was worth, that the novel with
its great possibilities had needed a critical and close revision by a
friend fellow writer with an eye for infelicities of technique, to iron
out flaws.
"My novel is flawed, like the Pentium Chip, you mean?", Kesavan
said in parting, without irony above the din of the pub.
2049 Words