In your writing, Baba,' said my daughter, who is 11, 'only the facts are interesting, not how you write.' In calling me 'Baba' she was not accusing me of being a black sheep; as you will have noticed, her complaint was different. In Hindi, 'Baba' can mean a father.
India's languages (if I may supply one or two facts) are apt to cause gender confusion in European minds. While 'Papa' in Tamil means 'little girl', 'Mama' means 'mother's brother' in most Indian languages. If you are a south Indian, 'Anna' too is a male relative.
My daughter, however, calls me 'Baba'. And, thrusting into my hands a book by a woman called Judith Kerr, When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit, she charges that I am incapable of writing anything comparable. There is no surprise, no fun, no suspense, no story in what I write. 'Hard work may go into it, but you are not a writer.'
True, gudiya (that means doll). I can't put a sunset into words or describe a bird in flight or on a branch. I can't even remember the names of birds, or of flowers, butterflies and fish. And I don't know how to weave these beings or human beings into stories that cause your eyes to widen. I guess I have been too self-centred to observe with care; too lazy, mentally, to imagine with abandon and too lazy, physically, to record with diligence. Beautiful things, or sad and joyous things, touch me all right, but I am so very poor at passing on what I think about them.
'And, Baba, it's the past you write about, not the future.' I plead guilty, bitiya (little daughter). I don't regret my attempts to catch a glimpse of history. They have made me less rash in praise and less harsh in blame; and they've also helped me see that an individual can help his people. I am not promising that I shall cease looking at the past, but there is greater truth in your remark than you may realize.
Warped sight
The past is too much with us. With me, yes, but also with other writers in our part of the world. What our eyes see and our ears hear is stored not on a clean tape but on material that retains earlier impressions. The past's injuries distort my recordings of the present and even my surmises about the future. Lingering bitterness and humiliation warp our sight. Some things we don't see at all. Others get a colour that is not there.
The colonial experience, or rather our unwillingness to let go of our memory of that blow to pride, centres us on our selves, nation or race. Though based in India, Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet didn't seize my attention. Why not? In part because its central characters were not predominantly Indian.
Such an attitude makes me a poorer writer and a poorer human being.
If our past and our blood are too much with us, thereby causing the world as a whole to be too little with us, the Indian caste system is as responsible as the Western colonial system. The caste system checked personal selfishness, making an Indian put his caste first, and obliged the caste to look after a member in need, but its poison has outlasted its fruits.
I do not want to speak now, beti (daughter), about the shame of untouchability, but the caste system limits a man's interest. He belongs more to his caste than to humanity. With effort he may move from caste to race or nation but he has divided mankind into 'us' and 'them', and literature, art and culture into 'ours' and 'theirs'.
What a delightful exception to all this is the young writer Vikram Seth! Indian in blood, he is a human in his soul. His account of a journey through China and Tibet is not the story of an Indian in a strange terrain but of a human being. Ready to write about anyone, he thus writes for everyone. The Golden Gate, his novel in verse, is about Californians and cats, not about Indians settled in California.
Our past weighing us down, men like me lack the alertness to notice the hopes and fears in people around us: we lose focus on the human heart, which is also a universal heart. Your Anna in When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit is a Jewish girl, but my heart and yours are grabbed not by her Jewishness but by her Anna-ness on the one hand and her every-girl-in-the-world -ness on the other.
Europeans have written about India's past and present. Their toil helps Indian researchers along. My study of the freedom-fighter Rajagopalachari (1878 - 1972), one of your great-grandfathers, was significantly aided by conversations with him recorded by an Englishwoman, Monica Felton; and part of my study of Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950), who integrated 500-odd princely states into India, relied on the remarkable research of a man called David Hardiman.
Yet Indian studies of non-Indians are few and far between. In Oxford lives a most talented Indian writer, Nirad Chaudhuri. The subjects of two of his biographies, Robert Clive and Max Muller, are Europeans, but with a strong Indian connection.
I will admit that I was moved to tears as a boy by the story of blacks in America told by a white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and was stirred, later, by Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country: each a story of the sorrows of one race by an author of another.
Real Story
Indians have been living in some parts of Africa, Europe and North America for generations. But the world is yet to receive their insights about these peoples and places. Some have painted valuable pictures of Indians in the West and others have commented with passion on racial discrimination. But even the most gifted have bequeathed few memorable portrayals of white or black people.
Visiting Britain recently, an Indian friend tried to talk to his neighbour on a bus, who was unmistakably Indian by race. When did you come here?' my friend asked. 'I am British,' the neighbour answered. 'Well, when did your parents come here?' my friend persisted. 'I am British.'
While undoubtedly British by conviction, nationality and conversation, this man did not represent the spirit you desire and I long for. His blood seems to be very much with him too, even though he is against it! No, my hopes are yours. I wish I could enter the souls of the careless, carefree, careworn people I look at every day, and write a real story about how their hearts rise and sink and rise again.
Rajmohan Gandhi is an Indian journalist and author.
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