Interview with Anita Desai

-How was it to grow up in a family like yours, with a German mother and a Bengali father, in India?

-When you are a child you take for granted what your family is; you don’t question it. The fact is that my mother adapted so completely to the Indian way of life that nobody thought of her as a foreigner anymore. It’s true that we spoke German at home, which is unusual in India, but I think it was only as I grew up that I realised our home was a bit unusual. We spoke German, we listened to to Western music, read Western literature to a greater extent than our friends and neighbours, but in every other way we were exactly as any other Indian family in that neighbourhood.

-You say your mother adapted completely to the Indian way of life. Did she also convert to Hinduism?

-No, she didn’t change her religion, but she didn’t bring us up to be Christians either.

-However, you went to a Christian school, St. Mary’s.

- It was a missionary school. My parents simply sent me there because it was nearby. In India children are often sent to a convent school because the education there is supposed to be of high standards. They are sent there for the sake of their education, but very few Indians ever convert. There’s a very small Christian community. When it comes to religion, when it comes to food, music, or cinema, Indians like their own ways; they don’t change very much. Indians manage to slip back and forth between the modern world and the ancient world, the Indian world and the Western world, with a great ease, without feeling any strain. If there’s one characteristic of India is that it’s very inclusive; it’s not exclusive.

-Later on you went to university in Delhi. Was it very unusual to be a woman in an Indian university at that time?

-No; it was a women’s college that I went to. Both my sisters had a university education, too. One became a civil servant, and my other sister became a doctor, a pediatrician. It was not unusual at all. I heard one story, which is quite astonishing, about an Indian woman from Bombay who went to England, to the university of Cambridge, and got a degree in medicine. But in those days women weren’t given degrees. They could attend classes and study, but they wouldn’t get a degree. She went back to India and got her degree, in Practice Medicine.

-How did you become a writer? When did you decide that was what you wanted to do?

-When I was a very little girl.We had a house that was full of books. All of us were great readers. We were always going to the library and the bookshop. When I was taught how to write and read at school I remember I made up my mind that this was what I’d love to do best and this was the world I was going to occupy. So I started writing little stories in that time. I never really wanted to do anything else. I think it was simply a love of books, and the pleasure I found in imagining images within words.

-Did you really publish your first story when you were nine?

-Yes I did, in a children’s magazine, so my family also thought of me as the writer of the family. That was the label they got.

-Why did you wait so much for your first book, Cry the Peacock (1963), then?

-Well, I was in my twenties and I had got married; I had two children, so...

-Was it very difficult to deal with writing and taking care of a family at the same time?

-It wasn’t at all difficult, because I had four children as a very young woman. I stayed at home, I didn’t go out, so when the children went downstairs to play or they went to school I would inmediately go to my desk and start writing. Then I would put it away as soon as they came back. I learnt to work according to the school timetable, and now that I teach I find myself still following it.

-As a teacher of creative writing, do you think that writing can be taught?

-No, I don’t think so. I can’t teach the students how to write. They can learn from reading. I try to show them what to books to read, how to learn from other writers. Basically what one does in the writing class is simply give the students time, space, in which to write. Otherwise their schedule is very full of their studies and exams, and no one takes writing very seriously. Here’s a class which does take it seriously, and does give them time and framework in which to work. They seem to find that helpful. All on tehir own might hesitate to start or not at all, but at least this gives them the opportunity to try their hand at it. They may give up, they may pursue it, then.

-Do you follow any specific method?

-I set them little exercises to begin with, like practice pieces. I always tell them it’s like practicing music: you have to play the scales before you can play a symphony. And from little practice pieces go on to learn how to develop stories.

-Where do you start from when you think of a novel to write?

-Usually quite a small detail, maybe just a single image. That image stays in your mind, so that you keep returning to it, and you keep adding other images to it, which fit, which are suitable and appropiate to it. So that gratulate begins to grow. Sometimes an image doesn’t grow; it remains where it is and never becomes a story, but sometimes it outs out branches, leaves, fruit, and then becomes a book.

-What is the first thing you tell your students?

-On the first day I make them take out a piece of paper and write down three or four ideas they have for stories, just the seed. I tell them: now you start thinking about these ideas and how to write them. If you get stuck and you can’t think I’ll give this paper back to you to look at once again and recover that part.

-What are your aims as a writer?

-I don’t have an agenda as a writer. People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way. But, really, when you write you don’t think about your readers at all; you don’t imagine what your readers will look for or what they expect from a book. You are alone with that page and with your pen. You are really only playing a game by yourself: of imagining thoughts ans and images with the best words suitable. It’s an exploration of language: how much can language do, how far can it pretend human experience and feelings.

-Are there any subjects you prefer writing about?

-Specially in my earlier work I found myself addressing the same things over and over again: very much about the life of women, specially those women who are confined to home and family, also the solitude from which a person can suffer even even if living within a big family or surrounded by crowds. But after several years and several books I began to feel suffocated myself by the confinement of these subjects. I felt I was limiting the territory to such an extent that it created a kind of suffocation even for me. So I very deliberately opened the doors, to widen the canvas, and started writing more about male charaters and their lives, because I felt they had a wider experience of the world, and I could address a greater variety of experiences.

-In Fasting, Feasting, though, the two main characters, Uma and Arun, being a girl and a boy, have similar experiences.

-They are brought up by the same parents; they share the same childhood and background. As Arun grows finds himself as incapable of grasping the opportunities he’s given and developing individually a personality of his own, any more than Uma can, because she is confined by her parents and the household. But Arun is also confined; he is in a way crippled by his childhood, and goes no further than Uma.

-In your last book, Diamond Dust and Other Stories, there’s one story –“The Rooftop Dwellers”- which looks like a continuation of Fasting, Feasting. Is it so?

-Yes. Originally I thought of writing a third part of that story, which is about the neighbour’s daughter, who goes to Delhi, takes up a job, has a career, learns how to live independently. It meant to be the third part of the book, but its tone was so different... It was very lighthearted. I put all the humour, and the fun, and the laughter into that section. It just didn’t fit in Fasting, Feasting. After writing it I saw it didn’t really belong, so I separated it and put it in a collection. Arun does appear in that story too. He returns from America with a degree and becomes this suitable husband posibly for the neighbour’s daughter. There are links between the novel and this short story.

-In Fasting, Feasting two families are compared: one Indian and the other American. Was it a way of replying writers such as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, or Bharati Mukherjee, who seem to say that America is the promised land –at least for women-?

-It was partly a response to all the literature that has been writen by British authors about India. I felt it’s about time that Indians, who now live in large numbers in the Western world, start writing about them too. It was about a foreigner’s experience, not really an emigrant’s experience like Bharati Mukherjee’s characters. It was more about the fact that, no matter where you travel, you come across the same emotional hungers and needs. What is different is our ways of satisfying them. In India one imagines religion should satisfy them. If you have nothing else in the world at least you have religion. In America people might think that a trip to the shopping mall is best.

-Do you think Americans are like that? They look quite caricaturesque.

-It was a bit of a caricature. I do feel as a foreigner in the US. There is a lot I miss, I don’t understand. I could never write about American characters, except from this perspective: a foreigner’s. Of course they see themselves differently, and if they were to write about the same things they would do it differently.

-Do you feel your work has become more occidentalised with time?

-I don’t think so, because the first thing I wrote was Fasting, Feasting. The Indian section is very much the way I would have writen it had I been in India. The material is entirely Indian and it is writen form an Indian perspective. But it was already when I was in India that I started writing about India from a foreign perspective too. Some of my books have foreigners as the central characters and I write about their experience of India. Baumgartner’s Bombay was the firts book in which I did that, and then Journey to Ithaca.

-Baumgartner’s Bombay even has full paragraphs in German...

-Yes. I wrote that book to begin with, as a starting point. It was a matter of language again, really. I wanted to use the German language in an Indian context the way I had always used it, and it took me so many many years to find a subject taht would allow me to do it.

-Does it have to do with you mother’s experience?

-Not really. It has to do with Germans’s experience of Germany in the thirties and the rise of nazism. It has to do also with being a German in India, so in that sense it has something to do with my mother; but it’s about a German Jew, a man, not someone who marries and has a family like my mother did. It’s a totally different experience.

-This character in Journey to Ithaca, Mother, is based on a real person, isn’t it?

-Yes. She was a French woman who set up this ashram in Pondicherry with a very famous Indian sage, Aurobindo. She outlived him by many years and died in her nineties. She was very much revered in India. What intrigued me was that, being a foreigner, she became this Indian mystic.

-Which writers do you think have influenced you the most?

-Different writers at different times. As a young woman, when I was very seriously writing, or trying to write anyway, it was British literature like Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster. They were my models in those days. Then for myself I discovered and really revered the Russian writers: Chekhov, Dostoievsky above all. Recently it’s more and more poetry that I use as a model. I’m more interested now in reading poetry than fiction. I think they use language in a way I would like to emulate. I would like to achieve that gravity, compression, the intensity of their language.

-Do you think any Indian writer has influenced your work?

-It’s difficult to say, because there are Indian writers in so many different languages, some of which I read and most of which I don’t. I do know writers of Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. I don’t know writers in twenty different languages. I can’t say any of them has been an influence on my writings simply because I didn’t read as many of them as I did of Western literature. But of Indian writers there are certainly many I admire very much.

-In your novel In Custody you wrote, as a matter of fact, about the decay of Urdu literature.

-I was trying to portray the world of Urdu poets. Living in Delhi I was always surrounded by the sound of Urdu poetry, which is mostly recited. Nobody reads it, but one goes to recitations. It was very much the voice of North India. But although there is such a reverence for Urdu poetry, the fact that most muslims left India to go to Pakistan meant that most schools and universities of Urdu were closed. So that it’s language I don’t think is going to survive in India. To some extent it is still written there. There are many muslims and they do write in Urdu; but it has a kind of very artificial existence. People are not going to study Urdu in school and college anymore, so who are going to be their readers? Where is the audience? I was writing about this very regrettable decay. I also wanted to write about the male world; I wanted to try my hand at writing about how life is like for men, how different it is from the life of women.

-And that was from the point of view of men, moreover. Is that why the female characters in the book are so awful?

-They are awful. I didn’t mean to add any women characters, because the world of Urdu poetry is very homosexual; there are not many women in it; it’s mostly a male’s world. I thought I would try to write without any female characters, but it proved impossible. I could hear them always screaming in the background, banging on the doors, being very hysterical. I asked myself “why have I made all these women so awful?”, and I thought “well, if that was the house they were made to live they would probably be awful”.

-The poets wife, in the novel, intends to be a poet herself. Were you meaning to refer to the recent eruption of women writers in Urdu literature?

-There are quite a few women writing in Urdu, yes; it tends to be extremely strong and feminist poetry. But really I was writing about a perfectly individual drama; I wasn’t making it typical or representative of a bigger world; these were individual characters. And I wanted to show how much easier it is for a man to live this life; how much harder it is for a woman’s words to be taken seriously, or even have the time, the space and the privacy... Imagine they would write without any of that. The ones we are writing we don’t have that, but we still write.

-In Custody was made a film in 1993. How did you feel when you saw it?

-Very shocked, because in my imagination it was all very grey, very dark and dirty, and I just couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it in gorgeous technicolour, and everyone beautifully dressed, looking very handsome... That’s the world of Ismail Merchant; he makes everything look so beautiful, gorgeous. I had to distance myself from it; I had to detach myself and accept the fact that it’s his vision of the book. He is very happy with it. It is not my vision: I would have prefered it in black and white, more in the school of New Realism. There were things though that I did enjoy very much in the film, like the music, and actually hearing the poetry in Urdu.

-In the book you took poems from several Urdu writers, while in the film they are belong to one only: Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Whose idea was that?

-That was Ismail Merchant’s choice. He does know a lot about Urdu poetry, so he was able to chose very fine poems. But it had an unfortunate effect, which I was afraid of: that people would think that the poet in the film was in some way connected with the actual poet. Some people took it to be biographical, which it isn’t at all.

-What do you think is the future of literature in Indian languages, now that Indian literature in English has become so strong?

-It’s become strong in the last ten or twenty years. When I started to write it certainly wasn’t. There was just a few of us who were writing in English; we had a lot of problems in finding publishers, there were very few readers, and no one seemed very interested at all in our work. I think things changed very dramatically –and I can put a date to it: it was 1980- when Salman Rushdie published Midnight’s Children, and it had such a huge success in the West. I think in India also. Readers and publishers took notice of it. After that there was a whole new wave of new writers. I think it was the success of his book that gave them such confidence, encouraged them to write. I think we all need models, and he was a model for that whole generation in the 80s. Also it is a growing confidence in the English language. When I started to write there was a lot of questioning: can you really express the Indian experience, and Indian ways of thinking and speaking in the English language –a foreign language-? But I think by the 80s everyone accepted the fact that English had become an Indian language, it was not going to disappear, it had taken roots and had started growing not in any artificial manner but in a very natural manner. Indians have taken it to our world and turned it into an Indian language. So now they are writing with a kind of confidence. I think it is not questioned anymore. I was always questioned about using English and I no longer am. I don’t think my daughter has ever been questioned about it. There was a certain amount of resentment by writers in the Indian languages, because of all the attention it has received in the West... But recently I read an article in a publishing journal comparing sales figures of writers who write in English and writers who write in... say Bengali, or Malayalam... and were more less comparable. Well known writers in Bengal were selling as many books as well known writers in English.

-Another hit in the tradition of Indian writing in English was Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Do you think it changed anything?

-You know, I don’t believe so. I know it’s had a defect: people has started looking at Indian writing in a quite different way after reading her book. I don’t myself see it as an innovation. I think innovations were made by other writers, such as G. V. Desani, much earlier; Salman Rushdie, certainly; I think Kiran’s voice is extremely original, she brings something totally fresh and new to the writing scene. For me Arundhati Roy’s book was very much in the tradition of the British novel in the 30s or 40s: British writers about India, the kind of disasters... and tragedies... and terrible things happening in the jungle. I was quite surprised that people saw it as an innovative novel.

-It has been said that your work expresses nostalgia.

-It’s something I wish to avoid, because I think nostalgia is a falsification. If you are nostalgic you tend to sentimentalise, or to fantasise, and you are no longer facing reality. So it’s something I try very hard to avoid, in books like In Custody or in Fasting, Feasting, to gloss over Indian life out of sentimentality, not out of fear of losing that. I would prefer to think that the books face the truth and don’t create illusions.

-Could that be the reason why sometimes you give such negative images of places like Bombay, or Goa?

-Well, in Journey to Ithaca it was only about the foreign comunity; it wasn’t about India from an Indian point of view. I wrote about the part foreign tourism mostly experience: the beaches, the drugs... They don’t take any part in Goan life.

-According to the Enciclopaedia Britannica your novels show a tragic view of life. Would you agree with that?

-No... A lot of people tell me my books are extremely pessimistic, and extremely dark, but I would prefer to think of them as facing the truth, not having illusions. But I do make an attempt also to show the fact that India is full of laughter; even in a family like Uma’s there’s room for humour.