Incendiary Circumstances (16 page)

The principles that guided my uncle's taste would have been much clearer to me had I ever had an interest in trivia. To the quiz show adept, the link between Grazia Deledda, Gorky, Hamsun, Sholokhov, Sienkiewicz, and Andrić will be clear at once: it is the Nobel Prize for literature.

Writing about the Calcutta of the twenties and thirties, Nirad Chaudhuri says:

 

To be up to date about literary fashions was a greater craze among us than to be up to date in clothes is with society women, and this desire became keener with the introduction of the Nobel Prize for literature. Not to be able to show at least one book of a Nobel Laureate was regarded almost as being illiterate.

 

But of course the Nobel Prize was itself both symptom and catalyst of a wider condition: the emergence of a notion of a universal "literature," a form of artistic expression that embodies differences in place and culture, emotion and aspiration, but in such a way as to render them communicable. This idea may well have had its birth in Europe, but I suspect it met with a much more enthusiastic reception outside. I spent a couple of years studying in England in the late seventies and early eighties. I don't remember ever having come across a bookshelf like my uncle's: one that had been largely formed by this vision of literature, by a deliberate search for books from a wide array of other countries.

I have, however, come across many such elsewhere, most memorably in Burma in the house of the late Mya Than Tint, one of the most important Burmese writers of the twentieth century.

Mya Than Tint was an amazing man. He spent more than a decade as a political prisoner. For part of that time he was incarcerated in the British-founded penal colony of Cocos Island, an infamous outcrop of rock where prisoners had to forage to survive. On his release he began to publish sketches and stories that won him a wide readership and great popular esteem in Burma. These wonderfully warm and vivid pieces have recently been translated and published under the title
Tales of Everyday People.

I met Mya Than Tint in 1995, at his home in Rangoon. The first thing he said to me was, "I've seen your name somewhere." I was taken aback. Such is the ferocity of Burma's censorship regime that it seemed hardly possible that he could have come across my books or articles in Rangoon. "Wait a minute," Mya Than Tint said. He went to his study, fetched a tattered old copy of
Granta,
and pointed to my name on the contents page.

"Where did you get it?" I asked, open-mouthed. He explained, smiling, that he had kept his library going by befriending the rag pickers and paper traders who picked through the rubbish discarded by diplomats.

Looking through Mya Than Tint's bookshelves, I soon discovered that this determined refusal to be beaten into parochialism had its genesis in a bookcase that was startlingly similar to my uncle's. Knut Hamsun, Maxim Gorky, Sholokhov—all those once familiar names came echoing back to me from Calcutta as we sat talking in that bright, cool room in Rangoon.

I also once had occasion to meet the Indonesian novelist Pra-moedya Ananta Toer, another writer of astonishing fortitude and courage. Of the same generation as Mya Than Tint, Pramoedya has lived through similar experiences of imprisonment and persecution. Unlike Mya Than Tint, he works in a language that has only recently become a vehicle of literary expression, Bahasa Indonesia. Pramoedya is thus widely thought of as the founding figure in a national literary tradition.

At some point I asked what his principal literary influences were. I do not know what I had expected to hear, but it was not the answer I got. I should not have been surprised, however; the names were familiar ones—Maxim Gorky and John Steinbeck.

Over the past few years, the world has caught up with Mya Than Tint and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Today the habits of reading that they and others like them pioneered are mandatory among readers everywhere. Wherever I go today, the names that I see on serious bookshelves are always the same, no matter the script in which they are spelled: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer, Michael Ondaatje, Marguerite Yourcenar, Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie. That this is ever more true is self-evident: literary currents are now instantly transmitted around the world and instantly absorbed, like everything else. To mention this is to cite a jaded commonplace.

But the truth is that fiction has been thoroughly international for more than a century. In India, Burma, Egypt, Indonesia, and
elsewhere this has long been obvious. Yet curiously, this truth has nowhere been more stoutly denied than in those places where the novel has its deepest roots; indeed, it could be said that this denial is the condition that made the novel possible.

The novel as a form was vigorously international from the start; we know that Spanish, English, French, and Russian novelists have read each other's work avidly since the eighteenth century. And yet the paradox of the novel as a form is that it is founded upon a myth of parochialism, in the exact sense of a parish—a place named and charted, a definite location. A novel, in other words, must always be set somewhere: it must have its setting, and within the evolution of the narrative this setting must, classically, play a part almost as important as those of the characters themselves. Location is thus intrinsic to a novel; we are at a loss to imagine its absence, no matter whether that place be Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford or Joyce's Dublin. A poem can create its setting and atmosphere out of verbal texture alone; not so a novel.

We carry these assumptions with us in much the same way that we assume the presence of actors and lights in a play. They are both so commonplace and so deeply rooted that they preempt us from reflecting on how very strange they actually are. Consider that the conceptions of location that made the novel possible came into being at exactly the time when the world was beginning to experience the greatest dislocation it has ever known. When we read
Middlemarch
or
Madame Bovary,
we have not the faintest inkling that the lives depicted in them are made possible by global empires (consider the contrast with that seminal work of Portuguese literature, Camões's
Lusiads).
Consider that when we read Hawthorne, we have to look very carefully between the lines to see that the New England ports he writes about are sustained by a far-flung network of trade. Consider that nowhere are the literary conventions of location more powerful than in the literature of the United States, itself the product of several epic dislocations.

How sharply this contrasts with traditions of fiction that predate the novel! It is true, for example, that the city of Baghdad provides a notional location for the
Thousand and One Nights.
But the Baghdad of Scheherazade is more a talisman, an incantation, than a setting. The stories could happen anywhere so long as our minds have room for an enchanted city.

Or think of that amazing collection of stories known as the
Panchatantra
or
Five Chapters.
These stories too have no settings to speak of, except the notion of a forest. Yet the
Panchatantra
is reckoned by some to be second only to the Bible in the extent of its global diffusion. Compiled in India early in the first millennium, the
Panchatantra
passed into Arabic through a sixth-century Persian translation, engendering some of the best-known of Middle Eastern fables, including parts of the
Thousand and One Nights.
The stories were handed on to the Slavic languages through Greek, then from Hebrew to Latin, a version in the latter appearing in 1270. Through Latin they passed into German and Italian. From the Italian version came the famous Elizabethan rendition of Sir Henry North,
The Morall Philosophy of Doni
(1570). These stories left their mark on collections as different as those of La Fontaine and the Grimm brothers, and today they are inseparably part of a global heritage.

Equally, the stories called the
Jafakas,
originally compiled in India, came to be diffused throughout southern and eastern Asia and even farther with the spread of Buddhism. The story, both in its epic form and in its shorter version, was vital in the creation of the remarkable cultural authority that India enjoyed in the Asia of the Middle Ages. Not until the advent of Hollywood was narrative again to play so important a part in the diffusion of a civilization.

Everywhere these stories went, they were freely and fluently adapted to local circumstances. Indeed, in a sense the whole point of the stories was their translatability—the dispensable and inessential nature of their locations. What held them together and gave them their appeal was not where they happened but how—the narrative, in other words. Or, to take another example, consider that European narrative tradition which was perhaps the immediate precursor of the novel: the story of Tristan and Isolde. By the late Middle Ages this Celtic narrative, which appears to have had its origins in Cornwall and Brittany, had been translated and adapted into several major European languages. Everywhere it went, the story of Tristan and Isolde was immediately adapted to new locations and new settings. The questions of its origins and its original locations are at best matters of pedantic interest.

In these ways of storytelling, it is the story that gives places their meaning. That is why Homer leaps at us from signs on the New York turnpike, from exits marked Ithaca and Troy; that is why the Ayodhya of the Ramayana lends its name equally to a street in Banaras and a town in Thailand.

This style of fictional narrative is not extinct—far from it. It lives very vividly in the spirit that animates popular cinema in India and many other places. In a Hindi film, as in a kung fu movie, the details that constitute the setting are profoundly unimportant, incidental almost. In Hindi films, the setting of a single song can take us through a number of changes of costume, each in a different location. These films, I need hardly point out, command huge audiences on several continents and may well be the most widely circulated cultural artifacts the world has ever known. When Indonesian streets and villages suddenly empty at four in the afternoon, it is not because of Maxim Gorky or John Steinbeck: it is because of the timing of a daily broadcast of a Hindi film.

Such is the continued vitality of this style of narrative that it eventually succeeded in weaning my uncle from his bookcases. Toward the end of his life, my book-loving uncle abandoned all of his old friends, Gorky and Sholokhov and Hamsun, and became a complete devotee of Bombay films. He would see dozens of Hindi films; sometimes we went together, on lazy afternoons. On the way home he would stop to buy fan magazines. Through much of his life he'd been a forbidding, distant man, an intellectual in the classic, Western sense; in his last years he was utterly transformed, warm, loving, thoughtful. His brothers and sisters scarcely recognized him.

Once, when we were watching a film together, he whispered in
my ear that the star, then Bombay's reigning female deity, had recently contracted a severe infestation of lice.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I read an interview with her hairdresser," he said. "In
Stardust.
"

This was the man who'd handed me a copy of
And Quiet Flows the Don
when I was not quite twelve.

 

My uncle's journey is evidence that matters are not yet decided among different ways of telling stories: that if Literature, led by a flagship called the Novel, has declared victory, the other side, if there is one, has not necessarily conceded defeat. But what exactly is at stake here? What is being contested? Or, to narrow the question, what is the difference between the ways in which place and location are thought of by novelists and by storytellers of other kinds?

The contrast is best seen, I think, where it is most apparent: that is, in situations outside Europe and the Americas, where the novel is a relatively recent import. As an example, I would like to examine for a moment a novel from my own part of the world—Bengal. This novel is called
Rajmohun's Wife,
written in the early 1860s by the writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was a man of many parts. He was a civil servant, a scholar, a novelist, and a talented polemicist. He was also very widely read, in English as well as Bengali and Sanskrit. In a sense, his was the bookcase that was the ancestor of my uncle's.

Bankim played no small part in the extraordinary efflorescence of Bengali literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. He wrote several major novels in Bengali, all of which were quickly translated into other Indian languages. He was perhaps the first truly "Indian" writer of modern times, in the sense that his literary influence extended throughout the subcontinent. Nirad Chaudhuri describes him as "the creator of Bengali fiction and ... the greatest novelist in the Bengali language." Bankim is also widely regarded as one of the intellectual progenitors of Indian nationalism.

Bankim Chandra was nothing if not a pioneer, and he self-consciously set himself the task of bringing the Bengali novel into being by attacking what he called "the Sanskrit school." It is hard today, looking back from a point of time when the novel sails as Literature's flagship, to imagine what it meant to champion such a form in nineteenth-century India. The traditions of fiction that Bankim was seeking to displace were powerful enough to awe its critics into silence. They still are; what modern writer, for example, could ever hope to achieve the success of the
Panchatantra?
It required true courage to seek to replace this style of narrative with a form so artificial and arbitrary as the novel; the endeavor must have seemed hopeless at the time. Nor did the so-called Sanskrit school lack for defendants. Bankim, and many others who took on the task of domesticating the novel, were immediately derided as monkeylike imitators of the West.

Bankim responded by calling for a full-scale insurrection. Imitation, he wrote, was the law of progress; no civilization was self-contained or self-generated, none could advance without borrowing. He wrote: