Rana Dasgupta describes the environment in which he grew up as “a very English context.” The 40-year-old author and winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize considers himself English: He was born and raised in Cambridge, he went to a private boys’ school, “I was the same as everyone else in the sense that I spoke like everyone else and I had the same interests.”
He was, however, different in one respect, which he speculates may have had some effect on his eventual career as a writer, which was that he was one of the few boys at his school with a heritage other than English. (His mother is English, his father, Indian.) It led, he says, to a sense of leading “this other, secret life,” especially when his family would travel to India every few years. He didn’t feel the desire to tell his friends about the family trips, but he also felt he couldn’t: They just wouldn’t understand.
Having stories of himself that he couldn’t deploy in his normal life gave him an instinctive belief that other people, too, have stories more complex than they might appear. It is a good instinct for a novelist to have.
Two topics are frequent in his conversation. One is the difficulty of expressing the contemporary. (“The present eludes us,” he says.) The other is a critique of how the story of history is told.
Here again the very English context of his upbringing may have had some effect on his interests as a writer, and if so, again, in contrast to his Englishness.
He identifies the dominant story of the 20th century as one told from the American “and to some extent British” point of view. “The 20th century was a great time,” he asserts, his tone changing while he tells the dominant story. “All the right people won. Things just got better and better. People made more money. They became more mobile. Technology got better. Life got better.”
Solo, the novel that won him the Commonwealth Prize, is a refutation of that position, though it never declares itself as such.
The novel is divided into two movements: “Life” and “Daydreams.” The first is a biography of Ulrich, a blind, 100-year-old Bulgarian man who keeps to his room. At one point Ulrich considers whether his time on earth might be considered a failure — he has achieved very little, has no wealth or heirs at the end. (Later he deems his failure an accomplishment: “A triumphant failure. I nurtured it for a lifetime!”)
“I wanted to write another history of the 20th century,” Dasgupta replies when asked about what attracted him to Bulgaria as a setting. Instead of a story in which the character’s horizon’s become larger and larger, he wanted to write the opposite, “of life getting smaller.
“This character starts in the vast expanse of the Ottoman Empire with very big horizons, and ends his life with tiny horizons having lived through a communist dictatorship in which people could not leave the country. All those places that had been part of their world no longer were.”
The second movement, a novel in itself, is the story of Ulrich’s imaginary children — the musician Boris, the poet Irakli, and Irakli’s sister, a dynamo named Khatuna. In his room Ulrich spends his days inventing the trio and spinning story, from their origins in Bulgaria and Georgia during the collapse of communism to their success in the United States, and the sadness they find there. “They are not the children I thought I would have,” Ulrich thinks.
I always imagined I would produce people more civilized. But a confounded man like me, living through such a mess — it’s not surprising if my offspring carry a few scars.
And what a mess: In his century Ulrich watches Bulgaria go from an Ottoman principality to a monarchy allied with Hitler to a fascist dictatorship to a communist dictatorship that lasted 45 years swiftly shifting in the early 1990s to winner-take-all, no-holds-barred capitalism. In 2007 Bulgaria joined the European Union.
The second movement is not pure fantasy: It is rooted in the details of the life we have witnessed in the first part. In his daydreams Ulrich reveals a mind turned in on itself. Every so often there is an a-ha moment of correspondence between the two halves: Boris shares the name of a friend from Ulrich’s youth. Small items reappear. Events reoccur, if slightly differently. The second movement is also a source of optimism. Over the course of his life, Ulrich’s world shrinks; in his dreams, it grows.
Dasgupta admits that the time span of Ulrich’s 100 years began as a device to tell a different history of the 20th century, one of repeated rupture.
“I was interested in how any person who lived through all those periods would emerge from them with any sense of coherence about themselves, because each one of those periods meant that all the iconography was thrown out, the old language was thrown out, you had to reinvent yourself each time. This of course is not just a regional study. It felt very apt to my own experience in India.”
That sense of rupture felt exotic (his word) to someone who grew up in England.
“England is in some ways the place that has the greatest sense of continuity, even if it’s not really true. The British people, they just feel the past is the most wonderful, comfortable place, and they love making movies about it. They all looked really good in the past” — the ironic tone slips in once more. “They all looked like Keira Knightley.”
“But most other people in the world have a more conflicted relationship to the past than that, and I think Bulgaria is a place where stepping back into the past is fraught with incredible danger. A lot of the people who are coming into the global economy now are people for whom the 21st century feels like it’s going to be a lot better than the 20th. They are kind of catapulted forwards because history is not really a place they would go back to.”
That sense of rupture is one that he recognizes in his current project. His next book will be a work of literary non-fiction about Delhi, the city where he has lived and written from for 11 years. The book will be the story of Dasgupta’s unfolding relationship with the city, told in part through the stories of the people he encounters.
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[pullquote]Related content: “Psychoanalyzing the city”: Rana Dasgupta on Delhi and the 21st century[/pullquote]
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When speaking to his interview subjects, Dasgupta notices a particular reticence on the subject of the Partition, the events surrounding the formal breaking apart of British India in 1947 into the modern state of India and West and East Pakistan, today Pakistan and Bangladesh. The border between the three regions was drawn along religious lines: East and West Pakistan were composed of majority Muslim areas; the majority Hindu regions went to India. The arrangement left millions of religious minorities on both sides of the border. Partition was marked by mass migration as people attempted to flee to the other side amidst lawlessness and communal violence. The newly minted governments of India and Pakistan were unprepared for the scale of the migration, as well as the ensuing violence in which as many as one million people were killed.
“Often in the personal experience of these people there is immense unresolved historical tragedy,” Dasgupta says regarding his interview subjects. “The Partition of India is behind the lives of many of these people. I say ‘unresolved’ because I think that European states have done something to resolve the equally large tragedies, or even greater tragedies of the mid 20th century. The Jewish Holocaust is something that has been memorialized and analyzed and even forcibly broken open as an historical object, whereas the Partition of India stays with a lot of families as a silence and a set of anxieties that’s passed on from generation to generation without that level of analysis and assemblage.”
ARIEL LEWIS/THE VARSITY
As a contemporary writer, Dasgupta has assigned himself and his peers two projects. One is the aforementioned attempt to describe the contemporary. The other is the production of the new: to not only find better ways of telling the stories we already know, but also to tell the stories we don’t know, and don’t know we don’t know.
His first book, the story collection Tokyo Cancelled, is an example of both projects at work, but particularly the latter. The premise of the book is that 13 people are trapped in an airport, and while trapped they spend the night telling stories to one another. It is frequently compared to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, if for our present age. In its interests, however, Tokyo Cancelled is concerned with the question of what it would mean to have a global culture.
“It arose from a feeling that though we have a lot of the mechanical infrastructure of globalization — we know how things and money move around, and we of lots of connections of telecommunications and thing like that — we don’t have anything that might be called a culture of globalization.”
Dasgupta cites the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s figure that at the time of the French Revolution half of the French population did not speak French at all, and only 12 to 13 percent spoke it “fairly.” At one point in France’s history, the idea of France would have seemed “too improbable.”
Tokyo Cancelled attempts to make a similar imaginative leap, from Benedict Anderson’s imagined community of the nation to an imagined community of the world.
“It felt to me that it would be a similar step up in scale again that we inhabited this integrated economic and political system, which we were unable to imagine as an entity. We were unable to imagine how all its parts and all its peoples might co-exist.”
Politics and economics, but especially business and finance, are the subjects that discussions of Dasgupta’s books tend towards. That is in part due to the author’s interests. After studying French literature at Oxford and Media Studies at Madison–Wisconsin, Dasgupta worked for four years in a marketing consultancy firm, which took him to London, Kuala Lampur, and New York.
There he learned about business. Part of his job involved shepherding CEOs from companies such as AMD and British Airways while they were on tour. By the time he left, he had become sickened by it. “I just felt like this was not what I was supposed to be doing with my life,” he says. He moved to Delhi. But he also took away a respect for the ingenuity of running a business. It is a subject he finds missing from contemporary fiction.
“I think it’s ridiculous to imagine that this is not a literary subject, since we are so much concerned about business. If you look at the 19th-century novel, it’s so much about business. Balzac — especially the French. And the Germans!”
He frequently mentions the word “energy” — of people, groups, and places; built and deployed; applied to a task. The word’s exact meaning, as Dasgupta uses it, is vague, but its characteristics are not: energy is magnetic; it can dangerous, even deadly, but with a decline in energy comes a kind of despair. And “it is the capitalist economy that supplies by far the greatest energy.”
Despair: When asked whether he is an optimist, Dasgupta replies that he is not. He has to struggle to find what optimism he has. But he also rejects the notion that the world is coming to an end, in part because the apocalyptic vision is anti-creative: “It’s not like saying that everything is shit is actually a radical position or contains any seeds of anything.”
“Probably the future of humanity is not one of those two things,” Dasgupta says, referring to heaven and hell — he senses a “post-Christian Christianity” to current narrative of the apocalypse. “Probably we wobble forward as we have always, and if you’re not the guys to invent futures for us, then somebody else will.”
In this interview, Dasgupta begins to outline a position of “tragic optimism,” which at one point he defines as being “emotionally receptive to the horror and exhilaration of your moment.”
“I guess tragic optimism would be my thing, which is not to say that I think the future’s good or bad, but I think the future is.”
***
Rana Dasgupta spoke to The Varsity in October when he was in Toronto for the International Festival of Authors. The “talk” referred to in this interview is a lecture Dasgupta gave at U of T on the subject of his Delhi book.
——— INTERVIEW CONTENTS ———
A different history of the 20th century
To recapture life in history
Some surplus
A tragic kind of optimism
To be ethically creative
The most intimate of our possessions
“All that is solid melts into air”
The contemporary and the new
Two forms of nostalgia
India’s disingenuous position
He wishes to make claims on your world
A culture that is trying to arrive
An interesting place from which to contemplate the 21st century
———
A DIFFERENT HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY.
———
THE VARSITY
Why Bulgaria?
RANA DASGUPTA
Well, I started developing this relationship to Bulgaria a long time before I started writing the novel, more than a decade before. I heard this album of Bulgarian folk music, which became this sort of global success in the ’90s called Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. It was this huge deal; I don’t know why. Maybe it was very well promoted or something like that. A lot of people listened to it, and when I listened to it the music seemed unbelievably remote, though it’s European music.
[pullquote]This history spoke to a mood that I wanted to write about, which was the mood precisely of rupture, of people who repeatedly had things taken away from them.[/pullquote]
I bought this book about Bulgarian music, which was a book that traced a particular family of musicians from the late 19th century until the time the book was written, which I think was in the ’80s. I realized that these people had gone through unbelievable things, and the history of the country began to interest me more than the music. My novel doesn’t go back this far, but it started with this moment in 1878 where a semi-independent principality was carved out from the Ottoman Empire. The Russians fought the Turks and secured from the Turks a kind of deal, where this Bulgarian territory was created within the Ottoman Empire. And I remember this scene in this book which I read where the peasant family, this musician family, heard one day that somebody had made this country called Bulgaria, but they weren’t in it — they were in another part of the Ottoman Empire — so they took everything, like they took their house, they took everything and they went to be inside this country.
I just thought that was an incredible idea. I mean, it’s a mythical beginning for people to hear that someone has made a country for people like them and they go to it.
Then the 20th century started pretty well for that country. Money started being made and railway lines were built, a small bourgeoisie emerged, and they started building opera houses and all the kind of stuff that Solo begins with. And in a sense that was the high point. For a few years there was this great optimism about what the country could be, and then it basically got ripped apart several times in several different ways.
This history kind of spoke to a mood that I wanted to write about, which was the mood precisely of rupture, of people who repeatedly had things taken away from them, their ordinary lives taken away from them. I suppose it’s not a novel which has an obvious political message, but it arises out of a lot of political feelings generated by the time in which I decided to write, which was the time of the Iraq War when America was bombing Baghdad, and I felt that I wanted to write a history of the west that went against the increasing Hollywoodization of the 20th century, and that’s a story told from the American and to some extent the British point of view, which is that the 20th century was a great time, all the right people won, and things just got better and better, and people made more money, they became more mobile, technology got better, life got better. I wanted to write another history of the 20th century, which was in some ways the opposite to that: of life getting smaller. This character starts in the vast expanse of the Ottoman Empire with very big horizons, and ends his life with tiny horizons having lived through a communist dictatorship in which people could not leave the country and all those places that had been part of their world no longer were.
[pullquote]Islam and the Middle East kind of retreat from the European imagination at the time. Of course, they don’t get physically further away, it’s that imagination shrinks.[/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
It’s interesting that you mention the time that you were writing this was the beginning of the Iraq War, because the sense of geography that is at the beginning of the novel is very different from the one at the end.
RANA DASGUPTA
Right.
THE VARSITY
Ulrich’s father lays tracks between Europe and what I suppose we would call the Middle East, and Baghdad didn’t seem all that far away from Bulgaria.
RANA DASGUPTA
Exactly. And it was a real railway line, that Deutsche Bank was funding, from Berlin to Baghdad. I came upon this at that time and I found it kind of moving that, precisely as you say, this intimacy exists such that you can just link the two places physically. So that’s another part of the story, about the way in which Islam and the Middle East kind of retreat from the European imagination at the time. Of course, they don’t get physically further away, it’s that imagination shrinks. So the fact that Bulgaria is part of the Ottoman Empire is another answer to your question: Why it and not, say, Romania, or any other place? It’s one of those places, like Spain and Portugal, that bridges the relationship between Europe and the Islamic empires. At the beginning of the novel we see it moving from one into the other, and I wanted to restore that history to the story of Europe.
TO RECAPTURE LIFE IN HISTORY.
———
THE VARSITY
As you say, that country has been through so much: it’s like Bulgaria has been through every single political and economic movement of the 20th century.
RANA DASGUPTA
Right.
THE VARSITY
Ulrich lives to his 100th year, and that time span allows you to recount that history, but I was also interested in how the first section of the book, your first movement, is called “Life.” The question of how do you measure a life: As you say, there were a lot of disruptions in the history of the country, but those disruptions are also disruptions in the narrative arc that we might expect from a century-long life. What were your interests in writing about Ulrich’s hundred years?
[pullquote]It’s important to try to recapture life in history. History shouldn’t obliterate life.[/pullquote]
RANA DASGUPTA
Well, obviously, at some level Ulrich began as a kind of abstract technical device simply to tell this period of time. And I wanted to tell the politics through the eyes of a man who’s actually not very interested in politics, and that was a kind of difficult technical thing to pull off: how would you bring these events to life when the guy who you’re writing about doesn’t actually get involved in that stuff? So you have these characters around him, like his mother and like Boris, who are the ones who report to us on a lot of it.
THE VARSITY
I suppose his lack of involvement is also a method of survival, too.
RANA DASGUPTA
Yes, that’s also part of it. It’s two things: One is that in a way I wanted to show how fatal this history was, which meant that it had to kill people and it obviously couldn’t be my main character. So, yes, he was self-absorbed or he had something else to think about rather than all these things. But it’s important to add to that: I wanted somebody who moved through all this rather blindly, partly so he could stay alive through it, partly because I think in a way it’s true to history that people remember that they were asking someone to marry them when the World War broke out, or trying to get a job — they had lots of other things on their mind beyond historical events.
[pullquote]If we were to reclaim a real language of humanity through the novel, it would be a language that would not be afraid to talk about nothing. If we lost our language for talking about the simple duration of life, then we would have lost a lot.[/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
“I couldn’t go to that rally because I was late for work.”
Ulrich finds that he can assign dates to his life only through reference to the events recounted in newspapers. He wonders sometimes why it is not the other way around, and whether it signifies some weakness in him. Should a man not have fostered his own time by which other things could be measured? But he suspects it is the same for others, too, and he concludes that the time inside a human is smooth and lobed like a polyp, and only history is striated with the usefulness of dates.
RANA DASGUPTA
Exactly. And it’s important to try to recapture life in history. History shouldn’t obliterate life.
I think also, to change tack on this same thing, there was something I wanted to do with the book which had nothing to do with Bulgaria or history, which is I wanted to write about failure. That also arose out of the experience I was going through at the time, which was that India was booming and all the newspapers were full of success stories of people with immense achievements and all that kind of stuff. I was getting very sickened by it, and feeling at the time that if we were to reclaim a real language of humanity through the novel, it would be a language that would be not afraid to talk about nothing. About people who really did nothing. If we lost our language for talking about simple duration of life, if we only knew how to talk about immense achievements of various sorts, then we would basically have lost a lot.
Thinking back he realizes how much has slipped through the fingers of his memory. Everything he still retains could be told in an afternoon, and yet there is so much more. The substance of all those days, which has entirely escaped.
The days of dust drifting in the light shaft. Tea bags put out to dry. Listless newspapers with new dates on them every day. The pipes of grubby gloss that turn from the back fo the radiator along the wall. The gradual death of things: plants and machines and animals, furniture and friends. Twisted hairs trapped in a hairbrush. The seasons, and their increasing irrelevance, even if there is still a sense of eternity about the clouds. Cracks in walls, and the refusal of windows to close properly after too many coats of paint. Filling in forms. New buildings whose purpose is unclear. Thing that have not been seen for some time; a good pen, a souvenir key ring. Lying in bed, and ceilings. Surprises, such as window glass blown in by the wind. Small changes that appear in routes walked often: a new fence post, or a sawn-off tree. The shocking breathlessness of climbing just a few stairs, and shaving in the morning. Thoughts in the background: concerns about money, and whether he can still be considered good looking. The cleaning of things just cleaned: cups, plates, bathtubs, cookers, hands and all the other parts of the body. Old-style banknotes discovered in jacket pockets, and the recollection of facts when the need for them has passed. The relief of television, and its futility. The persistence of shit, and its undue hold on the mind. The stuff that passes through the days: empty food cans, old batteries, rotten fruit and notepaper.
It has all slipped away.
Ulrich has sometimes wondered whether his life has been a failure. Once he would have looked at all this and said, Yes. But now he does not know what it means for a life to succeed or fail. How can a dog fail its life, or a tree? A life is just a quantity; and he can no more see failure in it than he can see failure in a pile of earth, or a bucket of water. Failure and success are foreign terms to such blind matter.
Ulrich’s spirit has expanded in these last days, and he is no longer bereft. Einstein said, considering his death, I feel such solidarity with all things, that it does not matter where the individual begins and ends. When his mind is particularly aware, Ulrich can sense the great black ocean of forgotten things, and ignoring his beginning and end, he casts off into it. Everything he has known has drained, over time, from the actual world into this ocean, and he is blissful in the endless oblivion. Only when his surroundings insist — when the electric drill whirs downstairs, and the walls start with that powdery vibration, so unique to this place — does he alight again, reluctantly, in the narrow confines of his room.
So the first part of the book, part of that project was that: How could I talk about somebody who’d achieved absolutely nothing at all? I wanted to write about somebody who failed at things, but also, I don’t even think that Ulrich is even that nice. I mean, he’s not the sort of character that people love. And I wanted to deprive myself of certain very obvious novelistic clichés in a way. I didn’t want to give him a great love story, which is one of the ways that you can become endeared to somebody, even if you don’t like them. I didn’t want to give him any great career success or anything like that, or even any historical heroism. But I still wanted to leave the reader with the sense that this life had been intense and intensely meaningful, even though one couldn’t say exactly why. So the fact that Ulrich is somewhat haunted, he is consumed by these things — by music and then by chemistry and then increasingly in old age by made-up stuff — hopefully one feels by the end of this novel in some strange way that this guy really has lived, even though there’s hardly an achievement to his name.
THE VARSITY
When Ulrich is young, he has this love for music, which his father puts down. I’m interested in the role that music has to play in the book. You mentioned that your early interest in the country came through Bulgarian folk music. Do you think that carried through the rest of the book? I’ve been speaking to some writers who are very inspired by the music that they listen to when they are writing. Are you somebody who does listen to music as you write? Do you try to work in any sort of rhythms or anything like that?
RANA DASGUPTA
[shakes head no]
THE VARSITY
No.
RANA DASGUPTA
The rhythm of prose, yes, of course. I’m kind of obsessed with the rhythm of prose. Music’s pretty important in my life, but I can’t really listen to it when I’m writing. I was in music school in fact when I heard this Bulgarian music. I play the piano, so it’s quite important in my life.
THE VARSITY
It sounds like you don’t want the music to infect your rhythm — you have your own rhythms that you want to set in your prose style?
RANA DASGUPTA
Yeah, and I just kind of concentrate when I listen to music. It doesn’t relax, it just interferes. Probably because, yes, because it’s a very acoustic relationship I have to prose. I think that I write visually in the sense that I write about what things look like, and I have to remind myself of other things. I have to remind myself that there are smells and all those things because it doesn’t come that naturally to me, but my relationship to the words themselves is very acoustic and they have to sound good and fall into rhythms of various sorts.
SOME SURPLUS.
———
“It’s a dream, Clara, but it’s not only a dream. There is far more to us than what we live.”
He speaks with unusual passion.
“Life happens in a certain place for a certain time. But there is a great surplus left over, and where will we stow it but in our dreams?”
THE VARSITY
I wanted to get into a bit of the second half of the book, the second movement. So Ulrich has these daydreams, these stories that he’s been building up inside himself for who knows how long, and there’s certain obvious connections to his real life, even if they may be somewhat tangential: matters of place, small items that come up in both parts of the book.
RANA DASGUPTA
Yeah.
THE VARSITY
Why does he escape into that interior space first of all, and what were you trying to achieve with the second half?
[pullquote]There is some surplus which often cannot be captured by that big story of the politics and economics, but which may be the key to a life, even in the eyes of the person who’s lived it.[/pullquote]
RANA DASGUPTA
Well I think the answer to your first question is that when I sent the manuscript of this book to my German editor, who was one of the two editors with whom we’d already had a contract — so he and my UK editor were the two people who gave me the most significant editorial feedback — I remember when he saw it he said, “Well, I like this book, but why doesn’t this guy ever get off his ass and do something? Why is he such a failure and why are we interested in this failure?” I realized when he said that just how un-European I’d become after living in India for seven or eight years at that time, because to me his comment revealed that he had not understood certain things about how a country like Bulgaria works, which I could understand because I live in India. Which is to say that the idea that you might just simply get crushed by circumstances is not at all difficult to swallow. I think situations where not only are there the great problems of material survival, but also the great problems of spiritually overcoming certain kinds of political or social obstacles to your flourishing, can just drag down a lot of people who are very talented. I know people like this who have reached old age and they live in small rooms and they never really did any of the things that one might expect that they could do. And those people do end up living in their heads. Some people are convinced by the high-velocity of Ulrich’s daydreams as a response to the low-velocity of life, and some people aren’t, but I think it’s certainly the only place he has left to go. I mean, he doesn’t have another form of agency in the world.
I suppose in terms of what I was trying to do, I mean, it was trying to do lots of things. One is not to leave the book as a rather conventional melancholy account of the Eastern European 20th century: Things started high and went low and people are rather sad. It’s definitely an interesting subject for me, but for me it’s not enough. It’s not enough because, despite what I’ve just said, I don’t think the whole of human life is predetermined by social and political problems. There is some surplus which often cannot be captured by that big story of the politics and economics, but which may be the key to a life, even in the eyes of the person who’s lived it.
[pullquote]It’s not like saying that everything is shit is actually a radical position or contains any seeds of anything.[/pullquote]
The other thing is that the events of 1989 are now a generation ago, and in a way, since most of the people who are reading the book are not in Bulgaria, it’s too comforting to portray this part of the world as this rather passive tragedy. In fact, you know, the population of Bulgaria is 7 million; 2 or 3 million Bulgarians are outside the country. The expat population of the entire Eastern Bloc is enormous, like, I think Romania has 19 million and, like, 8 million Romanians are outside the country. And Poland similarly. So these people are actually an immense force in the world. Also people in the country, they are actually approaching the century with great energy. Some of them are penniless and have gone to places like England and everyone is astonished that you call the Polish plumber and he’s unbelievable, and the Polish waitresses are unbelievable and in a small way you get a sense of how these people who have had no relationship to the global economy suddenly enter it with enormous energy. But that doesn’t capture a lot of the things I think you don’t see, which is people like I’m trying to capture with Khatuna or people that you may not come into contact with on a daily basis but who are starting businesses and doing all kinds of stuff with an energy and an intensity that is really phenomenal and can be massively underestimated by people who have grown up with welfare states who think, “After five o’clock I really need to get some time with my family or my novel,” or whatever it is. So I didn’t want to leave people with the idea that the emerging world was kind of cute and melancholy and should be mourned and pitied, because that’s not how a lot of people who are living in these places are, they are actually kind of ballistic in their energy, and I wanted Ulrich even as an old man to have a kind of sense of these things around him, that he might be in decline, but the place around him was just erupting with all kinds of stuff. That to me was a more radical end to this 20th-century history: not just an arc of decline.
A TRAGIC KIND OF OPTIMISM.
———
THE VARSITY
There’s a strange optimism to the second half. Things happen in the second half that you wouldn’t wish upon anyone and the characters have their struggles, but I do think there’s this underlying hope to it. Would you consider yourself an optimistic writer?
[pullquote]Probably the future of humanity is not one of those two things. Probably we wobble forward as we have always, and if you’re not the guys to invent futures for us, then somebody else will.[/pullquote]
RANA DASGUPTA
I’m glad you see it like that because I see it like that, too. I mean, I think it’s a tragic kind of hope, I guess, a tragic optimism, which is to say that out of all this decline of energy, completely unexpectedly perhaps, an immense new energy can erupt, and energy is very magnetic. We are all attracted to energy.
THE VARSITY
When you say “energy,” you’re speaking of human energy.
RANA DASGUPTA
The energy that individuals and groups of people and places possess. And it may destroy people within it, like how it destroys Irakli, but in a way all of us have almost a pre-ethical attraction to energy. It’s very difficult to deny what happens when immense energy is deployed like with the character I was reading about this afternoon. Before you know whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy, you just know that he is something or other, and it’s the same with a lot of those characters. I wanted to present a world that you almost didn’t know what to make of as a reader. You didn’t have any ethical map for it, but you knew that the end of the book was not death, you knew there was some kind of rise of life that was going to happen.
No, I’m not optimistic at all in my picture of the world. I have to really struggle to find optimism.
THE VARSITY
But do you also think it’s important to find that optimism?
RANA DASGUPTA
I don’t necessarily think that, but I’ve come to feel that pessimism has become deeply politically conservative. The idea that the world is approaching apocalypse has actually become the consensus, the orthodoxy. Hollywood tells you that. Politicians tell you that. Businesspeople tell you that. The newspapers tell you that. So it’s not like saying that everything is shit is actually a radical position or contains any seeds of anything. It’s not like I would try to focus my optimism on Occupy Wall Street or any particular kind of activity, but I do think that one has to try and find some continuities, things that will bridge us over gaps of time and take us forward.
[pullquote]I guess that tragic optimism would be my thing, which is not to say that I think the future’s good or bad, but I think the future is.[/pullquote]
There’s a strange kind of post-Christian Christianity in this apocalypse.
THE VARSITY
This kind of End of Days scenario?
RANA DASGUPTA
Yeah. We can only imagine two scenarios: There’s a heaven and a hell. Probably the future of humanity is not one of those two things. Probably we wobble forward as we have always, and if you’re not the guys to invent futures for us, then somebody else will. Maybe it’s Khatuna. Maybe it’s the person I read about in my talk, or whoever. Maybe it’s not people you like who invent futures, but someone will, because some people feel that, you know, “We’ve had shit times already, and the future’s going to be pretty good. I’m doing fine, and I’m going to try and make the world in my image.” Some people can bring enormous energy to that ambition and make the money and make the systems and everything else required to bring it about. So I guess tragic optimism would be my thing, which is not to say that I think the future’s good or bad, but I think the future is, and the ability of human beings to carry on inventing is something that for good or for bad is always with us.
The other thing I want to say to your earlier question, which is a purely literary thing, is I wanted with the second half I think to experiment with a certain kind of literary pleasure, which I’m not sure if it completely works, but the literary pleasure akin to waking up from a dream and being able to make connections between the dream and what you’ve lived. You know, there’s a water tower that collapses in both halves of the book, and waking up and realizing, “Wow, actually that water tower was that thing.” It’s a very abstract kind of pleasure, almost a poetic pleasure that you have in yourself about interpreting your own inner life, and I just wanted to see if it was possible to make literary pleasure out of that.
TO BE ETHICALLY CREATIVE.
———
THE VARSITY
I haven’t read Tokyo Cancelled, but from what I understand, it is also about storytellers, but not professional writers. These are amateur storytellers who are nevertheless telling the stories of our time. Is there something in particular that draws you to that kind of character?
RANA DASGUPTA
Storytellers?
THE VARSITY
Storytellers, although not professional ones.
RANA DASGUPTA
Well, in a way, though I am a professional writer and I sell the license for my book to a big corporation, something in me is a bit sickened by the professionalization of culture, the idea that there are a few people that can make culture and everyone else only consumes it. So it’s a romantic gesture to me to put amateur culture-making in my stories because I just think that most human beings have made culture in some way or another.
[pullquote]For me the artist is somebody who provides some hope about the fundamental fertility of the human being to develop ways of life that are adequate to our circumstances.[/pullquote]
Why is it that we bought into this idea that only other people make culture? I’ve had to overcome it myself in my life. When I was living in New York I felt that “Well that’s the building that made all the money of people who make culture. And there’s no way for me to go into it. It’s just — I’m always going to be on the outside of that. What would I ever add?” When I went to India, I was in kind of a backwater with respect to the publishing industry, and it was a time when a lot of people felt they could suddenly do things that they hadn’t done before. Everyone was saying, “Just do whatever you want to do. Don’t have doubts about it. Start that company, start that magazine, write that book.” And it seemed much more natural in Delhi than in New York to do that.
THE VARSITY
You have the character of Boris, the musician. He gets discovered and he goes to New York. I suppose he becomes something of a world music celebrity, but that whole industry, as you’ve portrayed it, is quite manipulative, it’s very focused on the consumer product, exploitive of artists. Are some of your frustrations towards the professionalization of culture worked out through that storyline?
RANA DASGUPTA
In a way I’m a little embarrassed. I kind of agree with the way that you’ve interpreted what I’ve said. It’s a little bit of a parody and it’s maybe not the part of the book I’m proudest of.
THE VARSITY
But he [Boris] is someone who truly lives through his music. He is going to be a musician whether somebody is recording him or not.
RANA DASGUPTA
That’s right. Just as Ulrich is truly possessed by chemistry, whether he can express it or not, Boris is truly possessed by music. The end implies that he leaves that whole industry behind, the celebrity machine. I did want to question corporations providing the imprint of quality and all that kind of thing. I think not only what you said about writers but also artists in general—there are also quite a few musicians and poets and things like that in Tokyo Cancelled, too. I think that for me the artist is kind of a romantic figure in a lot of these pieces of work, and it’s because I think that the quality that convinces me most about human beings is creativity. Not just creativity with artistic results.
THE VARSITY
Earlier you were talking about that kind of inventiveness in business as well.
RANA DASGUPTA
The creativity of running a business I find immensely inspiring, like human fertility. But I think it’s also to me an extension of particularly the writer’s life. The life of textual creativity is ethical creativity. I feel that we are faced in this period with a challenge to be ethically creative. We don’t really know how to ethically deal with a lot of the problems we face. How do you deal, for instance, with a society where 50 percent of marriages end in divorce? Are going to constantly go on calling that a tragedy, or are you going to accept that that is how people live and you will absorb it in a new idea of what love, marriage, and children are all about? How do you deal with petrol? What kind of new ethical framework can exist in which frugality is a virtue, not just we’re told not to consume, but where we are actually attracted to the idea of a frugal life? These are all things where the creativity of human beings is called upon in the area of ethics and behaviour, not just in producing symphonies and novels, and for me the artist — the person in my books who is creative outside of the systems which are built to absorb and commercialize creativity — is somebody who provides some kind of hope about the fundamental fertility of the human being to develop ways of life that are adequate to our circumstances.
THE MOST INTIMATE OF OUR POSSESSIONS.
———
THE VARSITY
Do you have certain aspirations for your writing?
RANA DASGUPTA
In terms of the effects it can have?
THE VARSITY
Yeah. Or I suppose another way of getting to that question would be “Why write novels?”
RANA DASGUPTA
Well, sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes I think one shouldn’t, and this is a completely conservative art form, and that most people read novels to escape from the horrors of the contemporary. I have thoughts like that. But I think that first of all my experience of receiving emails from people who have read my novels, and I’m not — compared to lots of other writers, not many people email me — is that the level of intensity with which they have read is unbelievable. I realize that one cannot make generalizations about readers and who they are and why they read, because actually there are some people who turn to books because they genuinely want to know something or want to think about something in a way that they never have before. They sometimes write mails in which you realize this person has gone through a very large arc of thought, of their own thought, through a relationship with your book.
THE VARSITY
And it’s happened externally to you, in that you’ve written the book, but they’ve gone through that arc before they’ve ever gotten in contact with you.
RANA DASGUPTA
Yes. That is a privilege of being a writer that you find yourself in contact with the inner life of people who are far away and whom you never meet, but who reassure you that there are human beings who live very seriously.
I suppose the other thing is that novels are — I’m not sure how seriously I believe this, but novels are a way in which you can plunge people for a moment into an alternative system of the world and make them think of what it feels like to be in that alternative world that is not the one they’re in. So as I was saying about Tokyo Cancelled in the talk, in this alternative universe, middle class air travellers from different places exchange something with each other through storytelling. Some reviewers actually said in their reviews, which I found unbelievable, they said, “I don’t find it very realistic that this would happen. It’s never happened to me.” I was amazed, because quite obviously it doesn’t happen and quite obviously the point of the book is to make you think about why it is that people don’t tell stories of this sort anymore. Why is it that this activity that seems to have been very natural in most groups of travellers across the ages no longer is?
My partner Monica set up this institution in Delhi called Sarai, and it’s named after all these caravan sarais, these stopping places that were on all the highways that crossed central Asia.
THE VARSITY
A way station? Something like that?
RANA DASGUPTA
Yeah. So these are built from the Middle Ages until the 19th century, and some of them became very important stopping places for travellers, where you would not only change your horses and your camels and get food and a bed and all that kind of stuff, but you would also listen to poets and storytellers and philosophers and musicians, and they became important hubs for culture. People would gain employment from entertaining travellers, and travellers would move with their stories to other places. Travellers therefore were not only merchants or whatever, they were also purveyors of knowledge and stories. So, in a way, Tokyo Cancelled plunges you into a slightly surreal and romantic 21st-century traveller universe in which all the external attributes of 21st-century travel are preserved, but there’s one extra attribute, which is ridiculous, which is that they tell these kinds of fairy stories.
So that’s one thing I like about novels, that you are asked to think about what it would be like to live that kind of life, or what it would be like to live in that kind of world. And maybe you come out of it with different thoughts about the world you’re in.
THE VARSITY
During the talk this afternoon I think you mentioned that [Walter Benjamin’s] “The Storyteller” was an inspiration, or one of your inspirations for Solo.
RANA DASGUPTA
I think it was because he asks exactly this question. Well, he says the most intimate of our possessions, meaning storytelling, has been taken away from us.
“ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR.”
———
THE VARSITY
Thinking about the setting of the book, the setting over the entirety of the book: Something that I found was the physical environment seemed very solid in the very beginning and less solid, kind of coming to ruin, dissolving as the story progressed. Into the second section as well: It continued to dissolve as they moved to New York. It put me in mind of that line from the Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air” — which admittedly is ironic given that Ulrich lives through a communist dictatorship. I was wondering about that whole aspect, because as you were saying, the characters in the second half of the book are of that post-1989 generation that is born into this chaos, and I think they make certain attempts to make the world more solid. For instance, that whole discussion about building the house, and what materials to use. But I was also thinking, once Boris moves to New York, I think the depiction of New York is very chaotic, as New York is. Was that something you were aware of?
RANA DASGUPTA
These are fun questions. In fact, I think, even the first time that we see Ulrich in the second half, he’s standing in Times Square. It talks about the building, the skyscrapers around Times Square as some kind of plasma or something like that.
He comes in under the marvelous light, and stops to watch. Dazzling screens wrap polyp towers, which spire against the orange sky. His white hair reflects the logos, and turns harlequin.
His attention is captured by the familiar features of Albert Einstein playing on a vast video display. Einstein’s face is the size of a large house, and it lights up the damp ground. The screen dims, and text appears: The highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought — and Ulrich smiles possessively, for these are words he had once written on his wall: Einstein’s opinion of Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure. The text dissolves and converts to plasma. The advertisement ends with the logo of a mobile phone company.
I like the link to Marx and Engels.
I do think that 19th-century cities were more solid in a sense. Sofia was largely copied from Munich. The guy who built a lot of Munich built a lot of Sofia, and then all these big buildings listed in the beginning of the book are built by these Austrian architects. Those sort of brick cities where human beings’ relationship to the scale of the city is quite clear, and the buildings are built to last. I mean, people sill want to buy a Victorian house because it has something about it, in its solidity, its reassuringness that subsequent moments of construction have not. And I think there just is a way in which all these kind of plastic-clad corporate headquarters that we see around us, they don’t speak to you of great duration.
I have lots about this in my Delhi book about how if you look at the various phases, the foreign rulers of Delhi have been great builders. The Mughals were great builders. They built the Taj Mahal; they built the Red Fort in Delhi. They built with grandeur and great technical ability and great grace. The British were also great builders. They planned out the great city of Delhi. They developed styles of architecture that were very well suited to the climate. They built a magnificent government building. And independent India has not built particularly great buildings, with some very few exceptions. But the worst buildings of all are the ones that have gone up in the last 10 years, which are old before they’re finished. I mean, they are falling down.
So in that very obvious and literal sense I think there is a sense that cities — Rem Koolhaas calls this “delirious New York” — they sort of evaporate in a way.
But I think it’s also related to what you said earlier: I do think that there is an exchange value to everything. Houses, solid things, are property. In the highly financial universe of someone like Khatuna there is nothing really that is this solid. Everything has its exchange value, and nothing really endures.
[pullquote]Marx is remembered as the critic of the bourgeoisie, but his ability to capture the achievements of the bourgeoisie, the dizzying achievements, is amazing. That’s tragic optimism: to be emotionally receptive to the horror and exhilaration of your moment.[/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
In modern economies money is really only understood in the abstract, as a fluid.
RANA DASGUPTA
Exactly. I mean, basically it’s the idea that all things are commodities, including people, even intangible things, which is the sense that Marx is writing about. And I think actually that Marx, the Communist Manifesto, continues to capture something that most of us still are unable to express. What’s amazing about that document is the way that Marx is remembered as the critic of the bourgeoisie, but his ability to capture the achievements of the bourgeoisie, the dizzying achievements, is amazing. That’s in a sense tragic optimism: this ability to be emotionally receptive to the true horror and exhilaration of your moment, which is not to say, “There is no exhilaration, I’m blind to the achievements in my era, all I can see is horror.” That’s a bullshit position. And the opposite is equally bullshit: “I see only achievement and I cannot see destruction. I cannot see misery and oppression.” Marx is able to see both of those things and to imagine an incredibly dynamic relationship between them. In a way, I think it’s actually very important to restore that, especially for my Delhi book, for instance. People do like talking about one of these positions or the other. It’s easy to say “Everyone’s an asshole and all of this is terrible and there is only evil,” which is to deny an awful lot. It’s to deny not only the ingenuity of the elite but also to deny the fact that there are people who had nothing and now they have something. They were living on a hundred dollars a month and now they’re living on a thousand dollars a month. It’s a really big deal.
THE CONTEMPORARY AND THE NEW.
———
THE VARSITY
Why don’t we talk a bit about your Delhi book. One question I had in relation to your writing as a whole is that you’re a contemporary writer in that you are writing right now, but you also seem to be somebody who’s very concerned with the presentness of the present. Do you agree with that statement, or do you think of yourself as a contemporary writer in a different sense?
RANA DASGUPTA
I’m very concerned with the presentness of the present. Like I was saying in the room today, I think the present eludes us, and I think the contemporary writer has two major projects, which are probably the projects that interest me.
One is to express what it is that’s contemporary, because I think that you can go on applying an image to your world which is increasingly not the world, but it seems to function well enough that you don’t really need to displace it. And yet, as you go on denying more and more, your intellectual life becomes increasingly impoverished and also your anxieties about the world creep up on you more and more because you realize that you’re not actually talking about the world, you’re talking about this image.
[pullquote]I think the contemporary writer has two major projects. One is to express what it is that’s contemporary. The other is the generation of the new.[/pullquote]
I think that writers have some, not responsibility — I don’t think writers have any responsibility — but it seems to me one of the more interesting things that writers can do — which they hold in common with journalists and many other people who are in the image-making business, but possibly more philosophically than journalists — is to find not only the stories, which Tokyo Cancelled does quite a lot. I mean, I ferreted out a lot of stories, like: sailors. I mean, we talk very little about sailors, but there are a hell of a lot of them in the world, and nearly everything we have around us was has travelled on —
THE VARSITY
A ship. Yeah.
RANA DASGUPTA
— A ship. So there were a lot of sailors in that book. A journalist can also write a nice account of how sailors live, or how things arrive on boats, but the novelist has an additional layer to add about imagining forms in which these facts can sit alongside each other and mean it again.
The other project I think is the generation of the new, which is a similar project but you don’t just jump into this project in order to tell people the stuff that they already know in a better way or a more true way, but in order to come out of it with something that they didn’t know and that you didn’t know; which would be of the philosophical and ethical order; which is not the same kind of innovation that corporations or politicians do. It’s to try and provide a new set of tools with which those people can generate their new things — that we can act differently or think about things differently. Maybe those two projects are the same. I’m not sure.
TWO FORMS OF NOSTALGIA.
———
THE VARSITY
You were talking earlier, I think you used the words “ethical creativity” — trying to find a new ethics — and something you mentioned this afternoon was that you are trying to escape from nostalgia. Are those two things connected for you?
I guess, first of all, what are the dangers of nostalgia?
RANA DASGUPTA
I think nostalgia has two forms. It has a radical form, because we live in a society that destroys the past on a minute-by-minute basis, and asserting the past, saying, “Actually, the way that we do things right now is not worse than the way you’re proposing we do them in the future,” can have a radical element.
I think in some ways our language of how societies change is upside-down. People who occupy the left of the political spectrum talk about themselves as the “progressives,” as people who make things progress, which I don’t think is the case at all. I think actually it is the capitalist economy that supplies by far the greatest energy; whether you like it or not, the change of societies is happening primarily because of the capitalist economy. Any project that would wish to critique or oppose that would have to in some way be nostalgic. It would have some urge to preserve that which is being destroyed, and that includes very intangible things. I think one of the things that I’m writing about in my Delhi book is the tragedy of everything intangible being taken away from a society, and what it means to flounder in a non-cultural space where only publicity is providing you with any guidance or any image of what your life should be like.
THE VARSITY
I think we also tend to fetishize the past.
RANA DASGUPTA
Yes, and that is what is politically conservative and boring and unproductive, this other edge of nostalgia, which just plays right into the hands of political conservatism and says, “Imagine the golden past”; says that immigrants are the problem, because they are of course the things that change; and everything was better before. That form of nostalgia is completely uninteresting.
INDIA’S DISINGENUOUS POSITION.
———
THE VARSITY
Well, tell me about that form of nostalgia in relation to Delhi. Because it sounds like that is something you are struggling against somewhat in your writing of this book. Is that right?
RANA DASGUPTA
Yeah, because I think that India has moved very fast from being a country that was exploited to a country that is looking to exploit. It’s true that the wounds of exploitation have not healed. It’s true that in very basic situations, like if a white person comes into a restaurant in Delhi, the waiters will drop everything they’re doing to serve that person, though the Indian person that they’re serving might be much more politically and economically significant than that white guy. The place does suffer from terrible post-colonial anxieties. And the English language, the fact that this foreign language is now the language of commerce and politics and intellectual life: Many people who didn’t grow up with that language feel this great sense of exclusion and insecurity.
These are all post-colonial problems which continue to afflict the place. But the country also has to wake up to the fact that it is now stealing resources from other countries. India is the biggest industrial employer in the U.K. now. Tata, the big Mumbai corporation, has bought the two biggest industrial employers in the U.K.: Corus, the steel manufacturer, and Jaguar Land Rover. The British industrial workforce is working for the Indian financial and corporate elite. So you have to be able to manage these two things. You have to face up to your own position in the world, and India has not really shown any interest in the ethical discourse of global capitalism. It did not embargo Myanmar, for instance. It happily continues trading, and part of the reason it does that is it says, “But we’re not — We don’t have those kinds of responsibilities, because we are a post-colonial country and we don’t have to take on these kinds of responsibilities. We are still struggling. We are still poor. So we have every right to take opportunities where we can get them.” As I was saying in the room, I think it’s becoming increasingly disingenuous of India to on the one hand take a lot of stuff and claim a lot of stuff and rejoice over the acquisition precisely of British companies or the successes of Indian corporations abroad, and continue to play this small, wounded character that doesn’t have any responsibilities. So those are the ways in which I think nostalgia is just completely unproductive. Not that India doesn’t have enormous problems of poverty and all these kinds of things, but in so far as you want to dominate the 21st century, and it’s doing everything to try and achieve this, you also have to take responsibility for it. Admit to what you are.
HE WISHES TO MAKE CLAIMS ON YOUR WORLD.
———
THE VARSITY
I’m interested in your decision to write this book through a series of interviews. And it’s a non-fiction book, but you are trying to use the tricks of novelistic writing. How did you decide upon how you wanted to go about this book, and why a work of non-fiction and not another novel?
[pullquote]This guy may be entertaining, but that’s not why I’m telling you about him. I’m telling you about him because he’s in your world and he wishes to make claims on your world. Somehow your picture of your world has to accommodate him.[/pullquote]
RANA DASGUPTA
First of all, every book that I write I want to be completely different to the last one. Partly I just want to discover how to do new stuff and partly I think that one should start a book with a fear of failure. I think it should risk failure. If you know how to do it already, then I feel it’s going to be a tame experience for everyone.
But more than that, I think that this book has a more direct purpose than the last book. It is trying to give people a very real picture of the world. It’s trying to say to people: This guy may be entertaining, and maybe you would have enjoyed reading about him even in a fictional format, but that’s not why I’m telling you about him. I’m telling you about him because he’s in your world and he wishes to make claims on your world, and somehow your picture of your world has to accommodate him. If it were a novel, then you would have an alibi, and you wouldn’t have to accommodate him, but I wanted to say, “This is your world and somehow you have to try and make sense of it.” So I always wanted to report on this very directly: This is the person I met and this is what he said and this is how he lived.
And interviews because I think it’s not just about economic statistics. It’s not just about saying, well, the GDP is this, and you have to pay attention to all this stuff because they’re getting rich and all that kind of thing — which other people can do better than me. I think that when you talk about novelistic tricks —
THE VARSITY
Or novelistic forms, I suppose. Structures, style.
RANA DASGUPTA
“Forms,” but also interests, in that novelists are interested in character. For me, character and psychology is really the interesting part of all this. How does the person I am writing about think about his life and how does he think about the world? What does he want? It’s really not the same as people that we might know who are rich in other places, who have very different histories.
A CULTURE THAT IS TRYING TO ARRIVE.
———
I met this guy who was very depressed. He lived in a new suburb of Delhi and he’d become very depressed in that place. He is an art critic for some global art journal, and he lives in his life haunted by a memory that his father has from I think the ’60s when his father went to visit a cousin, who was an artist. This cousin had this unbelievable bohemian party where there were beautiful women and great conversation and references to books and foreign authors and foreign movies and all that kind of stuff and the guy came back from this evening and he said, “Now I know what life is.” He had a great job and everything, but his life was very boring and very straight. “Now I have an idea…” He took his son along to this party. His son was 16, and his son came back and felt that he needed to be an artist. For very complicated reasons — it’s a long story — the son committed suicide in the pursuit of this dream of being an artist, and the younger brother, who was an infant when this party took place, took over this dream.
THE VARSITY
This is the man who became the art critic.
RANA DASGUPTA
Yes, this guy I interviewed. He’s the younger brother of this guy who committed suicide. He also went into art having absorbed this image of this one evening that had come down through the family over 30 years, or whatever it is.
Anyway: So I did an interview with this guy called Satish Gujral, who’s a very famous, 85-year-old artist who was part of that scene, and I said, “Did you know this guy, this artist who had these amazing parties, because it’s very significant to my book, one of these parties.” And this man said to me, “That party never happened, it cannot have happened, because that man that you’re talking about never had any money, he never had an apartment in which a party like that could have happened, he was completely socially incompetent, and never entertained.” He then started telling me stories about this man, about how impossible it was to get that guy to go to any party and how gauche and uncomfortable he was at any gathering, which convinced me that, yes, he’s probably right.
THE VARSITY
So on the one hand he’s right, but on the other hand, this family has built this myth.
RANA DASGUPTA
Right. So for somebody who’s attached to the facts of the case, this second story invalidates the first, but for the novelist, who is intrigued by the ways in which people construct their histories and all that kind of stuff — maybe some people that are also non-fiction writers are interested in this kind of thing, but I feel that the novelist is particularly interested in this — this is a particularly haunting kind of story. Like, where did this memory arise from? From what was it transferred? And what kind of family culture, what kind of father-son relationship incubates such a powerful thing that people die for it, and all kinds of stuff happens in the name of it?
[pullquote]These are beautiful things to me, and they say something very deeply true about the place that is living.[/pullquote]
I did quiz this guy Sadish Gujral quite a lot about bohemianism in those days and what did people do? What were parties like? And he really discouraged me from this line of thought: “We were poor and we were very conservative, and the parties started much later.”
So I don’t know what the truth of it is, but for me, because the story is much bigger than what I’ve told you, this non-memory is actually the kind of thing that displays a lot of the poignancy of a culture that’s trying to be something, that’s trying to arrive, that is making huge, epic promises to its population — “We are independent, we’re the biggest democracy in the world, life will be better” — and people don’t actually experience it in their lives and then dream of something else or something that has been taken away from them that they think might be restored. These are beautiful things to me, and they say something very deeply true about the place that is living, and reveal a lot of the suffering and deprivation, spiritual deprivation of some of the people who are now buying their Lamborghinis and in a way taking a shortcut to reconciling themselves with their own history.
AN INTERESTING SORT OF PLACE FROM WHICH TO CONTEMPLATE THE 21ST CENTURY.
———
THE VARSITY
My last question, which relates to my first question, is regarding the place: Why Delhi? You live there.
RANA DASGUPTA
Yes. For 11 years.
THE VARSITY
And you wrote your first book there, is that right?
RANA DASGUPTA
I’ve done all my writing there.
THE VARSITY
So why Delhi and why now?
RANA DASGUPTA
Why am I writing about Delhi now? Well, maybe if I were living in Bangalore I would be writing about Bangalore, but I do think that Delhi is particularly interesting because I think it’s become very popular to tell an American story of India. That is to say, “In this waning moment of American power, let’s tell ourselves a story that makes ourselves feel good about the 21st century. Well, China doesn’t make us feel very good, because we don’t know what the hell goes on in that place, we don’t know how it’s going to work out.
“But India has loads of people who are just like us: They speak English, they don’t like big government, they like free enterprise, they send their kids to American universities, and they build great technology companies. We can do business with those guys, and we can hand over the mantle of the global economy to those guys in such a way that we can tell ourselves that the future will be just like the present, and the people that are sharing power with us like us and they are just like us and nothing’s really going to change.”
You can tell me the opposite story of India, and that is that India between 1947 and 1991 was a socialist country and like most of the Soviet Bloc — which was socialist for almost precisely the same period, except for the Soviet Union itself, which started earlier — ended with a huge scramble of oligarchs to take bits of the system for themselves, and a new elite has arisen out of its closeness to federal political power.
That’s why Delhi rather than anywhere else, because most of these people are in Delhi. Actually, what we’re dealing with in contemporary India bears much more resemblance to contemporary Russia than it does to contemporary America and there’s no reason to be nearly so comfortable about this place as that first story implies. In fact, these people who have billions of dollars of cash and who are looking across the globe for opportunities to invest it, and who understand everything about how corruption works and how you can occupy the resources of the world, there are a lot of those kinds of people in India.
Like I said in the talk, I think it’s too early to say that those people have no future. I think actually the conditions are very ripe for them to do a lot before they become regulated, if that ever happens. They have a lot of stuff that they can still acquire and still do.
So I think the story of those kinds of people is interesting and I think that’s what for me makes Delhi a sort of an interesting sort of place from which to contemplate the 21st century. It has taken over a lot of the commercial energy from other Indian cities. As I said before in the talk, all the new billion-plus fortunes that have been created in India this century have come out of Delhi, not out of Bombay or Bangalore. Maybe with some exceptions, but certainly the top ones, and that’s for this reason: Like Russia, there’s this new environment where people like this can thrive and I think that they’re actually very significant personages of the 21st century. They’re not just cowboys who are on their way out. So for me I think that a lot of contemplation of things that affect all of us, that can start in a place like this.
The image I have in my head is it’s a kind of place where the surface of the earth has broken open, and one can see the precise churn of the 21st century in a very real way, in a way that one can wander around in the west for quite a long time without really encountering. The feeling that Delhi represents the 21st century in a raw form — it has the future on display.
