U R Ananthamurthy: Nirmal, you write in Hindi and I write in Kannada, But I met you several years ago and then I read one or two of your short stories in translation. Then I began to like what you write generally on culture and literature. And in all your writings you have held that a writer has a particular role as a writer and should be very true to his role of being a writer in whatever he says or does. And you have always ‘demanded the maximum honesty from a Writer. For a long time if I remember, Orwell was very dear to you because of the role Orwell played in his own culture. An Indian writer in his own context, unless he has the courage to be unpopular he can’t sometimes speak the truth. So the assumption is that literature has some worthwhile role to play. I agree with you, but I have an anxiety which I want to share with you. I sometimes feel that the Indian bhashas have no future. Because all the children of the well-to-do in the middle classes don’t take the Indian bhashas in their curriculum as seriously as we did when we were growing up. After Independence, English has become more central in our educational system than when you and I were young. And when we were young at least up to the SSLC level, we used our own languages. And if you use your language in your childhood learning process, then even if you give it up later it can always be used, it is there with you. This is increasingly becoming difficult now. Even in small taluka headquarters, I find, there is this moha for the English medium. And our languages, not that they will die, but they will become kitchen languages. But people who are very backward, who can’t afford the English education, are the only ones who study through the bhashas. So there is hope that these will not die. But the more aware people, the more fortunate people are not into it, and hence what is the role that I will play in a society where for very serious purposes of life you don’t depend on the bhashas? Does this worry you?
Nirmal Varma: | think this is a genuine worry. I cannot imagine a literary work which sustains itself as a work of art, as well as something that can affect the lives of the people unless it is written in a language which is very potently rich in the references and symbols and the associations of a culture to which a writer belongs. Actually, it is through these symbols, these associations that he shares through his writing the dreams and hidden longings of the people around him. Actually, we are living in a strange and painful paradox. People who have tremendous things to say, fund of experience – of suffering, derivation, joy – do not have that literary idiom at their command through which they can express these deep emotions The small number of people who call themselves intellectual or writers or educated people, who have been given this privilege of acquiring this literary language whether in the bhashas or in English, have so totally cut themselves off from this basic what is it — what William Butler Yeats called “the emotion of the multitude”. What they say or speak or write hardly reflects those most fundamental and the deepest experiences of the people which they claim to represent, In my opinion, Indian literature has to face these two, challenges. One, it should completely do away with the burden of a foreign language like English. But more important in my opinion is that the Indian writer ought to be totally committed to the integrity of the language in which he is writing, and which in the present circumstances is being seriously compromised by various types of pressures: political pressures, commercial pressures, pressures of a technological age. The extent to which a writer, the proportion in which a writer goes on compromising with these external pressures on his language, the truth of his writing to that extent will be diluted, it will not emerge. So, it is not merely a question of English or his bhasha: it is also a question of the commitment of a writer to the language in which he is writing.
Ananthamurthy: I want to make an observation in order to understand you. This has to do with the language of the environment in which we live. Many writers writing in my language, Kannada was not their mother |tongue but they began to live in Karnataka and they began to write in the language. This must be true of many Hindi writers as well. If you don’t take to the language of your environment, there are many discontinuities. One, there is a discontinuity between my own childhood and my own adulthood because the other language is the language of my adulthood. So there isa discontinuity between me and my relations who do not know the language. There is a discontinuity between me and the multitude. These discontinuities will begin to tell upon your perceptions even, and then you may start writing for a foreign market. Literature matters when you are interacting with your own people very intensely in the language of their symbols etc. And I may add to what you have said about our own symbols A friend of mine once told me that there are 22 languages in India but there are two languages in India which are current in the whole country. These two languages are Ramayana and Mahabharata. I thought it was a profound remark. These two are meta-languages. People everywhere would use symbols and signs from these two great stories to interpret their own suffering, their own doubts, their own problems. When there is the caste question, Karna comes to mind, Ekalavya comes to mind; when there is hatred between two groups, Kauravas and Pandavas. So, in terms of everyday life these two languages have connected the country. Do you think we writers, writing in our times, have been able to affect people with anything of this impact? Do we mean something to people when they attempt to interpret their own lives? Do you think they make use of what we write? Do we become either a lamp or mirror? If you are a lamp you guide, if you are a mirror you at least show what you are. I wonder!
Varma: This is a question which Indian writers face with a greater complexity than any other writer from any other country. I think an Indian writer operates between two types of environment. Visible and invisible. Invisible, in the sense you just said, is the entire legacy of the epics. And not only that. But the cultural memory of the saint poets and the type of values that we unconsciously imbibe, not merely from poetry of the past, but from our ancestors, from our forefathers. Because they are the best transmitters of this memory for us. This operates for modern writers like us not as a direct intervention, because the pressures that are on me are the realities of the present-day environment. That is my loneliness, my consciousness of my individuality where I am a unit in amass of people, my relationship with the society, with my family and my isolation from them. This type of a modern angst — a sense of connectedness on throne hand and complete helplessness so fares my own self is concerned in the modern world. Unless these two things interact in my writing and I do not use my past merely as a cushion using myths and symbols assume writers do, which have no contemporary relevance at all. Nor can I become totally contemporary writer by forgetting and foregoing what has been given to me. How to integrate what is inarticulately present in the multitude which they are not able to articulate but which I am able to transmit through my own personal individual experiences both as an Indian, both as an individual, and both as a person living in the twentieth century. I think I have to operate, unlike a European writer, at these three levels continuously as a writer. An American or a French writer does not feel the need and does not have to be a spokesperson of the community. If they write a good novel or a good poem or paint a good painting, that is good enough for them. And I think, they are satisfied with that. I do not think this at all possible in India. Not that this is not important. I would like to refer to the theme of my novel in terms of the novel itself, in terms of its craft. But the kind of light that a novel encompasses within itself will pose so many questions to me, which I will not be able to answer even as a fiction writer, unless I am able to solve these problems, not merely on the basis of the craft, but also as a person who is an Indian living in the present time. This puts a kind of a responsibility on me as an Indian writer. To what ex-tent my art, without ceasing to be art, and without becoming a propagandist art is, able to make a connection between me and the community, that is the real test.
Ananthamurthy: A propagandist art ceases to be art, so it is not even effective propaganda. You and I write about our intense problems. Many people like you and me, modem educated people, have roots in our society but are exposed to the West, who are troubled, who readers react to. But a multitude of people, who really matter, who have a great imaginative hunger, this hunger is so very great. And J am not connected with that as a writer. Which worries me. What has happened? Popular films which draw upon the epics often assuage this hunger. But I cannot do it. I would be unauthentic. Nor can I do it in order to bring a kind of samadhan, because it becomes false, because I cannot simulate the happy endings that these films have. At the same time, any artist who is serious wants to be connected with his own people. Even if the people don ‘tread him, though that is important, but writing itself should be connecting, in the choice of your themes Hopkins wrote very profoundly about his own times, and about his own struggle, nobody read him. It does not matter. But he was connected to his times. Are we in our writing really connected with our people and our times? Is there something lacking in us? Not only that we are not popular like the matinee idols. Is our literature serious enough to be potentially a force?
Varma: But do the films of the popular cinema, with which so many people connect, ever disturb them about things?
Ananthamurthy: No.
Varma: The problem that I am trying to amplify is this. Without succumbing to this form of populism in art, an artist should connect himself and he does connect himself in the best moments of his success, not by catering to the lowest denominator. Without being self-indulgent he tries to put himself in situations where he begins to wonder about the quality of life. In other words, without becoming esoteric as an artist and without compromising with any kind of populism, an artist has to struggle to maintain the authenticity and the integrity of his word and his vision and connect it with the problems which are not the problems merely of the people, but which trouble him personally as well. If they trouble me enough and deeply enough then this will create a kind of discomfiture, anguish. This is what great art has always done. Tolstoy was a most popular artist. He was read by millions of Russians But he was a writer who posed the most disturbing questions about the kind of life Russians were leading, the darkness of their lives I think this happens in every society where the writer has to walk on the sharp edge of a razor without either falling on the side of populism or falling on the side of the self-indulgence. And yet try to make connections on his own terms rather than on the prevailing terms of morality or code of conduct.
