Sahgal, Rushdie Ponder Literature and Politics

Sahgal, Rushdie Ponder Literature and Politics at "maximum INDIA"

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By Howard Cincotta
Special Correspondent

Washington - Seated on stage in large armchairs, two of India's most distinguished writers - Nayantara Sahgal and Salman Rushdie - wrestled with the question of how to define literature's role in politics and public life.

The discussion, moderated by Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif, was one of several literary panels that took place at the "maximum INDIA" arts festival, which ran March 1-20 at Washington's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Rushdie and Sahgal offered unique perspectives on the often difficult relationship between politics and literature.

Sahgal was born into India's "first family" of politics, the Nehrus. Her uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his daughter Indira Gandhi were the country's first and third prime ministers, respectively. However, Sahgal did not hesitate to criticize Gandhi's suspension of democracy during the so-called Emergency of 1975-1977.

Sahgal was one of the first Indian writers in English to reach a broad international audience, with a memoir, Prison and Chocolate Cake, and novels in the 1950s and 1960s. She is also a prolific journalist and commentator who has written eight nonfiction books addressing feminist, literary and political issues.

"I grew up in an occupied country where politics was inseparable from family life," she said. "I found myself living in a world invented by others. I needed to get out of this invented world into reality. ... Politics was a way to learn to speak in one's own voice."

Rushdie, who burst onto the international literary scene with his novel Midnight's Children (1981), winner of the Booker Prize, is probably India's best known literary figure. Among his more recent works are the novels The Moor's Last Sigh and The Enchantress of Florence and the children's tale Luka and the Fire of Life.

"As creative artists, we all get to argue and tell our stories in a free society," Rushdie said at the March 18 panel. "The argument itself is liberty. That's why dictators first lock up the writers - they have the ability to change the narrative."

NARRATIVE POWER

Sahgal and Rushdie agreed that politics is inseparable from creative writing, but that the power of the narrative will determine if a novel remains meaningful.

Rushdie pointed out that the gap between public and private life used to be much wider. The English novelist Jane Austen, writing at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, never mentions the conflict. Soldiers appear in her novels, but their chief function is "to look cute in their uniforms at parties - not that that wasn't important," Rushdie joked.

"She was able to explore the lives of her characters so remarkably without touching on the war at all," he said.

Now a novelist risks becoming irrelevant by being too topical in his or her fiction, according to Rushdie. In the end, what lasts is the narrative. For instance, in the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Rushdie said, what reader now cares about the details of the Battle of Borodino? It is the greatness of the narrative and its characters that compel the reader.

Yet even Rushdie's children's books have a political dimension. In Luka and the Fire of Life, a city "is colonized by easily offended, thin-skinned rats," Rushdie said. "Look around the world today and you can see thin-skinned rats everywhere."

His solution in the book: Defeat the rats with itching powder.

POLITICS AND LANGUAGE

A writer needs distance to see the full picture, with all its political dimensions, Rushdie observed, noting that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace 50 years after the actual events. Sahgal said she waited 10 years before writing her novel Rich Like Us, set during the Emergency in India.

To engage a public issue, you first have to define it, Sahgal said. "The beginning of the battle is to put it into words."

Both Rushdie and Sahgal write in English. India has a "colossal, highly developed" literature in non-English languages, Rushdie said, but those works are regionalized and dependent on the quality of translation to reach wider audiences.

"English is malleable and flexible," Rushdie said. The language is remade again and again, so that it is no longer what Rushdie termed the "cool and quiet" model of a writer like E.M. Forster.

"Whatever else India is, it's not cool and quiet," he commented to appreciative laughter from the audience.

Rushdie said he grew up surrounded by many languages in Bombay, now known as Mumbai. "I want to make English sound like that cacophony of languages."

With the changes in contemporary Indian society, many younger writers are staying away from politics, Rushdie said. Sahgal, whose writing is much more politically engaged, was skeptical of that conclusion.

Rushdie did note that Pakistan appears to be a place where a new generation of fiction writers is dealing with political subjects.

But in the end, he said, "What you have in your heart is what you write."

ENDS

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