An Indian affair

[1]

Belgian writer Dirk Collier, who wrote The Emperor’s Writings, a fictional autobiography in the form of a series of letters from Akbar to his son Salim, has been to India innumerable times. One of his unforgettable experiences was in 2008 when he was asked to lead a puja to mark the inauguration of a chemical plant in Gujarat’s Ankleshwar by his friend and company chairman.

Why him? “No doubt because he knows my interest in and respect for Indian history and culture,” says Dirk, who is one of those Indophile authors who consider India the most interesting country in the world. Arriving with preconceived notions about a strange land with even stranger rituals, they are struck by what Octavio Paz described as “an unimagined reality” and make India their perennial muse.
Says Dirk about his love affair, “For a culture and history buff like me, it would be quite impossible not to fall in love with the subcontinent! Not only because of the incredible diversity and wealth of its cultural heritage, but because there literally is no place on earth where history remains as alive as it does in India! When you participate in a puja, or attend a wedding ceremony, the Sanskrit incantations you will hear are exactly the same as the ones that chanted when Stonehenge was built! That is India for you: very much belonging to the 21st century, with world class physicians, engineers, IT specialists, etc., yet keeping alive traditions that have come to us from the deepest depths of human history, literally thousands of years old.”
For American Indologist Wendy Doniger, it was more like a teenage crush as she read the Upanishads when she was just 14 and was stunned by their beauty. “Then I read several novels about India — E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India made a strong impression on me — and saw the early Satyajit Ray films, Pather Panchali and Apur Sansar, and I knew that I wanted to devote my life to learning about India. When I went to college, at Harvard (Radcliffe), I majored in Sanskrit from my very first year, when I was 17 years old.”
The Indophiles do not go by second-hand experience or limit their curiosity by mingling with academicians alone. “My first trip to India was in 1963, when I lived in Santiniketan and Calcutta for months, and also toured India, from Chennai to Elephanta, and up to Kathmandu. In Santiniketan my friends were not the academicians but the other women who lived in the hostel with me; my best friends were a wonderful Punjabi woman named Chanchal Dhand, and a most talented young Bengali woman named Mishtuni Roy. Ali Akbar Khan taught me to play the sarod. So I met a lot of wonderful people who were not academics.”
Living in India had a profound impact on her personality, she says, changing her aesthetic tastes. “I have always liked Indian food best of all foods, Indian painting, sculpture, and architecture better than anything anywhere else, and of course Indian literature best of all literatures. I also think that sarees are far more beautiful than European dress, but I feel self-conscious if I wear a saree outside of India.”
Jon Stock, a thriller writer based in London, is another who was determined to have a first-hand feel of things. “After I got married, my wife Hilary and I decided to take six months out before we had children. We settled on living in Kochi in Kerala. We spent a very happy six months living on Vypeen Island and travelling around the south of India.”
The pull of India was so strong that the former journalist persuaded the Daily Telegraph to send him to Delhi as a foreign correspondent for two years. “It was quite different from the south. Delhi is a tough city but one of my favourites, along with Kolkata, which I visited a lot for work covering the Peter Bleach/Puralia arms case,” he says. “We now try to return to India whenever we can — usually once every two years.”
When their first child was born, Jon gave him an Indian middle name, Ramachandran. “Felix is immensely proud of his middle name even as a teenager. It makes him cool at school. Our home in Britain is like a furniture warehouse in Mattancherry in Kochi — stuffed full of Indian teak cupboards, chairs and tables.”
Not all in Jon’s social circle understand his obsession. “People are slightly bemused by our fascination with India,” he admits. “Unfortunately, there are still some misconceptions about the country — poverty, disease, Delhi Belly, etc. I hope we are good ambassadors for the country — we’ve certainly dispatched a number of friends to India who have never been there before. The last family we sent had a wonderful holiday in Kerala. I also tell everyone to visit Kolkata, which gets a particularly bad press here. It’s a very European city in some ways. Bengalis are proud and don’t try to please foreigners or suck up to them, which I find very refreshing. They will be charming once you’ve engaged them, but it’s up to you to make the approach.”
India has been a wonderful inspiration for him as a writer over the years. “I have now written five novels and three of them have a strong Indian element. The Cardamom Club, my second novel, is set entirely in India — Delhi, Kochi and Dharamsala. More recently, I’ve set the finale of Dead Spy Running in Delhi (at the Lotus Temple) and there’s a big scene in Games Traitors Play set at the Meenakshi temple in Madurai. I know that Warner Bros, which is currently developing Dead Spy Running into a film, will keep a lot of the India locations.”
That then is the biggest attraction for Indophiles; India is a dream location for them. “Even if you only take a few notes while you are traveling, you’ll have many more local nuggets than you would anywhere else in the world. There are always so many interesting things going on in the most everyday of places — colourful vignettes that write themselves,” he says, throwing light on the creative process.
Wendy, who has authored many books on Hindu mythology and Vedas including the controversial The Hindus: An Alternative History, has just completed a very large anthology of Hindu texts, from the earliest Vedas to contemporary short stories, that will be published in 2013. “I am also editing a volume of my collected essays about Hinduism that will be published this coming autumn in India. After that, I am writing a book about the way in which the Arthashastra and Kamasutra speak about religion,” she says.
For Geoff Dyer, one of the leading novelists of Britain, the literary link-up with India came in an unexpected fashion. “I was going to write a short novel set in Venice. Then my wife and I came to Varanasi and as soon as we got there I had the idea of pairing or twinning Venice with Varanasi. We were only staying there for two nights and it was such a mind-blowing place. I wanted to stay longer but that was impossible. Then, when I had made some progress with the book, we came back to India stayed in Varanasi for about six weeks. I’d been to India quite a bit before the first Varanasi visit.”
The book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which was published in April 20009, earned critical acclaim. “It was a very powerful place to which I had a very powerful response. And it was of course rather mysterious and therefore very interesting to me. I like places where time has stood its ground. Which is certainly the case in Varanasi.”
Geoff, who had earlier written a book titled Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it, sums up the Indian experience: “As a visitor to India, one is in a flux of constantly changing responses and reactions. Whatever else you might say about it, it is the least boring country in the world!”