Raza, Adichie explore identity & nationality

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I have not done any painting which has hurt the sentiments of the Hindus,” said S.H. Raza, the high priest of modern Indian art who has made “bindu” (dot) the wellspring of his paintings, at Day 4 of the Jaipur Literature Festival that draws to a close on Tuesday. Raza was talking about his association with M.F. Husain and his love for Hinduism. The nonagenarian artist, who has been living in France for about six decades, said that while he had “deep esteem” for the Hindu religion, he hadn’t “left” his own religion. “I want to pick good things from Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. I don’t like it when religious people hate another religion,” he said, reciting Allama Iqbal’s couplet, “Mazhab nahin sikhata aapas mein bair rakhna, Hindi hain hum watan hai Hindudstaan hamara,” to cheerful applause.
Raza said he was at the festival as an Indian. The artist, who spent decades to understand Indian art and culture, said merely seeing with our eyes was not enough. “We must learn to see with our heart,” he said. His ways of seeing with his heart and inner eye revealed to him dot and its myriad “possibilities”.
Reminiscing about his childhood days in Madhya Pradesh, Raza said he was never a good student. When he was five-year-old, Raza was asked by his teacher to look at a dot that had a deep impact on him, even though he understood its significance much later. The dot helped Raza get rid of his distractions and “concentrate and see in one direction”.
In the process, he found himself. “We all have to find ourselves,” said the artist, who is known for his humanity and generosity. The sign of a great artist, said Raza, not just depended on his paintings, but also on how profound he was as a human being.

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, yet another star author on Day 4, endeared all as she talked about her identity and her craft. Her nationality, said Adichie, was close to her. “I can’t be anything, but Nigerian.”
Adichie, a great admirer of the African writer Chinua Achebe, who was her parents’ friend, said her writing was very different from Achebe’s but since she grew up in a house where Achebe lived, she was often asked how that experience was. “I tell people stories about the literary spirits, coming from Achebe, who tell me what to write,” she joked.

One of America’s greatest living writers, Richard Ford, who was “dazzled, shaken and moved” to be in India, talked about Lay of the Land, his 2006 novel — third in a trilogy that included The Sportswriter and Independence Day — the landscape of his writing, his style and his treatment of characters, including Frank Bascombe.
US President Barack Obama had a fan in Ford when he said: “If I were to choose between war in Afghanistan and Obama, I would choose the latter. I am very happy with Obama even though he does many things that I don’t like.”

In yet another session, Candace Bushnell, the writer of Sex and the City, spoke about how Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist of the sensational serial, was her alter ego. It came as a surprise to many when Bushnell said she believed in fidelity and commitment.
“While many watched Sex and the City, few understood where it came from. It came from the feminist movement of the 1980s and its sexual revolution. When I was young, my worst nightmare was to get married to a man I didn’t know,” said Bushnell.

Joe Wright’s film on the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten based on Alex von Tunzleman’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire may have been shelved, but the story of their love affair never ceases to lose its steam. It was evident at a session with Tunzleman who, in a conversation with Karan Thapar, insisted that Nehru and Edwina were truly in love. And the thousands of letters that they exchanged, which have not been made public due to political reasons, were a testimony to their intimate association.