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One Thousand Writers, One Flat World

Writers must speak on the louring sameness born of extremism and market

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One Thousand Writers, One Flat World
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When I thought about what I should say to this illustrious company, at this special literary festival, it seemed obvious that I must talk about climate change—not about global warming, but about the way the mental and emotional climate we are living in affects writers. So I am calling this talk 'Climate Change or Is the World Becoming Flat Again?'—by which I mean a limited world whose people see thus far and no further.

We are here to celebrate literature, which is the same as saying we are here to celebrate diversity. Literature means many voices. As writers, we project our unique points of view. As readers, other writers show us there are other visions and values, other ways of living and thinking. India has always seemed to me to be a good place to have a celebration of many voices. One of my favourite writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, once called his continent a microcosm of the human race, and this subcontinent is pretty much the same kind of mix and muddle of races and cultures. We have a plurality of religions and languages thrown in besides. Racial purity, a single Book, a single Way of Life, one prescription for solving all problems, would seem absurd here, a fantasy we would never consider. I'd like to say we never will. Instead I have to say that diversity, here as in many parts of the world, is under attack. And because diversity is at the very heart, the very meaning, of literature, I have wondered how creativity in life and literature is going to be affected—is already being affected—by the relentless drive toward sameness by religious fundamentalisms on the one hand, and on the other hand by the lookalike world that globalisation based on marketisation is producing.

I've used the word celebration, but recent events have given us more cause to mourn than to celebrate. Next door to us in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto has been murdered because there are those the world over who believe that assassination is the way to deal with opposition. In Bangladesh, the writer Taslima Nasreen has had to flee her country because neither her life nor her writing is safe there. Here in India, Muslim hardliners have forced her to withdraw what they call offending passages from one of her books. Here, too, M.F. Husain has been driven into exile by Hindu fundamentalists who accuse him of insulting their religious sentiments. And not long ago a valuable archive in Pune was attacked and a manuscript burned because it supposedly hurt Maratha sentiments. We in India can no longer say—"It can't happen here". In post-modern India all this is happening. And it has happened with religious and state sanction.

India has shown that a multicultural society where religions are valued and practised can be based on a secular idea. Multiculturism is nothing new to the world. Empires, including the Ottoman empire, lived with it. And today many societies are experiencing aspects of it. Cultures need other cultures to recharge and revitalise themselves. Others who are not the least like ourselves have to be admitted, accepted, understood. It is the outsider who crosses our path who brings the fresh air and excitement of new ideas and new vistas our way. Languages run into and invigorate each other. But need I say more when we look at the exhilarating effect of immigrant writing on English literature, and the intoxicating things that happen when vastly different art forms and traditions—in cinema, theatre, music—come together?

Post-modern is also connected in my mind with a climate ruled by commercialism. The other day, no less likely a person than a former attorney-general of the US called globalisation based on economic power, consumerism and materialism deadlier than armed conflict, because the spread of sameness—the same technology, the same kind of entertainment, the same junk food, the same desire for the same endless toys—will wipe out the distinction between one culture and another. Ultimately, whole areas of human experience and accumulations of human imagination will simply disappear. And if this is the process we are in, how are minds going to stay free and open in such a climate? The ruling theories and philosophies of any era shape its thinking and create its mindset. The things we believe in restrict our imaginations or set them free. The mindset of people who thought the world was flat was very different from those who knew it was round and could set out to explore the difference. What I'm afraid of is that the world is becoming flat again and we are getting locked into an either-or, we-and-they, black-and-white way of thinking, a shrunken, stereotyped, cliched world with no room in it for shades of meaning or for adventures of ideas; and this is a condition for which the laid-down certainties of our time—whether religious or economic or violently nationalistic—are all responsible.

Writers used to react to and comment on such defining moments and developments—and this moment is as defining for our time as the difference between a flat and a round world once made. Writers stepped into controversy and took sides. Will this kind of involvement become unfashionable in the 21st century? There are those who argue that this is politics, or this is economics, and nothing to do with literature, but when have politics and economics not been part of literature? What else are they but the conditions we live under, making us the kind of people we become? Becoming politically aware didn't prevent Pablo Neruda from writing odes to red wine, or lyrics to the body of his beloved. Neruda's poetry, his personal life and his politics were all one—as was the case with so many poets and novelists and playwrights in the 20th century who also became, perhaps for that very reason, the most widely read writers of their time. Will the 21st century produce this breed? I don't say times mustn't change—only that we have to play a part in the changes, decide what direction change should take, influence it, not stand by and let it happen, for better or worse.

I'm probably more aware of the commercialism of our current book climate because it is so different from when I started writing. My first novel was published in 1958. No one then judged a manuscript by how many copies it would be expected to sell. Agents and editors had a part to play, in recognising quality, and taking risks, if need be, to nurture it. Books of topical interest were important and there were plenty of them, but fiction was not a matter of topical interest or current fashion. I remember asking my editor at Alfred Knopf whether he thought a particular novel was "timely" and he said they chose fiction for its timeless quality. And Victor Gollancz, who published me in Britain, had the same attitude. Publishers considered themselves taste-makers, opinion-makers. Agents and editors did not intrude into the process of writing—at least I never had such an experience, never so much as a change of sentence. This came back to me very strongly when a few years ago a successful Indian-American writer told me how beholden she was to her agent—he had told her what to enlarge on, what to leave out, and generally decided how her product should be "packaged" for the best effect. I am grateful I made my start in times when nobody told me what or how to write, and before marketisation and corporatisation had taken over the arts.

Post-modernism has not led us to post-nationalism. We are as far from becoming one world as we ever were—though we are a better-connected world. The nation-state is very powerfully with us. Fortunately, a universal literature is growing out of a wealth of national literatures. That foreign—mainly British—writers choose to live and work here, just as some Indian writers live and work abroad, is testimony to the truth that literature knows no frontiers, and an artist's country is the realm of his/her imagination.

Neither do civilised instincts know any frontiers. My father, who was a passionate patriot committed to the overthrow of British rule, and was to die of his last imprisonment under the British, wept when London was bombarded in the Blitz, and when Hitler's army marched into Paris. If anyone had asked him what race he belonged to, he would have said the human race. In the early '50s, soon after my mother had been elected president of the UN General Assembly, she was in London, and Winston Churchill, who was then prime minister, asked her to lunch. In the course of the conversation, he suddenly turned to her and said, "We killed your husband, didn't we?" She was so taken aback at this remark from a diehard imperialist who had vowed never to quit India that she didn't know what to say, and then she found her voice and heard herself saying, "No. Every man lives only to his appointed hour." The end of the story is that they became friends and he later told her that her brother, Jawaharlal Nehru, had conquered mankind's two worst enemies, hate and fear. Am I imagining it, or is that supremely civilised approach to one another missing from today's climate?

As I've been writing this, I've had more uncertainties than answers in my mind. But of one thing I am certain, that writers will write, whatever the odds, and I want to wish them safety and freedom in a new year of great writing.

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(This is an excerpt from a speech given at the Jaipur Literary Festival on January 23, 2008.)
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