INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR/ Aatish Taseer
INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR/ Aatish Taseer
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His mother Tavleen Singh is a senior Indian journalist and columnist who made her name covering the Punjab insurgency of the eighties.
His father Salmaan Taseer is a Pakistani businessman and politician, and currently Governor of Punjab in that country.
How did you decide on the pattern of this book, in which you've alternated your personal search for your father with this journey from Istanbul to Mecca and through Syria and Iran to Pakistan?
Many of the personal sections of the book were already written; they were the remains of a failed novel. I knew early on that Stranger to History was a book in which the personal and public had a necessary relationship. But it took much editing and re-thinking to make the two narratives run together in such a way that they aided the flow of the book rather than obstruct it.
How did you fund the trip?
In part, through journalism; in part, by staying with friends; in part, with help from a parent. And since I sold the book on proposal, I was able to make up the money quite quickly.
You've written about how a corrupt and self-serving state can distort history and religion in its own interests. How do you think can we stop that from happening in India?
By keeping robust the institutions which protect us from the excesses of religion. Fortunately Hinduism, unless it is distorted beyond recognition, does not lend itself to the kind of authoritarianism that attends the Semitic religions. And yet, we have seen that even this gentle, tolerant faith, with such deep roots in this country, can in the hands of shiny-faced thugs become a form of hooliganism. It mustn't be allowed to; the cultural regeneration of India is too important to fall into the hands of pamphleteers; it must be accompanied by an intellectual regeneration.
In Turkey, where the state works to keep religious fervour under control, you met people who were fanatic about it, and in Iran where the state uses religion to dominate, you met people who craved religious comfort and sought it in unlikely sources. Would you say this was a pattern?
No, it is the result of the state co-opting religion. The secularism of Turkey was not genuine; it meant that the state appointed clergy, wrote Friday sermons, controlled the Mosque. This is not the place of the state. In India too, this concept of secularism has been distorted and turned sometimes into an attack on Indic culture. It's no less absurd to turn one's back on Sanskrit because it's had liturgical origins than it would be for the West to turn their back on Latin for the same reason.
You were in Syria when the riots in reaction to the Danish newspaper cartoons broke out, and someone said to you, "Tell your people in Europe that the freedom of journalists is the freedom of madness." Do you feel this is applicable in India?
No. It was the remark of someone who didn't understand these freedoms. The press in India and even in Pakistan where press freedoms have known a short spring has played an invaluable role in documenting and examining the change in this country.
In your description of the trouble that day shows that the fear and hatred between Islam and the western civilizations are based almost entirely on cultural differences. Would you say that this book is partly an attempt to help bridge those differences and create better understanding?
I can't say that I had any motives of this kind. It is not a fair description of the way I write. I try to be as close to my material as possible, to look at it hard and frankly, and to draw out a narrative that is rooted in the material. Honesty is my primary aim and I suppose it is a secret hope of mine that honesty itself leads to a deeper understanding between different people. But that is not always the case and I would find it difficult to introduce these external motives into the writing process.
Have your parents read the book? What did they think?
My mother has read the book and has been very supportive. Some of it must have been difficult for her, but she was always clear about drawing a line between what were her circumstances and what were mine, both as a writer and a person. I've sent the book to my father but don't know if he's read it or not.
Your novel was recently accepted by a publisher when is it out? Please tell us something about it.
March 2010. It's called The Temple-goers; it's set in Delhi and in the fictional satellite cities of Sectorpur and Phasenagar. It has as its principle characters, a gym trainer, a rich businessman's 'healthy' daughter and the Chief Minister of an imaginary breakaway state called Jhaatkebaal. So comedy, I suppose.
EXCLUSIVE excerpt
Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer, published by Picador India, Rs 495
It was during the years that I was growing up in Delhi that I had my first questions about my father, but like so much else about that early absence, they were lost in confusion and laughter. One day, my second-year teacher telephoned my mother, concerned that I was suffering from some kind of emotional disturbance. When my mother asked her why she felt this, she said I showed a tendency to tell wild, obviously untrue stories. My mother pressed her and she said she had asked the class what their fathers did for a living and I replied, 'My father is in jail.'
'It's absolutely true,' my mother said, and left it at that.
Then, aged seven, I met a friend of my mother's, and discovering his name was Salman, asked him, to my mother's great embarrassment, whether he was Salmaan, my father.
We lived at first on our own in a small terrace flat, for which my grandmother paid the rent, and later with my grandparents in the small house, past the flyover, from which I would go to the Lutyens bungalow on the neem-lined avenue.
When I was very young, my mother explained her separation from my father in terms of a fight with a friend, not unlike those I had routinely with my friends. When my questions became more sophisticated, she told me about his political career and how it would have been impossible if we had been in his life. And though I didn't have a good impression of my father, I don't think I had a bad one either. My mother was always very clear about who he was. She supported my interest in meeting him, and made sure that I saw the Pakistani friends they had in common whenever any came to India. She seemed also for many years, and I don't know how I know this, still to be in love with him, or at least thought of their relationship as the big love affair of her life.
She often said, 'Sometimes people come together for a reason, to create something or someone, and then they go their own ways.' This made me think, at least when I was child, of my father's departure as something unavoidable for which no one was to blame. My grandfather, of course, made it seem like just one more chapter in the Partition saga he had lived through. When I was eight or nine, I wrote my father a letter, expressing my desire to see him, which I sent with my mother to Pakistan where she was covering the election. 'If I see him, I'll give it to him,' she said, 'but be prepared that he may not reply. What will you do if he doesn't?'
'I'll leave it and never get in touch with him again.'
Pic by Theo Wenner
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