Does it matter how much money you have if the air in your country is killing you?
How does it benefit India if farmers are compelled to sell their land to builders, and citizens struggle with
rising prices and food shortages?
Is a liberalised India liberal enough to accept the dreams of its young women and homosexuals?
In his first book, India Becoming, writer Akash Kapur explores the lives of an eclectic cast of people who are caught in a society in dramatic transition after India opened up its economy in the 1990s.
Kapur strings together a series of conversations, spread over five years, with a group of people as diverse as a nostalgic landlord, a closeted homosexual, an atheist cow-broker and a young, working woman who finds repression and prudery can catch up with you, even in the big city.
In an exclusive interview with Sarita Ravindranath, Kapur speaks about his fears for the new India, the disappearance of farmland, his hometown Auroville and his favourite India books.
The title of your book, India Becoming is based on Einstein's comment that Americans are always becoming, never being. Does it upset you that people in India are now 'becoming', not being?
No… It doesn't upset me at all. I think it's wonderful. Being implies an unmoving situation. One of the exciting things about India is that there is this forward movement, and people are reinventing themselves. It's a very exciting time to be in India.
You refer to the corrosion of the "Great Indian soul". Don't you think that's a romantic concept? Dynamics may have changed, but the poor have always had it bad in India...
India has always been a complex country. But since the reforms of the 1990s, I feel the pace of change has become more dramatic. Because the country has opened up, the outside influences are much stronger than in the 1970s and the 1980s.
Yes, we've always had the poor. But in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the narrative of India had been that it is a poor country - overlooking the fact that there were also wealthy people.
What has changed in the last 20 years is that the narrative has become about India's power, India's rich - overlooking the poverty. The narrative has changed, but the poverty is still there, and in some cases, it has gotten worse.
What comes through in the book is an element of longing for the old India...
There is an element of nostalgia there. But am not saying they were better times, but there were simpler times. There was less movement, there was less churning.
In many ways, India was a sleepy country in the 1970s and the ‘80s. There wasn't much economic opportunity or change.
People lived the life they were born into, and if you were born into an occupation or caste, that's what you did. There wasn't a lot of outside influence.
I am not saying that was a good thing. Everyone knew their place and things were static and unchanging - I think that's a very bad thing. I don’t agree that I romanticise that.
What I'm saying is that India has become a lot complicated in the last 20 years. Suddenly, everything is out of place. In many ways, that's a wonderful thing: It means if you were born a Dalit, you can go to school and move up in the world. You can move out of your village and do a lot of things. That's the wonderful side.
But with all this economic growth, and all this opportunity, a lot of confusion sets in.
So I don’t think the book is an attempt to say the past was good and the present is bad or the reverse. It's much more an attempt to say that we live in these incredibly complex times, and it's an attempt to capture seven-eight lives trying to navigate that complexity - and trying to show how well that complexity reflects in their lives, and how badly it does.
Your book is based on a series of conversations with a set of people navigating a changing society. What made you choose your characters?
I didn't say to myself that am going to find eight characters who are a demographic representation of India. India is an incredibly diverse country and I think you're not going to manage that, right?
If I were to say that I want one guy from Chhattisgarh and one guy from Kashmir...it's not going to happen that way, right?
Whatever you do, you're not going to represent India. I tried to be representative in a different way which is to capture this universal Indian experience now, which is this attempt to comprehend change, and to live through change.
I think change is something every Indian is feeling now. What's happening is wonderful, it's confusing and I wanted to capture that.
The other thing is that you need to find people who were willing to open up to you, to spend time with you because the book goes on for five years. It's not that I would walk in, do two interviews with them and then leave. They needed to be willing to let me into their lives, let me watch their lives unfold for five years. Not everybody is comfortable with that.
I talked to many more people than those mentioned in the book.
My characters were the people who let me into their lives, who opened up and let me be part of their lives. It's not easy to find people willing to do that. In that sense, it was pretty much a collaborative project.
Did you ever get the feeling that the people who you interviewed sometimes told you what you wanted to hear?
It's hard to tell... Maybe something like that happens in the first couple of interviews. But what happens in a book like this is that you spend so much time with these people that you get to know them really well. The act drops after a certain point.
You're used to each other's company. And remember, I wasn't interviewing them in vacuum, I was getting to know their lives, watching them and I was meeting people who knew them.
So if somebody were to outright lie to me, it would be easy for me to know that. It's human nature to exaggerate, but I don't think people could have misled me so much.
And all the interviews were done in Tamil?
No, mostly in English. The hardest interview was the scavengers’. They speak in a gypsy dialect which is very hard to understand.
I took somebody who speaks Tamil much better than me to help me and even he had trouble understanding what they were saying.
You write about the disappearance of farms and farming. Where do you think that will take us?
I think it's a very dangerous situation for the country and for the world. You see food shortages and rising food prices everywhere. It's a very difficult situation and as somebody asks in the book, "Everybody talks about city city city, but my question is who's going to feed all those city people if the farms die?"
I don't know what the solution to it is, but I think it's a major problem.
When you decided to leave New York, what made you come back to Auroville?
Auroville is home. I loved living there, and I loved growing up there.
Secondly, I think it is one of the most live-able, beautiful places in India. The green work that's been done in Auroville has been absolutely amazing.
I love the value system of the place.
I have two young children, I love the fact that they're growing up in Auroville.
Yours is one of the few India books set in southern India. But there is little about your hometown - Auroville - in the book...
Auroville is a complicated place. And if you're writing about Auroville, you've to write an entire book on it.
Auroville is not directly present in my book.
But indirectly, the place does inform a lot of writing - In the sense that if you grow up in a place where the values are anti-materialistic, it changes the way you look at economic growth, economic development.
It makes you question whether GDP numbers are so magical... whether the fact that GDP numbers are up means automatically that things are wonderful. I think to that extent Auroville is very much in the book.
How has Auroville changed?
A lot of the changes I describe – The changing of the landscape, villages that become towns - that's the landscape of Auroville.
In some ways, it would be the starting point of my book.
When I come back home, and I see the world around me has changed so much at a physical, geographical level.
You write about the rage and despair you felt when your home is invaded by the stench of burning garbage. A scavenger who lives off the garbage dump tells you that health isn’t important to him – He just needs to find a way to live. What made you stay on in India after that? You say you came back and found things were not as you expected... But here you are…
This is my home. It's my home. It's my home. It's my home. And just because something is not what you expected doesn’t mean you don't like it. It's not what I expected and that's normal.
You've been away for a long time and you're surprised by the reality of life. But I find this country probably is one of the most exciting countries to be in the world now. There's so much happening. You meet so many amazing people. There's amazing lives being led here.
Like I say in the book, I feel like I have a ringside view to history. I feel like history is unfolding in front of me and am part of it. I don't feel that way in the US or Europe where everything feels slower. History has already played out in those places.
Are you optimistic about India?
I say in the epilogue that I'm cautiously optimistic...very cautiously optimistic.
There's so much potential, so much opportunity and so much energy in India. So, the question is how it gets harnessed... Does it play itself out in a positive way? Because unfocussed energy can also be chaotic and play itself out negatively.
It's a very important turning point in the country now and we'll have to see what direction it goes in. But certainly, there are grounds for optimism.
A large part of readers and critics in India are touchy about books written about India – especially if the book is not a tribute to India. Does that bother you?
What's the point in worrying? You write the most honest book that you can write - some people like it, some people don't. It's not the case that the only negative reviews you get are going to be in India. I don't really lose sleep over it. A thoughtful negative review can also be very interesting.
What is less nice is when the negative reviews are pure attack pieces, where you feel the author has an agenda.
But if you're going to be a writer and going to put a book out there, you can obsess over the reviews. You have to be deeply ironic about your reviews - both the positive and the negative.
I thought a lot of books coming out of India were taking a very simplistic positive take on things, or a very simplistic negative take on things. I was trying to say that it's actually both. That it's a very complex country and that it's not simple to judge it.
What are your favourite India books?
Among novels, Midnight's Children ranks up there...And then there's Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August, An Indian Story. It's an absolutely brilliant book, not known nearly as well as it should be.
Among non-fiction books, VS Naipul's A Million Mutinies Now is an absolute classic. I also like Suketu Mehta's book on Bombay (Maximum City). Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India was brilliant.
Who are your favourite writers and critics?
(Anton) Chekhov, RK Narayan and Raymond Carver are my favourite writers.
Among contemporary critics, I find James Wood very thoughtful and very inspiring. In India, I think Nilanjana Roy's criticism is very good.
First published in sify.com on November 2012
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