大象传媒

Where Is Home?

• Rana Dasgupta
• 3 Sep 06, 09:02 AM

Have just returned home to Delhi from 10 days in Sydney and Melbourne to find that this blog has been chattering quite effectively without me. It is always good to feel dispensable!

One of the subjects it has been debating is whether I, born in the UK, deserve to call Delhi home at all, and whether I can presume to write about it. Peter Harrap introduced the debate:

"I have just found out that we are in fact addressing someone who is not Indian at all, but British-born and bred. Rather like illiterate Indians voted in Newhru's daughter because she had herself renamed "Ghandi"."

"Fitz" responded:

"Whilst anyone I believe can be invited to write about anything and anyone and anyplace. There is a certain moral code in literature or just the world that we do declare or interests, biases and backgrounds. Can we have a real Indian next time please? You could lose viewers (or at least discerning viewers) otherwise!"

Peter Harrap explained what such a real Indian would look like:

"What native literary talent to write about this India can he have with his track record, I ask? How is a life unlived- no 6am baths at Bhimashankar, no pujas by the Ganges or breakfast off banana leaves, no sweets in shops down Assighat and primary hot schooldays under trees sat in the dust being bitten."

Let us leave aside the obvious fact that my biography has been available on this site from the beginning, and address the more interesting aspects of this debate, whose essential question is: Who can write authentically about Delhi?

I don't think the debate would have arisen had I been writing about Toronto or Frankfurt. There is an assumption, however, that "true" knowledge about a place like Delhi is of a different sort to knowledge about such places. It is organic, acquired through the soil and the heat, and it is fundamentally inaccessible to someone coming from outside. Inaccessible, particularly, to "modern" people, for it is a folkloric kind of knowledge that must always remain foreign to them.

I want to say a few things about this set of assumptions.

1. The uncorrupted, traditional figure at their centre is a European fantasy, and it is a fantasy that reveals nothing about India but much about Europe. We can see in Peter's discussion how easily the same abstract character flips from being a figure of homage, a kind of mystic hero living according to the beautiful rhythms of the millennia, to being a figure of modern contempt ("illiterate Indians"), according to the needs of the moment. Europe has for a long time desired two conflicting things from places like this: the enchantment of eternal tradition, and the assurance of its own ultimate superiority. Homage and contempt are the corresponding - and interchangeable - narrative voices.

2. Peter says, "Rather like illiterate Indians voted in Newhru's daughter because she had herself renamed "Ghandi"." As most readers are aware, this is completely untrue. Jawarhalal Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, acquired her name as many women acquire new names - by marrying a man who carried it (who was entirely unrelated to Mohandas Gandhi). His anecdote of her name change is not evidence of the primitiveness of "illiterate Indians" and their politics (he adds, later "You are still all too primitive to attain nationhood") but of how unshaken so many blithe European opinions about the non-West are by the actual facts of history. (Since not one name is correctly spelt in his commentary, his comments about illiteracy also have a certain beautiful irony to them.)

3. It will always be true that someone who has grown up in a place will have a denser relationship with it, and more stories to tell. But I am often impressed by the unease that nomadic commentators, whose affiliations are simulaneously multiple and unclear, arouse. Is it not crucial at this point in our history that we attempt to straddle histories and cultures and find ways for them to communicate, and why this insistence on radical unintelligibility? I would agree that there are many many things about this country that I do not know or understand; but I have that in common with all the other billion or so people who live here, for its realities are too many for any one person to absorb. And in some ways, though clearly not all, travel makes one a better observer of one's surroundings. I end with a quote from

"When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about,” goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions. If one wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman. Indeed, each sphere of life has, as it were, produced its own tribe of storytellers. Each of these tribes preserves some of its characteristics centuries later. Thus, among nineteenth-century German storytellers, writers like Hebel and Gotthelf stem from the first tribe, writers like Sealsfield and Gerstacker from the second. With these tribes, however, as stated above, it is only a matter of basic types. The actual extension of the realm of storytelling in its full historical breadth is inconceivable without the most intimate interpenetration of these two archaic types.

Such an interpenetration was achieved particularly by the Middle Ages in their trade structure. The resident master craftsman and the traveling journeymen worked together in the same rooms; and every master had been a traveling journeyman before he settled down in his home town or somewhere else. If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place.

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