Novelists From India

"India’s very definition of comfort is a state of being that is inaccessible to the poor. Often, we pay not for the quality of service, experience, home or education, but for keeping the poor out. Low standards for the poor are embedded in all the cures that India prescribes for poverty."

"Irrespective of whether you are a freelance humanitarian or a freelance patriot, a fact that is beyond dispute is that the country treats its poor very badly. Across India, in the name of fighting a pandemic, India has beaten up its poor, denied them their livelihood, made them run behind trucks for food, and forced thousands of families to walk hundreds of kilometres to their villages, letting some people die on the way. A few days ago, more than a dozen men travelled inside a cement mixer to escape detection."

"There will always be the poor as long as there are the rich."

"I wish I could explain, in a manner others may consider “rational”, how these plots come to me. But I can’t. I just open the laptop, and there is this parallel universe that opens up and I record what I see. I discover the story while writing just as much as readers discover the story while reading. So I know it may sound strange but I genuinely believe that these stories are the blessings of Lord Shiva. I am only a channel. I am only someone who is lucky enough to receive this blessing."

"Our society has collectively chosen a smriti for now: it’s called the Indian Constitution."

"“I find nothing wrong in being called a ‘Hindu’ writer, but I dislike the implicit assumption in that terminology.”"

"Remember, in the Indian way, only the shruti scriptures are of divine origin. The laws, or smriti books, are not of divine origin, but man-made, which means we can change the laws depending on what society wants. There are many smritis besides the Manu Smriti, some are very liberal and some are conservative, and they reflect the mood of the society when these smritis were written."

"Later, years later, a famous editor who regularly took tea with Sonia and who became a close confidante of her daughter Priyanka had a story to tell. We were having coffee together in the coffee shop of the Oberoi in Mumbai and I, as always, looked up to the eighteenth floor and paid silent tribute to those who were lined up against a wall and shot dead by the Pakistani jihadi terrorist, Fazlullah, on 26/11. And I was thinking of those who were killed in this coffee shop that same horrible night, when the editor said something that brought me instantly back into the present moment. This was not long after Tarun Tejpal was jailed for the alleged attempted rape of a friend of his daughter’s in a lift in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Goa. We were talking about how astounding it was that he had made so much money from a magazine that barely sold a few thousand copies. ‘The money didn’t come from journalism,’ the editor said. ‘I am sure not,’ I said. ‘Well, let’s just say that Tarun Tejpal had good reasons to be very, very close to 10 Janpath.’ In my head it was as if the pieces of a puzzle started to come together. I met Tarun through Vidia and Nadira Naipaul. Although he was always charming and friendly when we met, there was something about him that kept me from sharing their admiration of him. And I had always been sceptical whether his sting operations were sting operations or exercises in entrapment. His most famous sting operation was conducted in the third year of Vajpayee’s government, and it so discredited Vajpayee that it turned his government into a lame duck. The two people caught on hidden cameras accepting money from fake arms dealers were the BJP president, Bangaru Laxman, and Jaya Jaitley, who had long been the closest aide of George Fernandes. George had to resign as defence minister and the scandal never died. But because I saw it more as entrapment than journalism I began to follow other Tehelka exposés closely and noticed that they seemed always to expose Sonia Gandhi’s opponents."

"He does not seem to have understood the gravity of the offence. India's elite lauded the amendments to the IPC, widening the definition of rape, little realizing that they did not apply simply to lower-class men, but could affect them too. While there has been much clamour for the death penalty in cases of rape involving the lower classes, would the elite now like to apply this to themselves?"

"At this point in my life, I don’t worry about telling a literary story or the right story; I tell the story I want to tell, the story that makes me feel alive, the questions I want to answer."

"I feel like a citizen of the world. I have now lived outside of India, where I grew up, longer than I lived in India. I have picked up traditions and even accents from India, the United States, and Denmark. I struggle with my cultural identity – where do I really come from? And even harder, where do I really belong? Everywhere or nowhere? Since many of my stories are about women trying to find their place in society, their cultural identities play a major role in driving their narrative."

"I think it’s an organic process. I don’t plot. I don’t plan. I start writing and characters and geography emerges. I find that in telling stories, the best laid plans go poof when your characters do what they want to do because you don’t control them—they become real and live their own lives. I certainly am influenced by the people I meet and the places I go to when I create my characters but it’s an intuitive thing, I just know who this person is or that person is and I know their name and I just know. And what I don’t know, he or she tells me."

"I am a character-driven writer, and I believe that once you define a character, they tell their story. Characters are defined not just by their personality but also by their relationships to other characters. So it’s no surprise that relationships are central to my stories. And relationships are not always smooth and easy – they have edges and help me know my characters and their edges better."

"I have been in an abusive marriage. Violence can come from love, from a very intimate person. Violence can come from all sorts of crazy situations. What are you going to do? You have to deal with it when it strikes."

"Who does the novel belong to? I am writing about a different reality, so I need to shape it to fit my reality. You don’t want to do the same. You don’t want to do the done thing. To take a risk, you still need to be absolutely on the margins. I am doing what I want to do."

"Sometimes I think that what I do must be either idiotic and naïve or courageous. I don’t know which. If there was no threat of violence, that is what you would do. This threat of violence shouldn’t dictate what you are going to write or hinder you in any manner."

"The literary world must take a stand [to stop Bloomsbury publishing the book]. This is not about cancel culture. This is about defending literature from fascism. This is about standing up against religious divide, hate speech, islamophobia and false history."

"A memoir for me means a person’s life story; if I was going to write my actual life story, I would condense this entire marriage into a footnote."

"Shame is not in the beatings, not in the rape. Shame is in being asked to stand judgment."

"Love is not blind, it just looks in the wrong places."

"The public broadcaster's critique of the government was stinging in part because Johnson enjoys a high degree of support among Britain’s privately owned, overwhelmingly pro-Tory press. Nor does Modi, assured of craven public broadcasters, expect much criticism from the , which has been described, only semi-humorously, as veritably North Korean in its devotion to the supreme leader."

"As a writer I am more interested in describing the past accurately than in outlining the future; we need a new past if we are to make sense of our intolerable present or work to change it…"

"Supremacy of all stripes—racial, ethnic, national—works in insidious ways, burrowing deep inside impeccably liberal minds…"

"Even equality is a deeply problematic concept. It has its origins in Christianity, where it is conceived as equality before God. When you transfer that into a competitive commercial society, it becomes elusive, even deceptive. Really, the drama of the modern world is the collision between the promise of equality and the fact of structural inequality…"

"Awakening late to the pandemic, authoritarian or authoritarian-minded leaders have turned it into an opportunity both to shore up their power and to conceal their stunning ineptitude. To fail to see through their manufactured , as many in the media are doing, can only further endanger the long-term moral and political health of their societies."

"In addition to economic and military , wartime measures typically encourage a high degree of political, social and intellectual conformity. The general idea is that, in the face of an existential challenge from a vicious enemy, ought to cease. The media tends to become more patriotic, as do former . Such was the case in the United States during the early stages of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when most journalists and even Democratic politicians rallied around the Republican George W. Bush administration. The trouble is that the "war" against Covid-19 is actually not a war at all. And no one should feel obliged to sign up for it. The loss of, and separation from, loved ones, and the fear and anxiety that is devastating many lives is not an opportunity to fantasize about heroism in battle. The pandemic is, primarily, a global public health emergency; it is made potentially lethal as much by long neglected and underfunded social welfare systems as by a highly contagious virus. A plain description like this is not as stirring as a call to arms — and doesn't justify the more extreme actions governments have taken against critics during the crisis. It does, however, open up a line of inquiry that journalists ought to pursue, now as well as in the future."

"Governments around the world say they're engaged in a war against the coronavirus. [...] This kill-or-die idiom is more than casual rhetorical overkill. Many governments are symbolically but very deliberately calling, in this time of fear and uncertainty, for general along military lines. This is so they can, while pointing to an insidious foreign enemy, aim their firepower against some of the most valuable institutions of domestic public life. They have been very successful so far."

"Writing about Kashmir was a strange and painfully isolating experience, but an absolutely crucial one. It made me see that, whether you are Indian or American, black, brown, or white, it is best not to get morally intoxicated by words like "secularism" and "liberalism" or to simply assume that you stand on the right side of history after having professed allegiance to certain ideological verities. Rather one should try to perceive the scramble for power, the clash of interests, that these resonant claims to virtue conceal; one should ask who is using words like "secularism" or "liberalism" and for what purposes…"

"The Mississippi and its paddle boats, and the rivers of Bengal and their gleaming steamers evoked a similar atmosphere of romance, of long, song-filled voyages, high winds and lonely sunsets."

"How as a young girl, Ismat Chugtai convinced her father to excuse her from learning how to cook, and give her instead the opportunity to go to school and get an education: “Women cook food Ismat. When you go to your in-laws what will you feed them?” he asked gently after the crisis was explained to him. “If my husband is poor, then we will make khichdi and eat it and if he is rich, we will hire a cook,” I answered. My father realised his daughter was a terror and that there wasn’t a thing he could do about it."

"Come the rains and the beerbahutis appeared all over the green. From where do they emerge, so perfect in shape and colour, and where do they go?"

"She sat quietly in one corner of the sofa, the end of her sari drawn modestly over her hair. Like the motionless illusion of a madly spinning top, she was staring vacantly into space."

"The death in November of the well-beloved novelist, Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay, in his fifties, leaves a void in the life of Bengal. He was unsurpassed in his portrayal of the countryside...."

"The soil was adequately prepared for some of the great bildungsromans of modern India: Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's four-volume Sreekanta, Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay's Father Panchati and Aparajito..."

"I thought that while Gurudeva Rabindranath was the greatest poet of modem times, Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyaya could rub shoulders with any great novelist the world had known."

"“In spite of the ruins and death, where every illusion has ended, the strength of my dreams is so strong, that exaltation is reborn from everything, and my hands are never empty.""

"Being one of the few women in the leadership team, I am often surrounded by men, but I have never found that to be uncomfortable."

"“Spelling is relevant knowledge.""

"I've always loved life. Those who love life can never adapt, undergo, be commanded. Who loves life is always with the rifle at the window to defend life ... A human being who adapts, who suffers, who makes himself commanded, is not a human being."

"“Spelling is not an artificial skin of verbal expression, it is a deep structure that is revealed in the spelled image.""

"At sunset, on the river ban, Krishna Loved her for the last time and left. . . That night in her husband's arms, Radha felt So dead that he asked, What is wrong, Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said, Not not at all, but thought, What is It to the corpse if the maggots nip?"

"It is I who drink lonely Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns, It is I who laugh, it is I who make love And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner, I am saint. I am the beloved and the Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I."

"Like other women writers of my class, I am expected to tame my talent to suit the comfort of my family."

"A book is a good substitute for a man. Fiction, preferably."

"Wipe out the paints, unmould the clay, Let nothing remain of that yesterday."

"I am sinner, I am saint. I am the beloved and the betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no aches which are not yours. I too call myself I."

"I fell in love with a Muslim after my husband's death. He was kind and generous in the beginning. But I now feel one shouldn't change one's religion. It is not worth it. Also, I have been accused of being feminist. I am not a feminist, as it is understood. I don't hate men. I feel a woman is most attractive when she surrenders to her man. She is incomplete without a man."

"All round me are words, and words and words, They grow on me like leaves, they never Seem to stop their slow growing From within... But I tell my self, words Are a nuisance, beware of them, they Can be so many things, a Chasm where running feet must pause, to Look, a sea with paralyzing waves, A blast of burning air or, A knife most willing to cut your best Friend's throat... Words are a nuisance, but. They grow on me like leaves on a tree, They never seem to stop their coming, From a silence, somewhere deep within..."

"Getting a man to love you is easy Only be honest about your wants as Woman. Stand nude before the glass with him So that he sees himself the stronger one And believes it so, and you so much more Softer, younger, lovelier. Admit your Admiration. Gift him all, Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts, The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your Endless female hungers. Oh yes, getting A man to love is easy, but living Without him afterwards may have to be Faced."

"You didn't ever love him, but you were sentimental about him."