Writers can ignore India's political reality at their own peril: Jeet Thayil

What if writers ignore the political realities of the moment? They would risk being called a crackpot by future generations.

This was the consensus when two poets - Jeet Thayil and Megha Rao - came together at Manorama Hortus on Saturday. "When I was young, I believed in art for art's sake like it was religion. Somehow, when you are young and arrogant, you think you are a genius, and you think that politics is below me," Thayil, whose novel 'Narcopolis' was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, said. "When you grow older, you realise you are not a genius and you are shaped by your environment," he said.

Megha said it was difficult to take one's eye off global violence in this internet age. The shock and anger just finds its way to the pages. "You can't unsee it, you can't move away from it or step back. It is not something that I do consciously. It just finds itself on the page. I just cannot escape the political. It follows me around," Megha, a Malayali who lives in Thiruvananthapuram, said. "Narratives of trauma," is how Megha described 'Teething', her collection of poems. 

Thayil wonders how it is possible for an artist not to be aware of, not respond to, and not write to the country at this point in Indian history. "If the political situation were not to show up in a book, 20 years down the line, a reader who reads the novel set in 2025 is going to wonder what was up with this writer. Was he asleep or on drugs or something? How could they ignore this absolutely visible reality around them," Thayil said.

Megha wanted to know how a writer could achieve this without making herself the focus. "That is the question every writer needs to deal with," he said. Thayil recalled a comment made by writer Amitav Ghosh about the climate. "He said that if you write a novel, a capacious novel, and it ignores climate change at this particular moment in our shared history, you will leave out something that will seem very surprising to succeeding generations," he said.

Thayil gave the example of the war in Gaza. "We have been seeing images and videos of the destruction and it has come to a point where we can no longer bear to look at it. Some of those images are just so ghastly," the writer said. 

He said that a writer should write about exactly those things that would make her uncomfortable and wouldn't want to write about. "Because when you do that something will come out of it that you were not expecting. You will surprise yourself," Thayil said. 

For him, it is in his poems that these torments erupt without warning. "You write poems only when you are in the mood. "It is like being in a dream or trance. Then images and lines occur that you have no intention of touching. When I go back to those poems, those are lines that resonate with me," Thayil said.

Megha quoted from 'Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying', a poem by Noor Hindi. "Colonisers write about flowers/I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks/seconds before becoming daisies./I want to be like those poets who care about the moon./Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons."

Though Megha speaks Tulu, she is a Malayali who lives in Kerala's capital. Thayil, too, is a Malayali, with the famous journalist T J S George and Ammu George as parents. But his Malayalam is weak. 

Yet, his love for his mother tongue is disarming. At the Hortus stage, he quoted from his poem 'Malayalam's Ghazal'. 

Listen! Someone’s saying a prayer in Malayalam.
He says there’s no word for 'despair' in Malayalam. 
Sometimes, at daybreak, you sing a Gujarati garba.
At night, you open your hair in Malayalam.
To understand symmetry, understand Kerala.
The longest palindrome is there, in Malayalam.
When you’ve been too long in the rooms of English,
Open your windows to the fresh air of Malayalam.
Visitors are welcome in The School of Lost Tongues.
Someone’s endowed a high chair in Malayalam.
I greet you my ancestors, O scholars and linguists.
My father who recites Baudelaire in Malayalam.
Jeet, such drama with the scraps you know.
Write a couplet, if you dare, in Malayalam.