The Businwssworld interview. The first answer covers something I missed in the reading and discussion on Friday, Sept 21, 2012 at IIC Annexe, New Delhi. Read on.

Sanjitha at Businessworld read the book and decided to carry an extract. Read here.

Promila got the book very quickly and read it and reviewed it.  Here is the review. Please read.

Am pleased that JAM the nation’s top Young Adult magazine interviewed me on Roll of Honour. Read on:

Honoured that kafila.org carried an extract from Roll of Honour. Please read here.

Roll of Honour is going to break new ground for English-language fiction from India. It is a combination of YA, cross-over, a bildungsroman and a very disturbing account of adolescence. If I may say so, you have achieved something that I have only seen in Chinese, Japanese and French literature. I am as yet to see it in Indian fiction. You said you wanted to attempt the grittiness to show, and it does. It is very readable and flows well. …

You have created Appu as a trapped teenager, who is confused by his school, the choices he has to make, the social changes etc. For a teenager, the raging hormones are a nightmare. To top it, the horror of the school, witnessing the crumbling of society as you know it and more importantly, the very foundations on which you have been brought up being challenged … the dissonance in what is taught to what is expected of you. … (With this book) you are doing something very original.

Read the full review.

Dear friends, sharing my pleasure on the review of the novel Roll of Honour by Alok Bhalla, Professor at Ambedkar University and English Chair Central Sahitya Academy.

You have written a book which must have been painful to write. It takes more than a certain amount of real courage to write a life-story which is so evidently a confessional and to persuade a reader to carry on reading. It also takes more than a normal amount of novelist skill to stare into into the abyss of the self, and succeed at the end to turn away from the brink with not only your sanity intact but also with the knowledge that now at last you have achieved a kind of peace — signaled by the rather Keatsian line with which the novel ends.

Roll of Honour is also a bold novel, not only about the self, but also about institutions for which people in India have a sentimental regard and rarely ever subjected to a cold critical analyisis.Roll of Honour is, as far as I can judge, a novel which tries to understand all the multiple ways in which social institutions, families and traditions in India create structures in which people can only live either as bullies or as victims (often as both in different circumstances). Indian institutions are dysfunctional.

What saves the novel from being maudlin and sell-indulgent is the structural decision you make to inter-cut recollections with present meditations on how they may have been the cause of present anxieties and discontents and also by your ability to see that your own self’s journey may not after all have been different from that of countless other growing up in a time and a society in which people are rarely ever trained to think about the sufferings and the sorrows of others.

I like the way in which you recognize this at the end by talking quietly about the meeting with an old friend. Or if they ever think about school, family or the army they cast over them a haze of nostalgia. The only vocabulary they have is the one adopted without any thought or personal investment from the scriptures, resulting, of course, in ersatz morals and sentiments which are almost always available to the cynical and the corrupt.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose’s full article on the story on agents that went into print a few months ago. The last few paragraphs are my views. Read here …

Response to the topic for a blog magazine: Encountering the Other in Language/Place

The ‘other’ in place and language pre-supposes that place and language are located. To me they are not. I am often asked which language is my mother tongue. The answer is: I do not know. I was born in Rourkela, Orissa to Punjabi Sikh parents. My parents fought in Punjabi. My friends in the street played in Hindi. Our maids talked in Oriya. My school was in English. Each of those languages became part of my linguistic expression and experience. I laugh in English, feel sad in Hindi, count in Punjabi, and Oriya soothes my ears. As for the next question: where are you from? I again do not have an answer: as I said, I was born in a town whose official history started with a post-Independence steel plant and I have left a lot of places since then – Rourkela, Dehradun, Rajpura, Kapurthala, Bhilai, Hyderabad, Bangalore. Two of these cities have belonged to different states in my lifetime. Being dislocated and not being owned by a language, I have a self that is less defined by external markers and my obvious affection towards them. If all that I am not is the ‘other’ then, to make sense of living is, I need to find my ‘self’ and to confront my prejudices. To do so, I struggle with language and feel at home in the open pages of my drafts.

About a decade ago, I asked myself if my exploration of self would not best start by exploring my own family. I sought to write about my mother’s mental illness, about the care I received from our maid. Though my mother was my subject, I could not and did not want to be completely objective and clinical about her. In fact, the success of Sepia Leaves comes from it not being a cold, objective study of madness but by its being a warm, involved, subjective look at the situation in a family living under the shadow of Schizophrenia. It also posits the fact that a surrogate mother, the maid, actually connects the little boy to the world.

I said above that Rourkela’s objective history began with the construction of the Steeel Plant. That is how we construct our history as a nation – objectively. The reality is that the land for the Steel Plant was acquired from the tribals living in the region for generations, for hundreds of years. These tribals were uprooted, sent to the margins of the new town, made untouchable by the Nehruvian ‘temples of modern India’. Then when there is a crises in a family in this experimental nuclear society whose constituents have migrated from across the new nation, where one does not share culture or language with one’s neighbours, it is the tribal maid who comes to assist the young boy grow up. How can then there be an other in it? The othering is in our minds, in the language we employ, in the tools we use to sharpen our understanding and by which we miss out on the essential truths of the situation.

It becomes trickier in my next book Roll of Honour (due to be published September 2012). That is a story of split loyalties of an adolescent Sikh boy, studying in a military school during the wave of Khalistan, in the year 1984. The story deals with militancy at the national/state level and power hierarchies within school systems, and also with bullying and sexuality. The difficulty in writing Roll of Honour is dual:

a) The fact that the life at school is a sub-culture and almost complete in itself with hardly any reference to markers outside the school walls. It has its own system of punishments and rewards and valourizes its own notions of honour and disgrace.

b) That the language of the school is English but the language among students in a strange mix of Punjabi and their own code of speaking in which words are used more as tokens and less for what they inherently mean: cusswords which perpetuate and respond to a host of power equations.

The othering happens when I try to tell the story of an essentially rustic Punjabi experience in the English language. English is a language that the students learnt from textbooks and not from their environments. Each day of the last several years when I failed to articulate the angst of the protagonist I felt my own self was othering me, othering my understanding of what had happened.

One can write about the school as travelers wrote about Asia and Africa a few centuries ago by painting it in their own point of view, by orientalizing it. But here the storyteller is a native, himself not unfamiliar with what seems bizarre to an outsider. To write about a sub-group the writer needs to access what is being discussed within the sub-group in the language of the sub-group. If one chooses to access it like an erstwhile foreigner would to India or a grouping in India, the knowledge would remain that much bland. But if one wants to really access it, one learns to make it part of oneself, become a subject, and not objectify it. Quite like shop assistants in shoe shops all over Lajpat Nagar Central Market have their own unique register in which they fix prices for the shoes we buy. I remember the grain merchants from my childhood speak amongst themselves in a different language than what they used with the farmers who brought the grain. These language and registers are inherent in sub-groups which can extent to neighbourhoods, towns, cities, states, nations and also to religions, sects, businesses, occupations.

The only way I found out of it was to paint the picture as simply as I could. Use English not for its flamboyance or floweriness but for its ability to say less but to convey the essential. Whether it works or not depends upon the reception the book receives and how I feel just when the edits are over and it is going into print. That is when I will know if I could finally diminish or even erase my own sense of otherness from my own sense of self. I will know if I could move beyond dualities towards oneness and yet tell the story of the drama in the human heart.