Bookless In Baghdad: And Other Writings About Reading

by Shashi Tharoor

I read copiously, rapidly and indiscriminately. Chronic asthma often confined me to bed, but I found so much pleasure in the books piled up by my bedside that I stopped resenting my illness.

One year I kept a list of the volumes I’d finished (comics didn’t count), hoping to reach 365 before the calendar did. I made it before Christmas.

by the time I was three I was reading Noddy, and soon moving on to other stories by Blyton,

Today, Enid Blyton has become the target of well-intentioned but over-earnest revisionists, her stories assailed for racism, sexism and overall political incorrectness. But my post-colonial generation (and today’s Indians too) read her books entranced by her extraordinary storytelling skills and quite indulgent of her stereotypes.

In the same year, an otherwise detestable teacher dictated a passage from P.G. Wodehouse as a spelling test, and launched me on the first great passion of my life.

I still remember the first time black faces appeared on the Main Streets of comic strips, and what that taught me about the state of race relations in America.)

It is, I suppose, a uniquely Indian experience to embrace both Biggles and Birbal, Jeeves and the Jatakas, Tintin and Tenaliraman

The most difficult moments of my childhood came on one day every year, the holy day of Saraswati Puja. Hindus dedicated the day to the Goddess of Learning through prayer and ritual and, paradoxically, by denying themselves the joys of reading or writing. Despite the most strenuous efforts, I could never master the required degree of self-denial. If I successfully pushed my books aside, I would find myself reading the fine print on the toiletries in the bathroom or the fragments of old newspaper that lined my clothes-drawers. But I think the goddess forgave me these transgressions. For I continued to read and to learn from books, and now she has even allowed me to write a few of them.

To the extent that literature captures our imagination with a version of experience that privileges a particular point of view, isn’t it desirable, even essential, that others give voice to those who were voiceless, silent, marginal, even absent in the original narrative?

India’s is already a literature of subversion, with the added distinction that the stories our great writers have told were entirely their own—they did not need to borrow from the canon in order to subvert it.

I don’t think novelists should spend too much time rationalizing their whimsies. I basically write as it comes to me.

With fiction, you not only need time, which I am always struggling to find, but you also need a space inside your head to create an alternative universe and to inhabit it so intimately that its reality infuses your awareness of the world.

I sought to depict four or five different people’s views of the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid controversy; despite my own strong feelings about it, I tried honestly to empathize with each of them individually.

I write, as George Bernard Shaw said, for the same reason a cow gives milk: it’s inside me, it’s got to come out and in a real sense I would die if I couldn’t. It’s the way I express my reaction to the world I live in. Sometimes the words come more easily than at other times, but writing is my lifeblood.

I see myself as a human being with a number of responses to the world, some of which I manifest in my writing, some in my UN work (for refugees, in peace-keeping, in the Secretary-General’s office and in communications). I think both writing and the UN are essential for my sanity: if I h...

Wodehouse Society of St Stephen’s College, Delhi University. Ours was then the only Wodehouse Society in the world, and I was its president, a distinction I prized over all others in an active and eclectic extra-curricular life. The Wodehouse Society ran mimicry and comic speech contests

endearing international mysteries, like why Pakistanis are good at squash but none of their neighbours are, or why the Americans, who can afford to do anything correctly, have never managed to understand that tea is made with boiling water, not merely boiled water.

a crisis erupted in the Congress party over the claim by three powerful Congress politicians, Sharad Pawar, Purno Sangma and Tariq Anwar—with classic Congress secularism, a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim—that Mrs Gandhi is unfit to be prime minister because she was born in Italy.

In the extraordinary letter they delivered to her and leaked to the newspapers, the three party leaders declared, ‘It is not possible that a country of 980 million, with a wealth of education, competence and ability, can have anyone other than an Indian, born of Indian soil, to head its government.’ They went so far as to ask her to propose a constitutional amendment requiring that the offices of President and prime minister be held only by natural-born Indian citizens.

Of course there has been no such amendment, and the three Congress leaders are now ex-Congress leaders, having founded the Nationalist Congress Party instead to add to the splendid ...

by law, even a ‘natural-born Indian’ is one who has just one grandparent born in undivided India, as defined by the Government of India Act, 1935. You do not have to be of this soil to be an Indian by birth.

So the idea of India, to use Amartya Sen’s phrase, is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree—except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.

The reason India has survived all the stresses and strains that have beset it for fifty years, and that led so many to predict its imminent disintegration, is that it maintained consensus on how to manage without consensus.

It is odd to read today of ‘Hindu fundamentalism’, because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs.

They know how to fire a gun but not how to read the Bible.

I had made it a point not to discuss reviews of my own books in any of my own writing. This is not because I am excessively modest, or unduly burdened by a sense of authorial propriety; it is simply that I believe that a book, once published, has to make its own way in the world.

I was once involved in a minor literary controversy in the pages of the New York Times, whose editors felt compelled to acknowledge to their readers that the author of what is politely called a ‘mixed’ review of my book Nehru: The Invention of India had himself received a mixed review from me some years earlier for one of his books. Turnabout, to upend a cliché, was not considered fair play.

A review, good or bad, is a transient thing; a book, if it was worth writing, will endure long after the review is forgotten. Let the dogs bark; the caravan must move on.

a remarkable venture in Indian publishing, the Indian Review of Books,

India’s best literary journal had finally been defeated by the hard mathematics of the market.

The magazine was distinguished by some of the best writing about books one could find in India. Its contributors, including some of the finest minds in the country, eschewed both the jargon-laden self-importance of academic journals and the superficial plot-summaries of the popular press, offering instead the thoughtful insights and provocative judgements that true book-lovers value everywhere.

Publishers need well-informed readers, and one might have imagined they would want to support a high-quality literary magazine to enhance their own sales. But their advertising was minimal; one could turn page after page of the IRB without finding the prose interrupted by an ad.

After ten years of struggle, Padmanabhan and his well-wishers came to the reluctant conclusion that IRB was never going to be able to pay for itself.

So here’s the challenge to any corporate chieftain who happens to be reading this. Take on the resurrection of the country’s best book review magazine. Put your name on the cover if you must; give yourself a few ad pages in return for the funds; but let the editors continue to celebrate and promote the joy of reading.

‘I can see the double standard here,’ Shabana Azmi snapped. ‘Muslims say they are proud to be Muslim, Christians say they are proud to be Christian, Sikhs say they are proud to be Sikh, and Hindus say they are proud to be … secular.’ All right, Shabana Azmi didn’t really say it. Not as Shabana Azmi: she was on stage in New York’s New School University auditorium, reading lines I wrote in my novel Riot,

It was the first time anybody had called me from his bathtub. At least, it was the first time anybody had told me he was calling from his bathtub, and it certainly got my attention. ‘I’ve just been reading the New York Times review of your novel Show Business,’ said Bikramjit (‘Blondie’) Singh, ‘and it sounds great! I want to make a movie of it.’ I was a bit taken aback. ‘You haven’t read the book yet, and you want to make a movie out of it?’ was the first question that came to mind. Or did he want to make a movie of the review? ‘Of course I’ll read the book, but I’m sure I’ll like it.

So he was going to sign the contract as Caliph S. Kahn, write the screenplay as Bikramjit Singh, work in Bombay as Blondie Singh and direct the movie as B.J. Kahn. ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said disarmingly. If his wife and the taxman didn’t, how could I?

I couldn’t help feeling a bit like a father who’s given his daughter away and discovers the suitor carried four different driving licences. What else didn’t I know, I wondered, till my agent gave me sage advice. ‘You’ve got to let go,’ she said. ‘It’s not your book any more. You’ve signed the contract. Now it’s his project.’

let’s face it, films are a mass medium in a different league from books: even a flop will get seen by more people than bought the hardback. ‘Shashi’s movie’ is a phrase spoken with far more admiration than ‘Shashi’s literary prizes’. Even though, as I vainly point out, it isn’t Shashi’s movie.

So my message to all and sundry is: If you like the film, you must read the book. But if you don’t like the film, you must still read the book, to discover what the film-maker missed. Of course, I’m hoping Blondie doesn’t read this in his bathtub …

Some, of course, may argue that journalism is hardly literature, even if sometimes it has been indistinguishable from fiction. And at least the Indian journalist, like the Indian litterateur, is free to write what he wishes to.

In societies where truth is what the government says is true, literature must depict a deeper truth which the culture needs to grasp in order to survive.

It was my mother, her keen eye diligently scanning the press for items of interest, who spotted the ad in the newspaper. ‘Now,’ it said, ‘you can quote Kalidasa and not just Shakespeare; Amartya Sen and not just Adam Smith … Tagore and Tharoor.’ That, of course, was the clincher. (Show me a writer without an ego and I’ll show you a very good actor.)

I travelled to Baghdad in mid February 1998 not as an Indian writer but in the course of my ‘other life’ as a United Nations official.

Where does a non-Arabic speaker go in quest of literary pleasures in Baghdad? The answer, I was told by a senior UN colleague resident there, was to what visitors call the ‘book souk’. This is actually a longish street, Al Mutanabi, rather than, as the word ‘souk’ implies, an enclosed bazaar.