Ambitions from the margins

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Bihar is everywhere, Biharis are everywhere, Bihar is inescapable. Author Amitava Kumar may have left for Vassar via Delhi decades ago, but his return to his birth place was perhaps destined. His earlier books, Bombay-London-New York, Passport Photos and Husband of a Fanatic, all non-fiction had looked at the human condition in its exotic, sublime complexities. He returns three years after his previous book to his first work of fiction, Home Products (Picador), with the descriptive richness and reporting of non-fiction intact while breaking new ground. As much a tale of small town anxieties and ambitions, it is also about unfulfilled lives and knowing, or not knowing, what construes success. Full of minute observations, literary references of an unusually large range, sharply etched characters and a tale more about centrality of small town aspirations, this is perhaps the antithesis of works on India’s great metropolises.Suman Tarafdar caught up with the author as Home Products was launched in Delhi earlier this week. Excerpts from the conversation.

How easy was it to make the transition from non-fiction to fiction.

Non fiction involves a lot of observation and reporting. I did not want to abandon that. But I did want to mess with the expectation one has of non fiction. However I do want someone reading this to think that this is an observed work. Also it was not satisfying to remain in non-fiction when the subject was someone like Manoj Bajpai. There were great details that he shared, but others that were just not possible.

How were the interactions with Bajpai?

I started work on this novel around January 2004 and since met him at various points. A lot of our conversations happened, of all places, in a café in Atlanta, US. I also met him in Bombay, his village in East Champaran, which is actually just about 40 kilometres away from my ancestral village. I spoke to his family and friends.
Bajpai has a certain confidence about him. I admire the courage with which he demands respect. I was very intrigued by Shyam Benegal’s choice of him to play the role of the prince in Zubeidaa (2001) and, later I discovered so was Bajpai. He did asked Benegal about it, and the director showed him photographs of princes to convince him that he fitted the role. He realises that he is not the typical ‘chocolate-faced hero’ Bollywood’s definitation of male beauty. But onscreen and offscreen, audiences are reminded of what he has left behind, yet what he carries with him.

Your lead character Binod, does not seem withdraw by the end of the novel…

I wanted to bring out those questions. I am interested in how people know when they have found success. There are some people who will not succeed. How does one know who is a loser and what determines who a loser is? While Rabinder, who shoots heroin, has acted in plays as a student, and while in prison, dreams of making films starring Neeraj Dubey, possibly paired with Raveena Tandon, does manage to make his film, I couldn’t give the far more literate, and literary, Binod any hope. Perhaps his greatest love is literature.

Why is Bihar considered something of an enigma, even by most other Indians?

Bihar is everywhere, but what interests me is that there are so many changes. Modernity comes, but is equally promptly kidnapped. Once there were no phones, and once they came, they were used to make ransom demands. Sonograms are used for female foeticide. I don’t want to be suggesting that just as Suketu Mehta has dubbed Bombay as the ‘maximum city’, Patna is the ‘minimum city’. Everything is the same in Bihar as elsewhere, only a little better or worse.
I write about India as I want to have an audience that recognises themselves in the writing. The stories are from here — the US has a very cookie cutter approach to literature.

What are you writing next?

My next book is about a man in prison, about illegal detention. It looks at a spectrum — from force-feeding women in Manipur to detentions in the US. India and US are increasingly almost on a parallel track in this regard.