'DNA' talks to Namita Gokhale

Talking to an interviewer soon after Paro: Dreams of Passion was published in 1984, you had said that the book was an ‘expression of disgust.’ One might imagine that such an expression is not something one might want to revisit.
Did I say that? Honestly, I don’t remember, but I can imagine that I might have said that. Paro was published when I was 28, I must have been around 26 when I began work on it. Now, I’m soon to be a grandmother. Paro became a huge and unexpected success, although it also got a lot of flak in India. After Paro, there was a range of other things that I got engaged with — I’ve been writing historical fiction and dealing with mythology. All of that exploration was deeply satisfying and rewarding for me as a writer, even though the books were quite disparate and so it was not as if, over the years, I’ve found a regular constituency of readers. Even though so many other books came out over the years, I have this friend who would look back and say Paro was the best. I reacted to that with irritation, for Paro was my first. As a writer, one does not really have favourites. Although I resisted the idea, somewhere, it appeared to have stayed with me. Then one time, on a long flight on which I had a comfortable seat, I began work again. In Priya, the disgust has given way by now to the tolerance that comes with age, but in some ways there is also not so much maturity.

There is, in the book, still disgust at the sense of entitlement that the elite feel. And you have woven in contemporary events, the 2008 Mumbai attacks… The diary format requires it, so the book has a mix of timelessness and time, there are events to peg the narrative, the whole story is set in about four or five years, but of course time is compressed. You come with a political heritage?
Oh, please. I don’t like it to be put like that. It’s true that I have had a lot of politicians in my family, my granduncle Govind Vallabh Pant, my grandfather an MP, father-in-law, and now my daughter’s father-in-law, Kapil Sibal. What is less well known, though, is that I also have a lot of writers in my family. Shivali, who wrote in Hindi, was my aunt. Sumitra Nandan Pant and Ira Pande and Mrinal Pande were all there. It’s true that there is a lot of desensitisation and a great deal of corruption within politics, but even so, the struggles of a sincere politician are not recognised. There are unpredictable ups and downs and major conflicts in the life of a politician that those who just condemn politicians could have little inkling of.

Would you ever have seen yourself as a politician?
No, that kind of power has not attracted me. Yet, it’s true, even as a writer, one seeks to influence, to reach out to people. And now, through the Jaipur Literary Festival, that I am one of the directors of along with William Dalrymple, there is an attempt to create spaces for different literary traditions to mingle.

What would you like Jaipur Lit Fest to be, 10 years from now?
The first of the festivals in 2006 was a small event, but over the years, it has grown to a magnitude that we could not have envisaged. We would like to retain the spontaneity and intimacy of the interactions at the festival, and keep the audiences rooted. What the festival has shown is the huge hunger for literature. We only facilitate interaction. There is a huge, engaged and sophisticated readership, and there are many people seeking to celebrate books and ideas, to enter into dialogue. In 2011, the number of sessions in Hindi outnumbered those in English. Twelve Indian languages were represented, and books that were written in the Indian languages were picked up for translation into English and other languages. There was Rita Chowdhury’s account of the Chinese in India, written in Assamese, which found a translator at the festival. Jaipur offers a chance for us to see literature not as a university activity, but a festival. It is a festival of literature and music, and we celebrated, this year, the Bhakti poets. There was even a rendering of the Mahabharat as it is sung among the Mewatis, a tradition kept alive in the Muslim community. The text is transmitted as an oral tradition, and it comes across as a human saga. We had Gafruddin Mewati sing to us at the festival, and it was great to see how the tradition is carried on, how his grandson Shahrukh, only 13, is now beginning to pick it up too. There are vast and rich oral traditions that we need not merely to archive and preserve, but also transmit. I sometimes feel a little concerned that with the Internet, the resources of our memory are dwindling. Huge memory banks get depleted, when the whole tradition of learning poetry by heart, for instance, is not stressed upon.