‘In a democracy,it’s normal to have political families. But in India,the issue is that of scale’

Charmy Harikrishnan: An intimate biography of 1.2 billion people sounds rather ambitious. What were you trying to get at,and how did you go about it?

I think that if you come from a country outside India,it’s very hard to comprehend a nation that is so big. Whereas if you’re Indian,it’s very normal that one-sixth of the human race is also Indian—it is something you take for granted. But coming from a smaller country—and virtually every other country is smaller—it’s quite hard to try to get your head around that. It’s perhaps better if you had an intimate portrait of individuals to tell the larger story. And you can only generalise once you’ve got some specificity,some personal detail. How do you link a country that contains the northeast and Rajasthan and Kerala? Equally,if you say that’s impossible,then you’ll never get any kind of all-encompassing writing. So it was simply an attempt to try and do that. I spent a long time travelling in India before I wrote a word about the country. I had spent about 10 years coming to India,on and off,before I wrote Liberty or Death.

Mihir Sharma: Is there one book that people must read on India,or do you think there hasn’t been one yet?

The book I enjoyed the most in recent years has been Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi. Not so much for what he writes about the more recent period,but certainly the period from 1947 to,say,1980. I was fascinated by that. And that’s partly because he sparked so many thoughts and questions and ideas. I don’t think there’s any other book that particularly stimulated me. I think there have been quite good books on particular subjects. But the ones that have tended to appeal,for example,to a foreign business audience or to a foreign audience,have normally spoken about the events of the last decade as if they kind of landed on India from above and suddenly this transformation started. But what I wanted to write about in the book here was actually the historical roots of that process—everything from the conceiving of India as a universal democracy where potentially disadvantaged groups can band together and kick out the existing people in power,to the kind of scientific vision that Nehru and others had in the 50s. So a lot of what people talk about now—the software revolution,the engineering revolution,the institutions,for example the IITs,were set in motion long ago. It was like tracking back as far as possible.

Mihir Sharma: Did you have a clear sense of who is likely to read this book?

I very much wanted it to be a book for everybody. One of the difficulties of writing about India is that it’s very easy to get caught up in acronyms. For example,I decided quite early on I wasn’t going to use the word MLA. I wanted to be comparatively easy to read. Fundamentally,the response to the book that counts the most is the response in India. Not simply from literary critics,but from business people,people from different parts of the country. And I don’t know how that’ll be.

Coomi Kapoor: A lot of the book is anecdotal. At the same time,you arrive at generalities on the basis of those anecdotes. Take for example,the Aarushi Talwar murder. When you wrote about it,what was the reason?

That was chance really. Rajesh Talwar happens to be my wife’s family dentist and her uncle happened to have represented him as a lawyer. But it told a larger story—the failure of important institutions like the police,the CBI,the media to do their job properly. I have seen this case from the inside because of knowing the Talwars. Having looked at the sequence of events,it’s very clear to me that most of what is being flung at them by the CBI is pure fantasy and conjecture. People within the CBI leak a bit of information to a journalist and it gets written up as if it’s a reasonable piece of information.

Shefalee Vasudev: You write about the increase in political dynasties,hereditary MPs. But I don’t see dynasties in the services or in sports,music or painting.

I hadn’t fully thought of it in those terms. But on political dynasties: the idea here was to find out how every Lok Sabha MP got into Parliament. Did they get there because they had risen up a student organisation,did they get there because their father was the chief minister,etc? What the information showed was that 70 per cent of women MPs are hereditary,two-thirds of MPs under the age of 40 are hereditary,an overwhelming nine-tenths of Congress MPs under 40 are hereditary. It was a surprise to me. Well,it’s not just politics,it’s true of certain kinds of business families,it’s true of medicine,law,media,Bollywood,and other regional film industries.

Sudeep Paul: When writing a biography like Naipaul’s,how difficult was it knowing and writing about Naipaul from the inside? How difficult was Naipaul? And to what extent do you agree with the term ‘confessional biography’—because technically,all biographies ought to be confessional.

Well,Naipaul was difficult; his job is to be difficult. But the big advantage that I had was the era in which he lived. He was born in 1932 in Trinidad and he archived himself from the age of about 10. You got his school essays,his reports,you got him writing to his pen pal in America in a rather grand way. It made my task a lot easier. As for the confessional biography,the thing that was very unusual about V S Naipaul was that once he had allowed a biography to be written,he answered every question. He spoke about things he’d done that he was ashamed of. I felt that I was kind of blessed in a way—not so much of having to deal with him,but having that information and being able to use it in a book.

Mandakini Gahlot: The one thing the media picked up from the Naipaul book was Naipaul,the wife-beater. Did you expect that and how did Naipaul react to that? Did you speak to him after that?

I spoke to him a little bit. He had the manuscript,he allowed the book to be published without asking anything to be deleted. To that extent,it was done with his blessings. I didn’t fully expect the wife-beater aspect to be in the foreground quite the way it was. What the book was trying to do was to show the complexity of somebody of Indian heritage who grows up in the Caribbean,and tries to explain the kind of painful intellectual processes that somebody of that generation had to go through. He was the scholarship boy from the Crown colony in 1950s Oxford. It was not a great place to be. Yet equally,he didn’t feel that he could return to Trinidad after that because he had become British in a way. Hanging over the whole thing was that he was Indian,and yet,of course,he wasn’t Indian because he’d never been to India. So I was trying to bring out that process,to try and show that the cruelty in Naipaul as a person and as a writer is in a large part,in an indirect way,a consequence of indentured labour.

D K Singh: You have written that young MPs here don’t have an ideology. What led you to believe that?

I don’t think that’s true of the younger MPs in the BJP,I think they have an ideology. And I’d say quite a lot of the other caste-based parties or regional parties have an ideology. But my impression of younger Congress MPs is that they’re not particularly ideological. They seem to me well-educated,well-intentioned,but I don’t sense a great deal more than that. That may not be a bad thing necessarily.

D K Singh: What was your assessment of Rahul Gandhi? Does he have an ideology?

I think his ideas are potentially good. I think he’s somebody who has landed in a position where the job chose him; he didn’t choose the job. Publicly,he tends to not say very much. It’s quite hard to assess what exactly his intentions are. I think probably he does have an ideology,I think he’s a thinker and a reader. But,for the moment at least,the consequences of that are held back from the public—whether for reasons of self-preservation or because he is playing a very long game. I guess it’s going to be a little time before that really plays out.

D K Singh: Why do political dynasties here shock you?

You have them in US—the Kennedys,Bush,the Clinton couple. In your country,you have the Miliband brothers.

They don’t shock me and I don’t think that political families are a bad thing. I think in any democracy,it’s quite normal to have political families. But the issue to me in India at the moment,is purely that of the scale. If you look at the people of the older generation in their 60s,it’s one in five or six politicians coming from a political family. That doesn’t strike me as being a particular problem. But if you look at people under 40 and you find that nine-tenths of Congress MPs are hereditary,then that is a serious problem. And the thing that does surprise me a bit is why that is not debated more. Why is that simply taken for granted as normal? People should justify why it’s good that nine-tenths of their younger MPs are hereditary.

N P Singh: You’ve written a lot about caste dynamics,particularly in UP. Has this large block of people called Dalits collapsed into one community or are inter-caste tensions still very much there?

I think those old historic caste tensions are still there and I don’t think that you can speak of a monolithic block of Dalits. My impression of UP politics in particular is that there’s a degree of assertion which is extraordinary to see,and it was definitely not there when I first went to those parts of India. They have aspirations that probably would have been completely impossible or impractical a few years ago.

D K Singh: As someone from the outside who is trying to understand politics and society,how do you look at Sonia Gandhi ruling the country? Where do you think her being a foreigner reflects in her policies and programmes?

I guess it’s really her being the bahu of the family and being perceived by most voters as simply being the wife or the daughter-in-law. I happened to be around during the ’98 election when Sonia Gandhi first took up politics actively. And the BJP was really going for her,Bal Thackeray was going for her. My impression was that they didn’t get any traction on the foreign origin issue because when you went down to the local voter level,they just took a traditional Indian view of her role,which was that she had been absorbed into her husband’s family and that she was a dutiful widow. That she’d originally come from some faraway place was virtually irrelevant. My feeling is that when you look at Sonia Gandhi,she doesn’t betray that much of her Italian origin. I don’t know why that is,but that’s something that’s probably taken decades to happen. I’ve spoken to people who knew her when she was much younger,even before she came to India,before she married Rajiv Gandhi and all of them are flabbergasted by the personal transformation. For somebody who was very shy,probably still is very shy,she has been able to put herself in a public political position. I guess for her personally,it’s a necessity. She probably felt in ’98 that there was no alternative but to become a politician.

Shailaja Bajpai: What compelled you to write this book? Was it that you felt you were filling some kind of void or is it that you feel the India story is of such great interest?

I felt that the effects of the economic reform were changing India and that in certain areas and certain places,the country was pretty much unrecognisable when compared to the place that I visited as a teenage student in the 1980s. And I wanted to see whether it was possible to catch or maybe report that process and also to track it back historically.

Transcribed by Deepika Nath