Back Magazine
Literary canvases
Chandrahas Choudhury was in Chennai recently to launch his maiden book “Arzee the Dwarf”. Chandrahas is active in the world of literary blogging, in cricket writing — not so long, and a reviewer and critic in newspapers in India and abroad. He dealt with various aspects about the book and also looked at his forthcoming work. Excerpts from an exclusive interview.
You have moved from studies into writer mode by doing a series of reviews in The LA Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sunday Telegraph, The Scotsman and the Himal. Then there is active blogging on “The Middle Stage”. A job. When did you decide to write the book?
Well I think writing reviews and essays and writing books are two sides of the same coin. If you are interested in literature, you want to compose and also write about other people’s books. I worked briefly in cricket journalism for cricinfo. After that in 2005, I gave up my job with the intention of starting work on “Arzee …”. But it takes a long time to plan a book and then to work on it, and you need to do other things as well. My interest is in the novel form. You know very well that the amount of space available for literature in Indian newspapers is very little. So the blog just seemed like a very good way of reaching a devoted audience who are interested in a larger exploration of novelistic questions. There is place for close analysis as well as larger talk about ideas and the history of the form. I think all of this is part of a life now which I enjoy very much —writing my own books on the side and writing about other people’s books on the other.
Convincing readers to buy books is difficult. How successful are literary book blogs in helping promote books … “Arzee …” for instance?
I have done very little promotion on my blog for my own book other than just putting up a notice about readings and excerpts. The idea of promotion suggests that you are trying to persuade someone to read something or that there is a very urgent need on their part. But I believe if you just write about something sincerely or intelligently and leave it at that, it’s up to people then to read that and decide whether they are interested in the book or not. You can make a difference by making sure people read better. Blogger traffic from overseas has helped to some extent in highlighting Indian writers. Does your book feature in other literary blogs? It will in time. It’s only been on for a week now [at the time of the interview]. I’ve sent out a few review copies to the literary blogs that I read myself.
But its arrival has been heralded ...
(Laughs) It has. There are a lot of people in the Indian diaspora who read very seriously and who also run blogs. And you know the level of internet penetration in the U.K. or in America is much higher so everybody who has fast internet has a website. And a lot of my readers of my blog are Indian students in American universities. I want to reach this kind of audience as well.
You have said that Mumbai is the city you know best, so it was natural to set the book there. But the setting could have been in any large city as the energy of a city contrasts Arzee’s characterisation. It’s about alienation and dreams …
I think I was slightly misunderstood by the person who quoted me on that. What I was saying was that if you’ve even read a bit of “Arzee …”, there are a lot of descriptions of Bombay. It could only have been set in Bombay. There are specific descriptions. I think the important thing is to see how the writer has understood the place inside the book and not from outside and then say “this is a book about Bombay, this is a book about Delhi, let’s read it for that reason”. The theme of the book is that Arzee loses his job and so he doesn’t know what to do and he spends a lot of time out in the world but feeling very lonely. It was a challenge to contrast his loneliness with the huge pulsing of the city and all that. That was the fun of writing.
It’s been a three-year effort. As you can see it’s not a very long book, so there is no reason why it should have taken that long to write. But I was trying for a particular type of tone in it which took a long time in getting right. This tone is one of comedian pathos which I have intermingled. You will feel for Arzee and for his sadness and for his predicament, but you also laugh at him because he sometimes exaggerates his situation, he exaggerates his troubles and I wanted the narration to …
… The passages with Deepakbhai ...
Yeah. So you want to laugh and at the same time you feel for the character and I wanted to shuttle between these two tones. To find a kind of balance that mingled this properly took a long time and I think even till late last year I was not satisfied with the book. It was only after my fifth or sixth draft from January or February this year that I began to feel everything was looking polished.
In spite of a Mumbai setting, the book doesn’t dip into issues of language, phrases and translation...it’s not like say the rhythms of Jamaican fiction. I’m referring to your essay on Jamaican literature in the Telegraph. That was a conscious choice. Because you know there are a number of options available for Indian writers. And I don’t think if you are writing a book about Bombay your automatic choice would be to try to replicate Bombay street slang. You can use that as one option depending on what you are trying to do. Because India is so multi-lingual, effectively, every Indian novelist is a translator in some way or another even if he is not formally one. I just thought I would try and find a language that expressed the heat of Arzee’s mind. There are a few soliloquies of his in the book when he is thinking ... and for that I didn’t really need to dip into street slang. I only used a couple of words that I thought were untranslatable ... like kabutarkhana. The English word is pigeon cote or something like that but it doesn’t give the sense of what we know as a place in India where the pigeons come to peck at grain. Wherever I would find the right English word I didn’t bother with trying to translate or making a mix of languages.
How have you balanced “rage, despair and hope” to make this “a story for everyone”? The freedom of a fiction writer …
What I meant by that is you know that as a journalist you are bound by the facts, you are committed to the facts. But as compared to that in fiction, the idea is exceptional freedom. You can start your story any way you like, you can use any kind of narrative mechanism, your characters are all your own, everything by you is invented to a great degree. In a sense, that freedom can be dangerous because then it’s up to you to discipline yourself and find a particular theme, a style, a language. All of these are boundaries that you have to set for yourself. The idea was trying to find a style that mingled a comic element with the pathetic element. And sort of create a character whom you could laugh at and yet you feel very deeply for his sadnesses.
Could you comment on the characterisation. You see Arzee all the way through and the story is more or less told through his point of view. A lot of the other characters only appear once or twice in the book. In a way all these other characters are like foils for Arzee and you find out something new about him each time he meets one of them. I have tried to show him moving from place to place looking at how people are setting up their lives but realising that he has no place in their world. I think the main characters in the book other than Arzee are Deepak and Phiroz. Another important character is his mother who actually doesn’t appear in person till the 10th or the 11th chapter. By doing that, I have tried to show how people don’t necessarily exist for you just as physical presences. All of the characters are balanced so as to show the relationship with Arzee.
And your new novel?
I would prefer not to talk about it because writers are superstitious this way. Also you don’t want to talk about something that you have not even begun. But the book I am interested in and which is coming out next year is an anthology — “India: A Traveller’s Literary Companion”. It’s an anthology of Indian short stories which have all closely engaged with place and landscape. It’s an unusual kind of travel book — India seen through the eyes of its story tellers. For Chennai I have picked a story by Githa Hariharan from her book, “The Art of Dying”. There’s one story for every part of the country. The good thing about this anthology is that it roves across time and place. The earliest story was written in 1902. And the most recent story was written last year.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
About “Arzee …”, not really. Finally you know, people should even ignore what a writer has to say about his own book and read it and make up their own minds.
© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu
Author Chandrahas Chowdhury talks about Arzee, writing blogs and his new novel in this exclusive interview.
Multifaceted writer: Chandrahas Choudhury.