Read Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers for Free Online

properly understood, in and of itself is hardly disturbing as a prospect (and I have urged it in my 1997 book
India: From Midnight to the Millennium
), but that was not what Mitra meant; his concern was that the televised epic would become a vehicle for Hindu chauvinism. That would indeed have been worrying, if true (a qualification made necessary by the fact that the TV
Mahabharata
was written by a Muslim dialogist, Rahi Masoom Reza, and its production values may have had more to do with Bollywood kitsch than with Hindu atavism.) In any case, there is little doubt about a national trend toward the increasing communalization of religious faith, a trend that the ancient epics are inevitably being called upon to serve. In the case of the Mahabharata, this is particularly ironic. During a literary reading in New Delhi in 1991, I was asked whether I was not worried about helping to revive the epicat a time when fanatics of various stripes were reasserting “Hindu pride” in aggressive and exclusionist terms. I responded that to me, the Mahabharata, unlike the explicitly religious Ramayana, is a purely secular epic; its characters (with the sole exception of Krishna) are not divine, and their deeds are as human, and as capable of greatness and debasement, as those of any of our contemporary heroes. And, as befits a truly Indian epic, there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity it reasserts: it is large, eclectic, and flexible, containing multitudes.
    I am glad that
The Great Indian Novel
is still being reprinted and read nearly sixteen years after I wrote it, and that my Indian publishers have seen fit to publish a special commemorative edition of it on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence from British rule. If there is a message to the book, a message I have derived from the Mahabharata, it is twofold. First, that of the need to reexamine all received wisdom about India, to question the certitudes, to acknowledge the imperfections and face them; second, to do so through a reassertion of dharma, defined not just as religion but as the whole complex of values and standards — some derived from myth and tradition, some derived from our history — by which India and Indians must live. In this approach — which is, of course, no more and no less valid than any of those through which other conclusions have been drawn for today's India — I hope I have been faithful to the spirit of the Mahabharata, despite all the other liberties I have taken with it. And I hope, of course, to have demonstrated its continued relevance once again.

4
In Defense of the Bollywood Novel
     
    A CLASSIC
NEW YORKER
CARTOON shows a writer floundering in choppy water, stretching hopelessly out toward an inner tube floating just beyond the reach of his flailing hand. A typewriter sits in it, on whose solitary page can be seen the words “Second Novel.” Few challenges are quite as prone to generating literary anxiety as that of producing a second novel, especially when the first has been reasonably well-received.
    After
The Great Indian Novel,
a lot of readers didn't know what next to expect from me, but many in India made it clear that a novel about the Hindi film world called
Show Business
wasn't quite it. The book was reviewed on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review
and enjoyed raves elsewhere, but in India the disappointment was palpable — the author of
The Great Indian Novel
writing about something as trivial as Bollywood? I was soon being asked whether I had abandoned the larger themes and serious issues that I had taken up with my first novel.
    It was odd having to explain that
Show Business
also deals with some fairly serious questions — reality and illusion, morality and human values, life and death, the life of the surface versus the interior life. In my view, any subject, pretty much, can lend itself to serious fictional inquiry, and that includes the life and times of a