Free speech is the biggest value I believe in: Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk discusses ‘Nights Of Plague’, his new book, using the concept of quarantine to understand authoritarianism and the limits of free speech

When he began writing Nights Of Plague, his friends wondered if anyone would care to read it. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

There are at least three more questions I want to ask Orhan Pamuk. I tell him that, with an eye on the tiny, blinking clock on a corner of my screen. “I don’t know, you have only three minutes,” he replies.

He is in New York, I am in Delhi, and he has more meetings lined up for Nights Of Plague, his new, 704-page meta historical-fiction and political mystery. It’s set on an imaginary island in the last years of the Ottoman empire, during a pandemic—the bubonic plague.

We had barely finished the “can-you-hear-me-can-you-see-me” routine of most Zoom calls when Pamuk tells me he is a bit jet-lagged. It is 9am Eastern and he has just returned from Paris. But just as I am about to start on my list of questions, he interrupts me excitedly.

“I want to show you, look!”

Pamuk dips away from the frame for a second before coming back with a book. It isn’t Nights Of Plague.

“I was in Paris to promote a book. It is this book. I hope it is published in India,” he says almost breathlessly. “It’s not Nights Of Plague,” he stresses, just in case I haven’t caught on. “A lot of this book is about India…(here) is my days in Goa…this is the Bombay train station…You see?”

The book he is showing me is Souvenirs Des Montagnes Au Loin, a just-published sketchbook of sorts, with handwritten and hand-drawn entries. It is, I sense, close to Pamuk’s heart.

When he was 22, the writer, who had always wanted to be an artist, stopped drawing. On the last page of his 2003 autobiographical memoir, Istanbul: Memories And The City, he recalls how his mother told him never to give up architecture for the one thing he had loved ever since he was a seven-year-old—art. “In a country as poor as ours…(y)ou’ll suffer terribly if you do,” she warns, pleadingly.

Now 70, the 2006 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature notes in a blurb for Souvenirs that he realised about a decade ago that the painter in him had never died. He has been drawing every day since. It’s his way of journaling, even talking to himself to sort through his thoughts—even thoughts about the books he’s writing.

“Anyway,” Pamuk interrupts himself, going on to explain that this unplanned tangent is a way of telling me that he feels close to India and his Indian readers. He pauses and nods. Let’s start.

*****

It isn’t surprising, perhaps, that Pamuk seems, at least initially, more excited about Souvenirs—he had been thinking of writing Nights Of Plague for 40 years and actually started writing it five years ago.

The initial thoughts were “about existentialism, about death, an overabundance of death, a pandemic killing people”, he says. “Oh, and also about an Orientalist representation of Eastern nations, countries and empires where quarantine was hard to impose. I wanted to write against that.”

This isn’t the first time he has been ahead of the curve. I tell him that critics are calling him prescient—they have done so earlier, too. “Oh, meaning they are calling me prophetic?” It’s a rhetorical counter question. There’s a faint smirk on his face. “I mean, thank you to whoever is complimenting me as prophetic, but there is statistics…that once in 80 or 100 years humanity has pandemics like this; it’s not a coincidence,” he says.

When he began writing Nights Of Plague, his friends wondered if anyone would care to read it. “These things have passed. No one will understand quarantine,” he recalls some as saying. “Three-and-a-half years into writing it, suddenly we had the coronavirus pandemic. Now the same people call me and say ‘you are lucky your book is so topical’.”

It was the same with his 2002 book, Snow. Before writing it, Pamuk had begun tracking the rise of political Islam. “But they didn’t see it in America…. I am writing my novel and suddenly we are overtaken by history, by such a big event (9/11), which made my novel very topical. In fact, it drove up the sales of that book globally,” he acknowledges.

Years before any of us had imagined the possibility of a global virus, Pamuk began extensively researching quarantine, trying to use it as a setting to study how authoritarianism could play out. However, it was only when he began experiencing life starting March 2020 that he realised a fundamental flaw in Nights Of Plague, one he had to address.

“When (the virus) came, I was so afraid. And it made me realise that ‘my God, my characters are not afraid. They are not as afraid as I am’,” he says. “And believe me, the bubonic plague was 10 times deadlier than the coronavirus. It killed one-third of the global population. If you got the bubonic plague, there was no way out: You are dead.”

The world is more informed today. But, Pamuk says, people acted exactly as they did in the past, just as he had found in his research for the book. First and foremost was denial, just like now. “There is no exception. Good government, bad government, dictators, or the most democratic, they all deny. Then, the second stage is that when you deny, the numbers go up. When numbers go up, people get angry. They blame the government, they blame everyone else. They say ‘the Muslims brought it’ or ‘the Jews brought it’ or ‘the Christians brought it’, or ‘the people in the next village brought it’. Then, there are conspiracies, like ‘oh, did you see this guy, he was putting the plague on in the fountain’, or they are poisoning (something),” Pamuk notes. “We also had that, that also has not changed…. In the end, people demand so much that governments are obliged to be authoritarian because that’s the only way you can make people (adhere to quarantine),” he adds.

The slightly overwritten and meta nature of Nights Of Plague lends well to this universality of experiences across countries and centuries. It is what fiction, ideally never myopic, hopes to achieve. Yet the book has come under fire in Turkey—some parties have been offended by one of its characters, Major Kamil, saying the character is an attempt at lampooning Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey.

Reading Nights Of Plague in another country, however, one of the major, most continuous strands is of Pamuk’s thoughts on the discourse of nationhood. “The story is about the formation of a secular nation state after the empire dies. The Emperor, whether you call him a Shah or a Badshah, or a Kaiser, or a King or a Sultan, it doesn’t matter—but he has godly qualities, he is a sort of a shadow of a god. And once he’s gone, you have to invent a secular god in a way.”

Nights Of Plague tries to chronicle just this—“the invention of secular mythologies because you need these sacreds to motivate people…so that in the next war they are dying or killing for the flag, for the land, for the country, when earlier they used to die for the Emperor only,” Pamuk adds.

*****

Yet the reaction of his detractors is understandable to some extent—like Kamil, Atatürk, too, was once a young military man, critical of the Ottoman empire; he later quells opposition to establish Turkey, while Kamil breaks Mingheria away from the fast-fading empire. But Pamuk holds his ground: “Since I have so many enemies in Turkey, they will say this is Kemal Atatürk. But my character, by his physical (attributes), his outlook (is different from him). In Turkey, Islamists attacked Kemal Atatürk because he enjoyed alcohol. My character does not touch alcohol. But this is not enough. They are just angry, anything is (good as) a source of attack at me,” he says.

He has faced this for so long that I wonder what he thinks is a productive way to be angry at someone’s work, and what the acceptable limits of backlash against creative expression or opinion might be. Pamuk calls this “the issue of our times”; it is a paradox, he says, quoting German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s antinomies. He goes over a range of scenarios, both hypothetical and real, and how he feels, how he responds through each. A few more detours later, he pauses. “Free speech is a value—the biggest that I believe in. And if that includes some insults to me, I accept it,” he says.

Maybe it was, as he had warned me at the start, the jet lag; maybe he was just in a hurry to wrap up, but it seemed that for the moment, Pamuk was tired of politics and pandemics. When I ask him what he thinks might come of the pandemic novel in general—the sub-category has been growing, perhaps an inevitable and natural consequence of recent experiences and traumas— Pamuk doesn’t miss a beat. “I don’t know,” he says. “I never wrote about it because it’s topical.”

He continues: “In fact, I was thinking when I was writing (Nights Of Plague), I was asking this question, did people after World War II read war novels? Once humanity suffers and that period ends, people don’t want to read about those horrors immediately; they want to read about rosy, flowery loves stories—they want to forget the horror, this is my experience.” Then he adds a thought that sums up not only his clever enmeshing of politics and pandemics, but one that has me expecting more works with quarantine as a launchpad for sociopolitical commentary: “In isolated situations, history concentrates in more dramatical ways.”

This piece was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 13 October 2022.

Possessing more than one language has never harmed anyone: Geetanjali Shree

The writer, whose ‘Ret Samadhi’, in translation as ‘Tomb of Sand’ is on the International Booker shortlist, on process, writing in Hindi, and more

Author Geetanjali Shree. Image courtesy Penguin Random House India.

Most successful novels have blurb descriptions such as “gripping”. Some of them are praised for hooking the reader from the opening page. Tomb Of Sand, which made it to the 2022 shortlist of the International Booker Prize last week, does not fit this description.

In the book spanning close to 700 pages, the first quarter meanders, with the third-person narrator seeming to speak from a fever dream—an effect heightened by the fact that the dialogue is never demarcated by quotation marks. In an age when writing and “content” work to be the most attention-grabbing versions of themselves, Tomb Of Sand does not bother. Confident in itself and its world, it demands a certain discipline and stillness from the reader.

It begins with a chapter titled Ma’s Back, in which an elderly woman, is grieving and depressed. Her husband is dead. Her back turned to the world, she refuses to get out of bed.

The opening luxuriates in weaving in and out of a backstory, told with distracted charm. If impatient, you are bound to give up. Suddenly, though, sentences of deep, ancient wisdom will hit you: “Those who consider death to be an ending took this to be hers. But those in the know knew this was no ending; knew she’d simply crossed yet another border.”

And this is what the novel is about. The nature and effect of invisible, intangible, yet incontrovertible borders. Between countries, the realms of the mind, and people. Yet there is humour and lightness, undercutting the book’s physical and thematic weight. It takes Ma over a hundred pages to get out of bed but once she’s up, a sense of a plot takes shape. Its flow may not be for everyone but its spots of poetic wisdom resonate widely.

Shree, 64, is a well-regarded writer whose contribution to Hindi literature has been recognised over the years with awards like the Indu Sharma Katha Sammaan, Hindi Akademi Sahityakar Sammaan and Dwijdev Sammaan. In addition to short story collections, Shree has four more novels to her credit: Mai (1993), Hamara Sheher Us Baras (1998), Tirohit (2001) and Khali Jagah (2006).

Mai, about three generations of women in a middle-class, north Indian family and the way they navigate patriarchy, is narrated by Mai’s daughter Sunaina, giving the reader a layered understanding of their lives. In 2000, its English translation by Nita Kumar was shortlisted for the Hutch-Crossword Translation Award. Now, 22 years later, and two years after its Hindi original Ret Samadhi came out, Tomb of Sand too finds buzz with English readers, this time globally. It, too, focuses on women—a mother and daughter, with the latter discovering the unconventionality of her elderly, recently widowed parent.

Over the years, Shree’s stories have also found Gujarati, German, Japanese, Korean, Serbian and French readers. In 2020, Ret Samadhi was translated into French by Annie Montaut as Ret Samadhi: Au-delà De La Frontière. The English translation by US-based artist-translator Daisy Rockwell came out first in 2021, from Titled Axis Press in the UK. Shree’s first book published there, it qualified for the International Booker nomination. While Tomb of Sand had already begun making waves after the announcement of the International Booker Prize’s longlist last month, last week it became the first Hindi novel to make it to the Prize’s shortlist, which features five other books—Korean, Norwegian, Japanese, Spanish and Polish—in translation.

Soon after the shortlist announcement, Shree spoke to Lounge about her relationship with the process of translation, how she views her bilingualism, and how Tomb Of Sand’s original narrative style came to be. Edited excerpts from an email interview:

To many readers, publishers and fellow writers, you are already a well-regarded author. The shortlist means greater awareness of your work with a certain English-centric section of readers and publishers. In view of this, and in continuation of something you said in an earlier interview—that layers are gained in translation but your own “sounds and smells and tweaks and twirls” are lost—how do you see this wider recognition of you and your work?

I do not mean that sounds, smells, tweaks are lost, but that they are not necessarily the ones with my dhwani in them.

For me, translation is dialogue and communication which establishes a new friendship between the two texts—the original and the translated. As in communication there is something live and electric in what one says and in what the other receives, so it is here. It is not a dead object changing hands but a live and mercurial entity going from one place to another. A rich text becomes differently richer. It finds a new belonging in a new cultural milieu. And it also gives to the new homeland, if you will, cultural inputs from where it has originally come. It really is about a dialogue between cultures which brings to both new ways of seeing, being, expressing. 

How active was your involvement with the French translation of ‘Ret Samadhi’? How was each different?

Yes, Ret Samadhi has been translated into French and English (in that order). Given my respect for the autonomy of translation and translators, I cannot be hands-on. It is after a degree of mutual trust, respect and understanding has developed between me and the translator that translation in a different language is begun. Once it has begun, it’s for the translator to decide whether and when she (both the translators of Ret Samadhi are women) needs to get in touch with me for possible clarifications and explanations. That interaction during the making of the translation often turns out to be surprisingly rewarding. Several of the translator’s queries and comments offer clues to meanings and implications of which I had not been aware during the act of writing. This non-interference has been best for everyone.

A lot of Indians grow up at least bilingual, if not trilingual. Sometimes, a lot of this knowledge—of reading, writing, and at least being slightly fluent in our idioms and sayings—is neglected owing to the pressure of jobs, life, and the “convenience” of English. Language is, of course, a practice that needs daily nurturing. Can you talk a little about this?

For Indians, fortunately, it is natural to be multilingual. Our tragedy is that instead of nurturing that, we have let English hierarchise languages in our heads and hearts. English has become the language of success and getting about in the world. Which is fine, but that does not require letting go of other languages available to us. Possessing more than one language has never harmed anyone. It is, rather, a source of great enrichment, given the wealth contained within each, going back centuries. We should celebrate multilingualism, multiculturalism in the world and in our country rather than go astray towards a mono-culturalism, with its totalitarian impulse.

English was the medium of instruction in your education. Did you ever have to “consciously” choose to write in Hindi over English? Or did it come naturally?

Like so many other Indians in north India, I have grown up with Hindi and English. Most of us know English through formal education and Hindi through its informal proliferation in our lives. I think, on balance, the latter turned out better for me because I had picked up Hindi in many registers—the language of conversation within the family, of narrations of our bedtime tales, and the colloquial and lively street language, the exposure to serious, literary, classical Hindi and Urdu via mushairas and kavi sammelans, which were still widespread in my growing-up years in the small and big towns of Uttar Pradesh, and of course the reading that we did where there were still many Hindi children’s magazines available for us.

So, while I did go through some period of wondering and wandering between the two languages for my expression, it more or less quite naturally and intuitively became Hindi for me. This I say without rancour against English—we all write in the language we are most comfortable in.

‘Tomb Of Sand’ flows in poetic, meandering, third-person stream-of-consciousness. It’s almost sand-like—if you are trying to hold on to it and gain immediate meaning or direction, it slips from you. If you stay with it with stillness, the narrative, and the plot, seem to come to you themselves. I am assuming this is true of the original too. Can you talk about this treatment?

You have said it beautifully. That is the fun of (feedback from) readers, because they give the writer wonderful interpretations. What you say makes wonderful sense to me. I have achieved that intuitively, not by following a deliberate formula. The writing process has its own magic. You start off as if you are the controller but the work comes alive only when it acquires its own breath and soul. Once that happens, it takes over, in a manner of speaking, and you flow along with it. You are in a new partnership and sometimes you lead the way, sometimes the work leads, (sometimes) its characters do.

So whatever happened was in the dynamic of the narrative; and it kept happening (as if) that is how (it was meant to) happen.

This interview was first punished in Mint Lounge 15 April 2022

With 'Run and Hide', writer Pankaj Mishra returns as a novelist

Twenty years after ‘The Romantics’, acclaimed essayist Pankaj Mishra’s second work of fiction, ‘Run And Hide’ is now out

Pankaj Mishra’s second novel comes more than two decades after his debut, The Romantics, but Run and Hide is worth the wait.

Arun, Aseem and Virendra, all from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds, meet as batchmates at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Hungry to better their circumstances, Aseem and Virendra reach dizzying heights of material and social success; their eventual fall from grace is just as spectacular.

Arun’s aspirations are fuelled by a different desire—of what he thinks could be love. Told from his point of view, Run and Hide is a slow burn. It covers three decades, recounting stories of lives on the cusp of economic liberalisation in India and globalisation in general, takes cues from high-profile cases of both white-collar crime and the MeToo movement, while tracing political changes in the country and identity politics globally—till the scene is set for a global virus.

This interview was first published in Mint Lounge on 19 February, 2022

Yet no page feels bogged down by the weight of contemporary issues; no strand is underserved. Arun, self-effacing and almost unselfconsciously prone to philosophising, makes the book immensely readable. He observes and articulates minutiae with rare lucidity, grippingly sketching the emotional intricacies of trying to stay afloat through tides of change.

In the time between the two novels, Mishra has earned acclaim as a sharp yet sensitive essayist, a keen observer of our times. This also keeps Run And Hidefirmly rooted in reality, exploring motivations and sympathies, and how these play out.

While it is unfair, of course, to compare works 20 years apart, the arc is nothing short of phenomenal. The sharpness of experience and softness of wisdom find an alchemical balance in Run and Hide. A world-weariness is evident, but so is a deep romanticism towards life itself.

In an interview in the lead-up to the book’s launch today, Mishra talks about experiencing the world through fiction, the challenge of covering three decades of change, and more. Edited excerpts:

The book’s characters share similarities with people who have been in the public eye.

I think the reason why anyone turns to fiction is essentially to do what cannot be done in any other form, whether it’s reportage or essay, or poetry, or a play. The novel is just a much more spacious form that can accommodate different ways of understanding the world; the play and clash of ideas. In an essay you more or less end up taking one side—you might present the other side but you have to put your own position forward.

The fiction form gives you an opportunity to critique your own views, positions, your own class and caste. You can take very many different sides without coming out conclusively on one side or other. It’s a very democratic space; it’s a space that allows all kinds of characters to have their say, to have their inner freedom.

Obviously, I went back to the novel with these advantages in mind. But that does not mean I am going to break with everything that I have been thinking about or experiencing over the last three decades. I have encountered a wide variety of people, ways of being. They will inevitably make their way into my fiction, as composite characters.

These are (also) the themes that have concerned me over the years—the rise of a “new India”, what that actually means, who is rising, how they even seek fulfilment now that they have been freed from old restrictions and constraints, how fulfilled they even are, and how they pursue happiness, so to speak, in this new, very heady world that has been opened up to them by economic liberalisation and globalisation.

I’ve written about the political consequences of that, but the reason I turn to the novel is that only fiction can explore the spiritual and emotional consequences of this massive transformation we have undergone over the last three decades.

Is an essay exploring these concerns not as effective as a novel ?

These are two very different ways of reading and engaging with the world. (With fiction) you are asking the reader to enter into a kind of communication with the author; they are being asked to imagine certain situations, certain landscapes and people, (with) little signs of recognition all around. Which is not to say that only people in India will (relate).

Someone from a working-class background in the north of England emailed to say that the book spoke to him as an account of the humiliation you grow up with as a member of a lower class.The shame of growing up poor, of growing up ignorant—how much that follows you around even when you become successful. (With fiction) a reader brings their own life experience and imagination to the process. Non-fiction isn’t really asking you to do much of that. It’s giving you a set of facts around which a narrative has been woven.

Arun is an interesting choice as narrator. He seems never fully present in the events he recalls. Yet he is observant, reserving it all for a later telling.

This really goes to the heart of how you conceive of the novel and the strategies you adopt to tell the story. It was very clear to me that I had to choose somebody who is on the margins of the world he is describing, and yet, at the same time, not have a particularly moralistic point of view of it. I could not give Aseem the voice of the narrator, even though he is supposedly a novelist; he’s too egotistical and self-seeking to be able to see and observe the world around him. Whereas Arun, while working within the realm of literature, is on its margins too as a translator. It is a unique position—someone who does valuable work, and yet remains invisible.

Once I found this way of thinking about him and his relationship with the other characters, the novel started to fall into place. It was a challenge to think about covering three decades in the lives of these people. But the notion that he can be traumatised into eloquent speech helped me a great deal.

You meet people like Arun all the time—who don’t speak much, aren’t part of the cultural mainstream, who don’t go to parties, but are incredibly observant and insightful.

A certain unease is central to the story. Arun is uncomfortable with both the “victimhood” of the elite and the rage of the socially disadvantaged that lets them aid in oppressions of other kinds. For him, love, friendship, family fall away because of this. Is running and hiding the only way out?

One reason I went into fiction was to get away from easy generalisations or conclusions. It was really to demonstrate that there are so many different ways of being and perceiving the world. Living alone in the Himalaya can be much more exalting and liberating than, say, being at a dinner party in London, where you feel uncomfortable with all the opinions that are being expressed around you. Especially if you come from a background like Arun’s, where you know people have a very good reason to be angry at the way they have been treated by their social systems. He sees that his own father, regardless of how horrible he is, has known what degradation is much more than the people claiming that their rights and identity as a black or brown person should be honoured.

I think he has left open the possibility (of what he will do next). (The novel is at) an impasse he has been driven to, by his experience of all these different realities outside the little world he had created for himself. I would not want the book to be seen as my own kind of general statement on where we are today, and that there’s no other possibility except to run and hide.

Arun has influences of your life. Does inhabiting the book’s world influence you too, and shift how you view your life after writing it?

I do feel that every novel changes (the writer) deeply. Apart from everything else, you are exploring parts of your own self while writing fiction. Non-fiction engages only a very shallow part of yourself; mostly the mind—you have had an experience, you have talked to people and you are putting it in some shape. But when you are writing fiction, you are pulling stuff out of yourself, you don’t know where from. You are conducting a very intense dialogue with different parts of yourself. So if I were to go back and start identifying myself (in this novel), I would not identify myself in just Arun, I would also identify myself in Aseem, in Alia. We all consist of multiple selves—and all those characters carry traces of my own self. It’s only in fiction that you can conduct this dialogue with these different selves—where else would there be an opportunity to do so? So, to answer your question, I think writing it was really a unique experience. If people like it, it will be a bonus but it has brought me into a conversation with aspects of my experience I wouldn’t have otherwise engaged with.

This interview was first published in Mint Lounge on 19 February, 2022