var addthis_pub = "thehindu"; Deepa Kandaswamy

The Hindu: February 13, 2010

Shauna Singh Baldwin's first novel, What the Body Remembers, received the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book (Canada-Caribbean) in 2000. Shashi Tharoor described her second novel, The Tiger Claw (2004), as “a deeply felt, richly evocative novel” calling Shauna “a major literary voice.” English Lessons and Other Stories (1996) received the Friends of American Writers prize. She co-authored A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America (1992). Her latest story collection We Are Not in Pakistan has just been released in India. She is currently working on her third novel. Excerpts from an interview,

Tell us about yourself.

I was born in Montreal, Canada. My family returned to India in 1972 when I was 10 and I grew up in Delhi. I came to the U.S. for my MBA, returned to Canada for a few years, and then moved back to the U.S. when I got married. I now live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

When did the writing bug bite you?

I don't remember having a desire to “become a writer”; reading and writing is just what I liked to do. When I was a child, Europeans, Americans and Euro-Canadians could be writers because they seemed to own English. An Indo-Canadian girl living in India was somehow not authorised to write in English. And writing about how Indians and diasporic Indians see the world was very un-cool.

In the 1970s, English-speaking Indians didn't buy stories set in India or about Indians, so why should anyone else?

So I wrote because I needed to make sense of my world by describing it. Eventually the stories weren't about me and my experience, but about situations, problems, feelings, metaphors and images that just refuse to go away.

Your writing process is…

Fragmented; groping until I gain clarity. There's always a back and forth between the logical and emotional, leaving room for the illogical and absurd, just to let humour shine in. I write about characters that intrigue me, in dilemmas that take them past the usual middle-class challenges of disease and grief.

Each time, I try to write the story that only I can write; it must draw on my languages, research skills and cosmopolitan experience to make it unique and meaningful to the reader.

Voices and styles must fit each story. I experiment to find them, and often write in several points of view until I find those that will move the story forward and keep me interested as well. At each turning point, I inhabit the point of view of the character with most to lose.

There is an accusation that Indian/people of Indian origin writing in English tend to romanticise the past.

Our past — anyone's past — is fraught with moral compromises and easy rationalisations about oppression and inequality. It should constantly be subjected to scrutiny to illuminate our present.

In my five books so far, I have explored conflicts in historical and contemporary times, with settings from India, Canada, the U.S., Latin America, Russia, France, Germany, England, and Pakistan. Some characters are well-to-do; some are just trying to survive.

Another accusation: They never tell stories of poor Indians today.

“Never” falls apart when confronted with citations. The accusation rises from the strange premise that writing a novel is equivalent to social work; work that should preferably be done by artists on behalf of their readers. If a novel moves you to greater empathy or understanding of a situation, that's wonderful, important and necessary.

But reading or writing a novel is entertainment and meditation; neither is a substitute for action. Reading a novel about poor Indians does not help poor Indians. Fighting for every child's right to education, water, food and shelter and the protection of the law will help them. If there is an answer, it lies in the stories I tell, with the characters whose thoughts I render, and whose problems I choose to frame.

Do you think there is xenophobia in the West after 9/11?

How do you define “the West” anyway? East and West are futile and artificial separations worthy of colonialist regimes, not 21st century people. There has always been fear of foreigners; it cannot be confined because it is in all of us. We come into the world foreign to one another, even within the same family, culture and country.

Ignorance can lead to fear and phobia of anyone labelled “foreign.” So many people in the world are unable to read, and so many of us who can don't challenge ourselves enough to look past our own faiths. We need to work on bridging gaps every moment.

Fear of foreigners (“foreigner” is currently defined in each society and time) stems from fear of miscegenation/pollution across race, caste or class. So there is not more or less xenophobia after 9/11, but the crime became an excuse for xenophobes to act out repressed fears.

Who are some of your all time favourite authors?

The poetry of the 10 Gurus, Bhakti and Sufi saints in the Guru Granth Sahib never fails to uplift me.

My literary heroes: Tagore for opening the door to desi writing. Rushdie, for claiming Indian-English and the post-Independence experience. Poets like Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Walt Whitman and T.S.Eliot who have taught me rhythm in the spoken word. Writers like Kamala Markandaya, M. G. Vassanji, Janette Turner Hospital, who setting self aside, have made us see through the eyes of people on the periphery of mainstream experience.

Negative literary heroes: Naipaul and Oriana Fallaci, as warning that writing does not only expand the soul but can also contract it.