SALON

India

Thursday, May 14, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

Indian roulette

A veteran correspondent in India says that politics and frustrated nationalism together prompted the government to explode nuclear weapons.

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“This is really what we wanted, to become a nuclear power. Now nobody will dare touch India, so there will be peace.” The defiant, confident statement by a member of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seemed to sum up the overwhelming support in India for the nuclear weapons tests that have shocked and angered much of the rest of the world.

President Clinton on Wednesday announced a raft of tough economic sanctions on India’s Hindu nationalist government and implored other countries to do the same. Clinton suggested India had conducted the underground tests — five in the past two days — because it feels “underappreciated in the world as a great power,” but called the explosions “unjustified” and warned they had created “a dangerous new instability” in a region already destabilized by Indian-Pakistani rivalries.

One of the great fears is that Pakistan, which has fought three wars with India over the past five decades, will now conduct its own nuclear tests. In a telephone call, Clinton appealed to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resist the temptation.

The U.S. sanctions halt all American assistance to India, with the exception of humanitarian aid. From now on, the U.S. export of certain defense and technology items to India is prohibited, along with any military financing. The sanctions also end U.S. Export-Import bank credits and loan guarantees to India and bar U.S. banks from extending credit to the Indian government, except for the purchase of food and medicine. Most important, the sanctions, which are required under U.S. law, require the U.S. to vote against any loans to India by international lending institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Clinton also acknowledged that the Indian nuclear tests had caught him by surprise. He said that he had ordered CIA Director George Tenet to conduct a thorough review of the U.S. intelligence community’s performance in this episode. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the U.S. spy agencies’ inability to detect India’s preparations for the tests a “colossal failure,” especially “in an area that we’ve been watching for a long time.”

Salon spoke with a reporter who has also been watching the region for a long time — former British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent Mark Tully, in New Delhi, to assess the situation on the ground.

Why is it so important, as the BJP party member said, for India to be a nuclear power?

There’s a lot of politics behind this. This is the first time that the BJP has formed a government. It’s very important for them to demonstrate that they are different from other parties. Going nuclear has always been part of their agenda. So, in one way, they are just simply addressing that agenda.

Secondly, the government is a very fragile coalition. It has only been in power two months. It’s done nothing. Prime Minister Vajpayee desperately needed to show that he is capable of taking decisions. The National Volunteer Corps, which is the hard-line core of the BJP, have been rather bitter in their complaint that the BJP government has not been implementing their nationalist agenda. In the immediate term, the tests have definitely solidified the government politically.

Equally, I think there is a far greater feeling of frustrated nationalism in India, a feeling that India does not command the respect that it should by virtue of its size, by its successes and by the fact that it has remained a democracy. There is frustration that so much attention is paid to China and not enough to India. So there is a populist dimension to these nuclear tests as well.

Everybody is now looking at Pakistan. Are they about to go nuclear in response?

There is tremendous pressure in Pakistan to go nuclear publicly now. But there is one problem with that: Pakistan cannot demonstrate the same nuclear power that India has done. Nobody that I have met believes that Pakistan has a thermonuclear device. Therefore, if Pakistan decides to go nuclear, it could be something of a damp squid. On the other hand, if Pakistan does go nuclear and India signs the Nuclear Test Ban treaty — which seems to be what it is offering to do — then this in a way could put a cap on nuclear development in the region. So the developments of the past two days may not be all so depressing. In the long run, of course, if these two countries do convert their nuclear capability into actual armaments, then you do have a very dangerous situation. They’re almost at war with each other in Kashmir now.

In explaining their decision to conduct nuclear testing, Indian military leaders have talked about China, not Pakistan, as their biggest military threat. How much of a threat does China actually pose?

Clearly, China is a superior military power to India. But my impression had been that China was not anxious to pick quarrels with India; that it wanted, in fact, to improve relations with India, and to achieve a phased reduction of troops on the disputed borders. These Indian explosions will make it much more difficult for China to maintain that sort of approach.

You mentioned that Indian leaders indicated they are now considering signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. What are the chances of that happening?

I would think the chances are very good. But in doing this, India will want to make some sort of statement — that it does not regard it as a satisfactory treaty, that India believes that its policy, which calls for universal nuclear disarmament, is the answer to the problem. And even though it is now a member of the nuclear club, India will continue to say that the treaty remains discriminatory. After all, although it will be a member of the club, it will be a rather minor member, compared with the United States.

These same Indian leaders are also indicating that the BJP government will begin placing nuclear warheads on missiles. These seem to be conflicting signals.

I don’t think they are conflicting signals. On one hand, they’re talking about the Test Ban Treaty. But nuclear non-proliferation is another thing entirely, and their attitude to that is far less clear. At present, it looks to me as though India is in such a mood that despite the opposition to its doing so, it will militarize these explosions. That is to say, it will start placing nuclear warheads on its missiles.

How seriously will India be affected by the sanctions announced by President Clinton on Wednesday?

India is not as dependent on aid as it once was. These days, it is much more dependent on foreign investment. The great question will be: How will these sanctions affect the foreign investment atmosphere? The United States not granting Ex-Im bank credit clearance to exporters to India could be a bit of a problem, but it won’t affect people who want to invest in the country. So the hope among Indians is that, being such a large and potentially lucrative market, businessmen will say, “Well, we don’t care what the government says. We’re still going to go to India and do business.” But if that is to happen, these explosions will have to be followed by steps to make the investment climate a lot more attractive.

But under the U.S. sanctions, India also stands to lose World Bank loans, which have totaled some $44 billion so far. How seriously will that affect the Indian economy?

We’ll have to see about that one. Yes, America said that it will vote against loans to India, but the World Bank is not just America. India is quite experienced in international diplomacy and will certainly argue against the American vote. Obviously, if World Bank aid is hit, it will hurt. But as I said earlier, aid, be it World Bank aid or country-to-country aid, is no longer the factor in the Indian economy that it was before. Moreover, some countries, including France and Russia, already have indicated that they will not go along with the U.S. sanctions.

Could there be a ripple effect of this possible nuclear arms race that goes beyond the subcontinent — with Indian or Pakistani nuclear and missile technology now being exported to other troubled third world countries?

Yes, this is a distinct possibility. Although, I think that, under the present circumstances, India would be very reluctant because it would gain no political mileage from doing so. Also, India is not a member of any alliance that might make it think about exporting or cooperating with other countries on nuclear development.

Pakistan, however, is an Islamic country, and indeed, in the early days, the Pakistani bomb was called “the Islamic bomb.” I suppose there would be a greater temptation for Pakistan to help some Islamic country which wanted to develop nuclear technology. Moreover, more money could begin flowing from Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries to help Pakistan develop a bigger and better Islamic bomb.

Jonathan Broder is Salon's Washington correspondent. More Jonathan Broder.

Thursday, Apr 2, 1998 8:00 PM UTC

The sadhu from Texas

Anne Cushman describes a series of memorable encounters with a sadhu from Texas by way of Varanasi.

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I first met Charan Das in 1985, in Santa Fe, N.M., when he knocked on the door of my adobe cabin one cold November night. The churned mud of my driveway was frozen into icy ruts, but he was barefoot; he wore only a swath of brown cotton around his waist and a brown wool shawl. A sharp wind fluttered his matted dreadlocks.

“We just met your roommate at Jemez Hot Springs,” he said. “She said we could stay at your house for a few days.”

I was 22 years old and believed in opening the door to mystery. “Of course.” I peered past him into the dark. “How many of you are there?”

He gave me a radiant, gap-toothed smile. “Just this one,” he said.

Over almond tea in front of the wood stove, Charan Das explained that he was a sadhu, one of India’s millions of wandering yogis, who live on alms as they travel from village to village in pursuit of God-realization. In a previous incarnation, though, he had been a Texas college student who had gone to India to research Indian spiritual sects. Now he had come back to the States for the first time in 10 years, to visit his somewhat alarmed family and make a pilgrimage to the sacred sites of the Southwest.

He referred to himself in the plural, he explained, as an ego-deflating spiritual practice. “Our we,” he said, “includes you, too.”

“Should I refer to you as ‘they’?” I asked.

“They is fine with us,” he said, and began to giggle.

Over the next few days, Charan Das told me stories about sadhus. They live without possessions, he told me, entirely dependent on the generosity of strangers. They never stay anywhere longer than a few days to avoid becoming attached to places and people, and to spread spiritual teachings as widely as possible. To remind themselves of life’s impermanence, they meditate in cremation grounds and smear themselves with the ashes from the funeral pyres. To break their attachment to the physical body, they often vow themselves to seven-year cycles of extreme ascetic practices — such as holding one arm up in the air until it atrophies to a withered twig, or dangling upright in a sling from a tree branch instead of lying down to sleep.

“Would you like to hang a sling from our rafters?” I asked him.

“No, we’ll be happy on the couch,” he said.

He covered my kitchen table with snapshots of throngs of naked babas plunging into the Ganges to wash away their karma in the sacred river. “Come to India,” he told me. “We’ll be your guide.”

“But how can I find you, if you’re always wandering?”

“Oh, we only wander half the year,” he said, cheerfully. “The other half, we have a lady friend in the holy city of Benares.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Ten years later, I finally made it to Benares (better known in the West as Varanasi). I had become an editor at Yoga Journal; I was researching a guidebook to ashrams, meditation centers and pilgrimage sites in India. Synchronicity seems to be the only law that is enforced in India; so I wasn’t altogether surprised, my second day in Varanasi, when I spotted Charan Das sipping chai in the rooftop cafe of the Hotel Ganges View. His dreadlocks had turned gray, and a new pair of wire-framed spectacles perched unsteadily on his nose.

“We knew you would get here!” he said, as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted a few hours ago. “Would you like some chai?”

From our hotel roof we had a sweeping view of the city — already ancient at the time of the Buddha — stretching downstream around an elbow-shaped bend in the silky gray Ganges. Varanasi is the hometown of Shiva, the god of destruction, and a city sacred to death. Hindus believe that dying in Varanasi ensures liberation for the soul — on your deathbed there, Shiva himself will whisper a mantra in your ear that ensures your safe passage to the other side. The banks of the Ganges are lined with hostels where people come from all over India to die. The funeral fires have not stopped burning for several thousand years.

On the dirt road below meandered an intermittent stream of traffic: a herd of water buffalo lumbering to the river to drink; a band of pilgrims with six-foot staffs on their shoulders, weighted at both ends with bundles of cooking supplies and offerings for the temples; mangy, purposefully trotting dogs; a sadhu with orange robes and a pitchfork-sized trident, his forehead striped with the three horizontal bars that mark a follower of Shiva.

I told Charan Das that I was in India researching a spiritual guidebook and would appreciate his insights.

“We were working on a spiritual guidebook, too!” he said in delight. “That’s why we originally came to India 20 years ago.”

Somewhat alarmed, I asked him what had happened to his project.

“Our notes were all locked up in a friend’s house in Benares,” he said. “A whole trunkful of them, on hundreds of ashrams all over India. But the friend died many years ago. The trunk was moved, and we’re not sure where.”

He began to laugh — a zany, low-pitched chortle that went on long after my own laughter had stopped — and I knew that for him, a spiritual guidebook had long since lost all relevance. My publisher would have been alarmed, I’m sure, at how uplifted that perspective made me feel.

Charan Das invited me to meet him that evening at the Hanuman Temple, where he and his guru, Kathia Baba, were staying. Hanuman is the monkey god; the temple courtyard was strewn with peanut shells and swarming with bold-eyed, leering monkeys, covetously eyeing my day pack. I found Charan Das and Kathia Baba seated cross-legged on a caved-in sofa in a back room, sharing a fat, cigar-shaped chilam (a pipe containing a mixture of tobacco and marijuana, a plant considered by sadhus to be sacred to Shiva) with a handful of Indian and Western devotees.

“This is Anne,” Charan Das told Kathia Baba. “We stayed with her in New Mexico 10 years ago.”

“For this evening, you are not Anne,” Kathia Baba told me, clasping my hands and beaming. He was a stocky Indian man with a short-cropped beard, dressed in a white kurta and mala beads, with an expression of almost shockingly innocent pleasure, as if perpetually unpacking a Christmas stocking. “For this evening you will be called Annapurna, the goddess of plenty.”

“And this,” said Charan Das, gesturing toward a muscular blond woman in a green sari, “is Maya. She is from the Pleiades.”

“You’re a long way from home,” I said.

“Earth will never seem familiar to a soul from another star system,” she said in a strong German accent. “But Benares is more like home than Germany.” She reached out and took the chilam from Kathia Baba.

“She is telling me so many things I have never heard of,” said Kathia Baba reverently.

The chilam went round and round. Charan Das told me who really killed JFK. Maya told me that she was a “walk-in,” a soul from the Pleiades who had stepped into an earthling’s body in midlife to help save the planet from destruction. Kathia Baba told me about meditating in a cave in the Himalayas, where he went into a trance and lived without food or water for six months.

Charan Das told me that the FBI had genetically engineered the AIDS virus as a plot against homosexuals. Maya told me that it was possible that I was from the Pleiades, also. Kathia Baba told me that Charan Das intended to bring him to America and drive him across the country in a VW van. “He is telling me about the Rainbow Family,” Kathia Baba said. “It is truly a wonderful thing.”

Finally, unsteadily, I stood up to go. From a cotton pouch slung around his bare shoulder, Charan Das produced an address book, tattered as an ancient Sanskrit manuscript.

“If we ever come to California,” he said, “we will give you a call.”

A year and a half later, the phone rang in my room in the house I shared with three other roommates on a hilltop on the edge of a redwood forest in Marin County. I was going over my notes on yoga history, preparing to go on the radio the next morning on a live call-in talk show about the Yoga Journal conference on “Body, Mind, and Spirit” that was being held that weekend at the Sheraton Palace Hotel.

I really shouldn’t have answered the phone, but I was expecting a call from a man I had just started dating. I hovered my hand over the phone for three rings, so as not to appear too eager; then answered in my most professional voice.

“We’re in Portland,” said a voice that was not the one I had been hoping for. “We heard there was a yoga conference happening, so we’re flying to Oakland tonight. Our plane gets in at 5:30. We were hoping we could stay at your house.”

Frankly, I wasn’t thrilled to hear from Charan Das. I was nervous about the radio show and fretting about my love life, and the last thing I wanted was a visit from a matted-haired, barefoot Texan sadhu in a shawl and lungi. But it’s not good karma to turn away a wandering renunciate. So I picked him up that evening at the cafe in A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, across from the Airporter bus stop.

He was standing near the magazine racks, his bare, bony feet sticking out from under his lungi, surrounded by tables of bored professional couples drinking lattes and reading the San Francisco Chronicle. His smile was huge under a fluff of gray dreadlocks; he looked like a dandelion on acid. Slung around his shoulder were a spare lungi and a cotton sack of books. “We bought these at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in Los Angeles,” he told me. “They’re full of information for the revolution we’re planning.”

I drove Charan Das home to meet my roommates, whom I had tried to prepare for the occasion with a convoluted explanation of the ancient history of Indian asceticism. “So he’s a sort of a monk?” asked John. John works at the vitamin counter at Wild Oats health food store and believes that world peace would come sooner if we all switched to the lunar calendar favored by the ancient Maya.

“Not exactly,” I said. I explained about the chilams, and the lady friend in Varanasi, and how Charan Das wandered through the country sleeping in temples and train stations and living off the proceeds of a small trust fund set up by his parents in Dallas. “Ah,” said John, in comprehension. “An advanced Deadhead.”

I made Charan Das a meal of baked potatoes with nutritional yeast, while he told me about how extraterrestrials were harvesting human embryos and raising them in huge factory farms in outer space, and how the CIA knew all about it. He offered to read the manuscript for my guidebook to spiritual India, and check it for accuracy. “We have met so many of the holy men in India,” he said. “We know all of their girlfriends.”

I went to bed nervous about going on the radio the next day and talking about yoga, which I had been told was a big step up the ladder of my spiritual career. I lay awake for hours, picturing myself saying, “Yoga is about inner peace,” in a quaking voice. Early the next morning I tiptoed out of the house past Charan Das snoring on my sofa, wrapped in his brown wool shawl. My manuscript lay on the floor next to him, untouched.

When I got home Charan Das was waiting for me on my redwood deck, sunning his bony legs. “We heard you on the radio,” he said with a big grin. “You sounded great. Would you like to be on the TV show we’re going to start on public access TV? It’s going to be a spiritual show, and we’re going to be the anchorman.”

Later, I took Charan Das with me to Whole Foods market to get lunch at the deli counter. Whole Foods always reminds me of Buddhist depictions of the Pure Land, the sort of place you’d pray to get reborn, with lotus flowers, jewels and rainbows everywhere — a land flowing with organic BGH-free milk and raw unfiltered wildflower honey. Charan Das and I made our way past the stacks of strawberries and kiwi flown in from New Zealand, the Hawaiian pineapples and the Mexican papaya, the aromatherapy bath salts and the cruelty-free lipstick and the herbal diet pills and the books with titles like “Stop Aging Now.”

We came to the deli counter and selected our lunch: quinoa-orange salad, jerked seitan skewers, yam millet patties. I was pointing out the vegan rum balls for dessert when we were approached by a teenager in a Whole Foods apron.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to put on your shoes,” he said to Charan Das. “It’s the store regulations.”

“Oh, but we don’t have any shoes.” Charan Das seemed slightly bewildered. “We haven’t worn shoes since 1969.”
“It’s an insurance thing,” the Whole Foods official explained. “If you were to step on glass and cut yourself, Whole Foods would be liable.”

“We often walk on glass. We walk on rocks, snow, hot coals — we never hurt ourselves!”

After some debate, it was concluded that if Charan Das hadn’t worn shoes for almost 30 years, the bottom of his feet probably legally qualified as shoes. Charan Das and I picked up our plates full of food — I paid for both of them — and we sat at the tables by the window and ate. “Whole Foods is the only place anyone ever asks us to wear shoes,” Charan Das said. “Whole Foods and when we’re getting onto an airplane. We always have to put paper slippers on our feet when we walk down the ramp. Then we take them off as soon as we reach our seat.”

“The funny thing is,” he added as we walked out to my car, “we were one of the original founders of the Whole Foods coop. In Austin, Texas, back in the 1960s.”

“Really? Did you keep any stock?” I asked.

He shook his furry head. “No. We don’t believe in money.”

That night I took Charan Das to the Yoga Journal conference to hear the keynote speech by Stephen Levine, the author of “Who Dies?” and “A Year to Live.” Strolling into the chandeliered lobby of the Sheraton Palace Hotel, Charan Das looked like some sort of exhibit — like he’d accidentally stepped out of a diorama on ancient yogis. A bellhop in a red jacket with gold buttons held the door for him, expressionless.

None of the other yogis looked anything like Charan Das. Clad in form-fitting work-out clothes — setting off buttocks and pectorals sculpted by Sun Salutations — they milled past the booths full of silk-screened T-shirts and buckwheat-hull meditation cushions and ginseng tonics, eager as pilgrims crowding to the Ganges to bathe.

“What would Indian yogis think of this scene?” I asked Charan Das.

“You never know,” he said. “Maybe everyone here is a reincarnated yogi. Every guru wants to be reborn in America.”

In the Grand Ballroom, Stephen Levine gave a keynote speech on death. He led a very long meditation on softening your belly, and Charan Das fell asleep in the chair next to me, snoring gently.

The next morning, I tried to hustle Charan Das out of the house in time to hear Lilias Folan, a teacher made famous by her yoga classes on PBS, give a talk called “The Joy Is in the Journey.” Charan Das — whose sadhu’s sense of time was measured in lifetimes — was standing by my kitchen sink, filling a Knudsen’s strawberry apple juice jar with water.

“We’ll never get used to toilet paper,” he said. “It makes no sense to us. Water is so much better, you can clean your whole lower intestine that way.”

“Mmm,” I commented noncommitally, and walked out onto the deck, looking meaningfully at my car. Charan Das followed me, brandishing his jar.

“America seems crazy to us. None of it makes any sense to us. Toilet paper, shoes, driver’s license, having a job, insurance, money, the capitalist system — it’s all so inhumane.”

“Throw it all out,” I said. “Start with the toilet paper, end with capitalism. Let’s start now.”

He looked at me with delight, as if I were a deaf-mute who had just spoken for the first time. “Start now! With a good shit!”

“But let my roommates keep a little toilet paper,” I said.

“Oh, we don’t believe in controlling people. We believe in freedom,” he said. “We would never legislate no toilet paper.”

“It would be difficult to get it through both the House and the Senate,” I said.

He set down the juice jar on the railing and stared across the valley toward Berkeley. “People should love each other,” he said. “Toilet paper just gets in the way.”

Two days later, Charan Das left, heading for the Rainbow Family Gathering in Scotland. He took a copy of my guidebook manuscript with me, promising to make comments in the margins and send it back; I haven’t heard from him since.

Before he left, he enveloped me in a huge hug. His shawl smelled faintly of India — a musty blend of cow dung and diesel fumes.

“We’ll see you again,” he said. “Expect us.”

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Anne Cushman is a writer who lives in Northern California. She previously wrote for Wanderlust about a wandering sadhu from Texas named Charan Das. More Anne Cushman.

Tuesday, Sep 30, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

Arundhati Roy

Salon magazine: The Salon Interview: Arundhati Roy. The author of 'The God of Small Things' talks about India, the obscenity charge she faces and how writing is like architecture. By Reena Jana.

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she claims she never rewrites or revises. Her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” has just won the
English-speaking world’s most premier honor, the Booker Prize, is published
in more than 20 nations, has hit No. 1 on the Sunday Times of London’s
bestseller list and is climbing the New York Times list. It has earned her in excess of $1 million so far and international media attention as she faces obscenity charges in her native India for a sensual description of inter-caste lovemaking that serves as the novel’s coda. And beyond all this, she’s good. Real good. Butt-kicking good. So good, in fact, that John Updike, when reviewing “The God of Small Things” for the New Yorker, compares her mind-boggling debut to that of Tiger Woods.

She’s Arundhati Roy, and she’s remarkably tiny — hovering around 5-foot-2 — despite the black platform shoes she’s wearing and new literary lioness persona. An explosion of curly black hair frames her face, which showcases nearly childlike, saucer eyes and cheekbones that erupt the moment she talks or smiles. Now in her mid-30s, Roy grew up in Kerala, the Marxist Indian state in which “The God of Small Things” is set. The novel is a vertiginously poetic tale of Indian boy-and-girl twins, Estha and Rahel, and their family’s tragedies; the story’s fulcrum is the death of their 9-year-old half-British cousin, Sophie Mol, visiting them on holiday.

The daughter of a Syrian Christian mother, a divorcee who managed a tea plantation (just like the character of Ammu in Roy’s novel), Roy didn’t attend school until she was 10. “I was my mother’s guinea pig,” she explains. “She started her own school, and I was her first student.” As a teenager, Roy went on to attend boarding school in southern India and wound up at Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture. And now, after years of supporting herself as an aerobics instructor in New Delhi, she’s one of the world’s most celebrated novelists. We forgive her for not rewriting or revising “The God of Small Things.” Thank God she didn’t. Where would the world be without such a display of raw gifts for simile and metaphor, rhythm and lyric? Without Roy’s dizzying microcosm of modern India? Without such an honest and wildly creative (her word plays would drive William Safire and any self-respecting dictionary reader mad) expression of human yearning and joy? Let’s not think about a world without “The God of Small Things.” Let’s ask Roy about the world with it.

All eyes are on India right now, with the 50th anniversary celebration of its independence. At the same time, all eyes are on you and this novel. People around the world are asking, “What does it mean to be an Indian novelist today? What does it mean to be Indian?” Will readers find the answers to these questions in “The God of Small Things”?

You know, I think that a story is like the surface of water. And you can take what you want from it. Its volubility is its strength. But I feel irritated by this idea, this search. What do we mean when we ask, “What is Indian? What is India? Who is Indian?” Do we ask, “What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be British?” as often? I don’t think that it’s a question that needs to be asked, necessarily. I don’t think along those lines, anyway. I think perhaps that the question we should ask is, “What does it mean to be human?”

I don’t even feel comfortable with this need to define our country. Because it’s bigger than that! How can one define India? There is no one language, there is no one culture. There is no one religion, there is no one way of life. There is absolutely no way one could draw a line around it and say, “This is India” or, “This is what it means to be Indian.” The whole world is seeking simplification. It’s not that easy. I don’t believe that one clever movie or one clever book can begin to convey what it means to be Indian. Of course, every writer of fiction tries to make sense of their world. Which is what I do. There are some things that I don’t do, though. Like try to make claims of what influenced my book. And I will never “defend” my book either. When I write, I lay down my weapons and give the book to the reader.

Speaking of influences and defenses, your work has been compared to Salman Rushdie’s. And now, in India, you face charges of obscenity in India for the erotic ending of “The God of Small Things” — a controversy reminiscent of (but not as severe as) Rushdie’s fatwa (death sentence).

I think that the comparison to Salman has been just a lazy response. When in doubt, if it’s an Indian writer, compare them to Salman, because he’s the best-known Indian writer! When I say this, I feel bad, because I think it sounds like I don’t think very highly of him, because I do. He’s a brilliant writer. I think critics have a problem when a new writer comes along, because they want to peg an identity on them. And Salman is the most obvious one for me. But then readers begin to assume the influence, and this isn’t fair.

The comparisons emerge from the need to create an analogy, a metaphor for readers to understand the unknown writer’s work …

I understand that need. But then I don’t understand when readers assume that Indian writers are “magical realists” and suddenly I’m a “magical realist,” just because Salman Rushdie or other Indian writers are “magical realists.” Sometimes people can misread because of such pegging. For example, when Baby Kochamma is fantasizing or Rahel is observing something as a child or Ammu is dreaming in my book, it is not me, the writer, creating the “magical realism.” No, what I am writing is what the characters are experiencing. What the reader is reading is the character’s own perceptions. Those images are driven by the characters. It is never me invoking magic! This is realism, actually, that I am writing.

Actually, it’s not just Rushdie I’m compared to. There’s Garcma-Marquez, Joyce … and Faulkner, always Faulkner. Yes, I’m compared to Faulkner the most. But I’ve never read Faulkner before! So I can’t say anything about him. I have, however, read some other writers from the American South — Mark Twain, Harper S. Lee — and I think that perhaps there’s an infusion or intrusion of landscape in their literature that might be similar to mine. This comparison is not that lazy, because it’s natural that writers from outside urban areas share an environment that is not man-made and is changed by winds and rivers and rain. I think that human relationships and the divisions between human beings are more brutal and straightforward than those in cities, where everything is hidden behind walls and a veneer of urban sophistication.

The obscenity charges brought forth by an individual lawyer, Sabu Thomas, that you face are in Kerala, the same Indian region you depict in your book. Is this what you mean by “the divisions between human beings are more brutal and straightforward” in non-urban areas? And how are you coping with such a reception to your book in the very place that inspired its writing?

When the charges were first made, I was very upset. Actually, the individual who accused me of obscenity first did so when I was on my first book tour in the U.S. in June, and no one told me about it because they didn’t want me to be upset on tour. Now, I realize that this is what literature is about. This is the fallout of literature. It’s more important for me to argue that — on my territory. To state MY case for literature, and freedom of speech. It’s far more important for me to do that than to go to book parties or on tours. That’s the real fight, what it’s all about. And that is MY territory, no matter what he is trying to do, what he is trying to say against my book. And I am not afraid, I’m capable of dealing with this and doing myself justice. I am going to stake my claim. In fact, last week, I made an appeal to the high court, and they decided to give the case to a lower court. It’s a criminal case, you know; and in India, even though a private citizen charged me, the case becomes “the state” vs. me! It’s so unfair, the person who is accusing me of obscenity only photocopied the last three pages of my book and presented them to the court.

The vernacular press in India has dealt with this with viciousness; my mother, who lives in Kerala, hears of the controversy and cannot just be happy for the international success of the book. This has been a strain. But one cannot hide from the glare of one’s own writing.

When I started to read “The God of Small Things,” it took me some time to figure out who the protagonist was — and then I started to feel it was the place: India, Kerala.

That quest is interesting — that quest for one main character. There is no reason for there to be one. In fact, I think the center is everyone, Ammu, Baby Kochamma, Velutha, Estha, Rahel … they all are the core.

Another “core” of the book is the lyricism of your prose. The Indian-American writer (and Salon columnist) Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has confessed to writing to the rhythms of Indian music; sometimes she reads her work out loud in public with the music playing in the background to enhance the musicality. Do you have a similar approach?

I don’t listen to music when I write. It’s about design to me. I’m trained as an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat — patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I’ve found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well — the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel, the twins, were so playful on the page … I was being creative with their design. Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. “Later” became “Lay. Ter.” “An owl” became “A Nowl.” “Sour metal smell” became “sourmetal smell.”

Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot — death, lives destroyed or the horror of the settings — a crazy, chaotic, emotional house, the sinister movie theater.

How do you react to reviews that analyze your wordplays as “writerly” or self-conscious?

Language is something I don’t think about. At all. In fact, the truth is that my writing isn’t self-conscious at all. I don’t rewrite. In this whole book, I changed only about two pages. I rarely rewrite a sentence. That’s the way I think. Writing this novel was a very intuitive process for me. And pleasurable. So much more pleasurable than writing screenplays. I get so much more pleasure from describing a river than writing “CUT TO A RIVER.”

You know, I always believe that even among the best writers, there are selfish writers and there are generous ones. Selfish writers leave you with the memory of their book. Generous writers leave you with the memory of the world they evoked. To evoke a world, to communicate it to someone, is like writing a letter to someone that you love. It’s a very thin line. For me, books are gifts. When I read a book, I accept it as a gift from an author. When I wrote this book, I presented if as a gift. The reader will do with it what they want.

This is your first novel. How did you start writing it? What was your process? How did you guide yourself through it?

If someone told me this was how I was going to write a novel before I started writing it, I wouldn’t believe them. I wrote it out of sequence. I didn’t start with the first chapter or end with the last chapter. I actually started writing with a single image in my head: the sky blue Plymouth with two twins inside it, a Marxist procession surrounding it. And it just developed from there. The language just started weaving together, sentence by sentence.

How did you arrive at the final sequence that became the novel in its finished form?

It just worked. For instance, I didn’t know, when I started writing, that this book would take place in exactly one day. I kept moving back and forth in time. And then, somehow, I realized that in some of the scenes, the kids were grown up, and sometimes they weren’t. I wound up looking at the scenes as different moments, moments that were refracted through time. Reconstituted moments. Moments when Estha is readjusting his Elvis puff of hair. When Estha and Rahel blow spitballs. When Ammu and Velutha make love. These moments, and moments like these in life, I realized, mean something more than what they are, than how they are experienced as mere minutes. They are the substance of human happiness.

Your biography on the book’s dust jacket says you are “trained as an architect and the author of two screenplays.” By other published accounts you are an aerobics instructor. Why and how did you decide to write a novel?

From the time I was a very young child, I knew in my heart that I wanted to be a writer. I never thought I would be able to become one — I didn’t have the financial opportunities to be a writer. But then I started writing for film, and this started my writing career. Still, when I was studying architecture, or teaching aerobics, these were things I really wanted to do, things I focused on completely. No matter what I did or what I do, I become absorbed in it. And that was what happened when I started writing “The God of Small Things.” I worked for a long time, and finally, when I saved enough money to take time off and take the risk of writing a novel — which took me four and a half years of my life, once again I was able to focus on it completely and really enjoy writing it. I was as involved in being an architect as I was writing this novel, and vice versa. I never spent time just dreaming of becoming a writer and resenting my present state. No, my secret was to live my life refusing to be a victim. Failure — no, I shouldn’t say “failure,” rather, the “lack of success” never frightened me. Even if this book never sold or caught any attention, it would still be the same book. This book is this book. At every point in my life, I decided what I could do and then did it.

There is no way for any publisher or writer to know what will sell and why, even though they are all looking for formula. People are asking me if I am feeling pressure now, and they ask me if I will repeat what I achieved in “The God of Small Things.” How I hope I do not! I want to keep changing, growing. I don’t accept the pressure. I don’t believe I must write another book just because now I’m a “writer.” I don’t believe anyone should write unless they have a book to write. Otherwise they should just shut up.

So you aren’t working on another book?

No. Not now, I am totally free. Right now it’s important for me to accept my own peace; I have no idea what I must do next. I don’t care. I don’t feel I must “follow the path.” I don’t believe in rules. One of the worst books I’ve ever read was “The Craft of Novel Writing.” I don’t write reviews, even though people are asking me to now. I don’t want to analyze too much. I had no idea that all of this would happen. For me, what made writing “The God of Small Things” so worthwhile is that people all around the world are connecting with this book, that it’s somehow hitting some deeply human chord.

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Reena Jana contributes regularly to the New York Times, Wired, Asian Art News and Flash Art International. More Reena Jana.

Monday, Apr 7, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

“Kama Sutra”

"Kama Sutra" is bogus history and cheesy storytelling, but what the hell, it's sexy.

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Historical and exotic settings have always been a godsend to makers of soft-core erotica, especially when they want to appeal to audiences made squeamish by the slightest suggestion of sleaze. The same old inane plots, lavishly displayed flesh and coyly shot sex scenes that would offend the sensibilities of art house audiences if they were set in Sherman Oaks are touted as sensual, passionate and adult when the characters are, say, bohemian writers in 1920s Paris and wear lots and lots of scarves.

The difference, then, between Playboy Channel trash and highbrow Saturday night date film is really just a matter of outfits and locations. Mira Nair’s “Kama Sutra” succeeds ever so handsomely in both departments. The story is cheesy, the history dubious, the connection to India’s tradition of tantric meditation tenuous and the championing of “female sexuality” spurious — but, what the hell, it’s still pretty sexy.

The story concerns the schoolgirl rivalry between Tara, a princess, and a serving wench named Maya in 16th century India. Tara may be the pretty one, but Maya’s sultry ways tend to capture male attention. Maya, angry at having to make do with Tara’s hand-me-downs all her life, seduces her friend’s bridegroom the night before the wedding. Cast out of the palace afterwards, Maya takes up with a studly, long-haired sculptor and learns Kama Sutra techniques from a retired courtesan. When the sculptor goes all angsty and distant on her because he thinks a relationship will hinder his art, Maya consents to become head courtesan for the king who married Tara. Despite his dissolution and burgeoning opium problem, the king has never forgotten his night with Maya, and soon poor Tara feels like the odd girl out.

“Kama Sutra” looks gorgeous, from the obligatory scarves (in dozens of saturated colors) to the posh, cushion-lined interiors, to the graceful, statuesque women and their dashing menfolk. The hairstyles alone are worth paying seven bucks to see. Yes, it’s full of dumb lines like “There she is, my lotus woman!” and “You don’t know this, but you inspire all of my work,” but at least Indira Varma, as Maya, really does seem possessed of a mysterious, vixenish allure that transcends her otherwise ordinary good looks. And the midriff-baring beaded number she wears in one scene practically deserves a screen credit all its own.

“Kama Sutra” has nothing to do with the complex, codified Indian society of the actual historical period, just as any claims Nair makes to addressing the spiritual aspects of the real Kama Sutra are pure malarkey. This movie is your basic harem fantasy, easy on the explicit sex and dominance/submission dynamics, but lavish on the gauze, ambient sapphism and romance. There’s even a bare-chested wrestling scene between the king and Maya’s Fabio-esque sculptor beau — a bonus for the ladies, I guess. It’s only the jarring ending that strikes a gloomy, real-world note.

To assume that India’s history of erotic art and literature emerged from a society entirely comfortable with sex is a bit like looking at all the naked people in Western painting and deciding that we must be completely at ease with nudity. In fact, contemporary Indian cinema prohibits the depiction of the most modest sexual contact, even kissing, although rape is a commonplace narrative device. “Kama Sutra” itself has been bogged down in the certification process imposed by the Indian government’s censors for months and Nair had to go to court to get the film released in her homeland.

None of this affects the goofy, Never-Neverland appeal of the film itself, but it does undermine the liberal American tendency to imagine every other culture — the more exotic, the better — as less sexually repressed than our own. That’s as flagrant a fantasy as Nair’s blithe vision of seductive houris and handsome princes.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Thursday, Mar 20, 1997 8:00 PM UTC

No time for “Trek”

In India, poverty, nationalism and too many reruns conspire to ground "Star Trek" fandom.

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This is the third of four “Planet Star Trek” reports. The series will conclude next week with a visit to the Dalai Lama.

BANGALORE, India — i can’t lie to you: India was a bust, at least in terms of “Star Trek.” You can come to India looking for lakeside palaces; you can come looking for white Brahman bulls pulling ox carts loaded with satellite dishes; you can come for the hot pickles, the raita, the dal. But don’t come to India expecting to find a seething subculture of “Star Trek” addicts. I did, and boy is my face red.

The focus of my efforts was Bangalore. Unusually cool at 3,000 feet above sea level, it’s not your typical Indian city. Sacred cows do wander the streets, grazing the greenery amid the temples and beggars; but grazing as well are Oracle, Hewlett Packard and Toshiba. Despite the usual gap between the fabulously rich and the pathetically poor, Bangalore may be South India’s first truly middle-class urban center: a hard-working, tree-shaded megalopolis with its tail in an auto-rickshaw and a Pentium chip on its shoulder. Often referred to as India’s Silicon Valley, it seems an obvious place to seek out “Star Trek” fans.

Looking for an Internet connection, I’m stunned to find a full-blown Cyber Cafe featuring color monitors, Netscape Gold and serious coffee. Right down the street is NASA, a bar that resembles a funky space station, like something out of a William Gibson novel.

I spend two days running myself ragged trying to find Trekkers before an idea bulb bursts in my head. I duck into a crowded street-side CD-ROM stall and ask if they sell “Star Trek” games. The owner, Hassib, wags his head.

“Yes, yes. In fact, we have sold more than 400 in this shop alone.”

“Really?” My blood races. “To whom?”

More wagging. “Sorry, sir, we are not keeping records of such things.”

But I stick around, and after some time Hassib says: “OK, maybe you try Ashok, at double-five, seven-six, nine-two-nine, and also Prassant, you may phone him at double-six, double-one, three-two-five …”

“And Amjad,” his partner adds. “At triple five, double-naught, five six …”

Before I can whip out my pen, everyone in the shop is firing names at me. The next day I phone a dozen potential Trekkers. Only one — Amjad, a 22-year-old university student — returns my call. He shows up at my hotel late at night with his pal Naveen, a lanky computer systems engineer.

Both guys love “Star Trek,” despite, as they tell it, years of disappointment and betrayal. The fact is, “Star Trek” isn’t really on in India, not anymore. The original series began airing here in 1984, and Doordashan (the government-owned channel) is showing those tired episodes still. A single season of “The Next Generation” was broadcast on Star Plus, a satellite channel, in 1994, but the series was never renewed.

“I was heartbroken when it ended,” laments Amjad.

“If they showed all 179 ‘Next Generation’ episodes, we would watch for 179 days,” confirms Naveen. “Continuously.”

“But even if it was on television every day, the people who loved it wouldn’t start fan clubs,” Naveen adds hastily. “Indians simply don’t start fan clubs for foreign things. If it’s something Indian, we’ll be going crazy. We’re a very proud country.”

“That is why,” Amjad cautions me, “there may be loads of ‘Star Trek’ fans in India but you will find no fan clubs, conventions or magazines.”

The fact is, however, that — unlike in Pakistan, Japan or even Russia — there are not “loads” of “Star Trek” fans in the world’s largest democratic nation. And there’s a good reason why. Over the past 10 years, the Indian subcontinent has leapfrogged into the digital age. The awkward growing stage Americans went through — from punch cards and magnetic tape to Kaypros and 300-baud modems — barely happened here at all. India jumped, in a single decade, from being a country where you could hardly get your hands on a pocket calculator to a nation where many urban kids are growing up with Quake, Doom and the World Wide Web.

As a result of this infogap, “Star Trek” is basically ignored by Indian adults, who remain addicted to their cheesy soap operas and Bollywood musicals. Yet the show’s main potential audience, kids aged 12 to 20 — India’s new cyber-sophisticates — find the interminable reruns of old episodes like “Amok Time” and “Arena” hopelessly out of date.

Still, despite what Naveen and Amjad said, I’m not one to give up hope. There has to be a fan club somewhere, even if it’s a secret society, hidden behind a code name, meeting in rat-infested cellars below Bangalore’s PC-board assembly rooms.

I have one more hunch. Inside the NASA pub, images of blast-offs, space walks and the Earth from orbit gleam through illuminated portholes; the tabletops are perched on rocket-legs. “The Earth is the cradle of mankind,” a bronze plaque on the wall proclaims, “but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” Surely whoever designed this place would know what I was after.

NASA was the brainchild, I learned, of an architect and amateur pilot named Tom Thomas. His schedule is frantic, but he agrees to meet me briefly in his office. Drawings of a huge medieval castle are spread out on his desk. They’re plans, he tells me, for a madly ostentatious new shopping center, currently under construction near Bangalore Airport.

Thomas, a bearded and distinguished-looking 53, has been building micro-light aircraft for years. His teenage dream was to become a pilot, but his older brother talked him into a more down-to-earth vocation. He still has doubts about his career choice: “When I fly,” Thomas admits ruefully, “the world becomes believable to me somehow.”

Thomas is one of the few adults here who might have become a die-hard Trekker, but he echoes the usual complaint: “The version they show here is ancient,” he remarks with disgust. “I watched it for a while and thought, hey, this is like watching Lucille Ball.”

“Listen,” he says frankly. “I’ll tell you why you’re not finding legions of ‘Star Trek’ fans in India. It’s simple: The working class people here need to come home and relax with a drama they can relate to. ‘Star Trek’ succeeds in societies that have already achieved basic levels of satisfaction. Where the food’s on the table. Where clothes are in the cupboard and the car’s outside. Then, they’re willing to watch the next step. ‘Star Trek’ is certainly the next step. Our next step is still getting that food on the table.”

“And building castles,” I remark.

Thomas rocks back in his seat. “Well, I suppose we all have our dreams,” he laughs. “Back in the 1960s, during the heyday of the space program, I was dying to be an astronaut. I was sure that, if I made a million bucks somehow, I’d be able to take a trip, fly around in a rocket ship. But those days are gone.” He grins sheepishly. “Now I have to be content with building bars like NASA — and using rocket fins as table legs.”

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Jeff Greenwalds latest book, "Future Perfect: How 'Star Trek' Conquered Planet Earth," was recently released in paperback by Penguin. More Jeff Greenwald.

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