M.G. Vassanji reflects on syncretic cultures and the enduring afterlives of colonialism in a conversation with Professor Nishat Zaidi and Professor Dilip Menon, moderated by Steven George.
Introduction
M. G. Vassanji is a celebrated novelist, memoirist, and short story writer whose works explore the interconnected histories of East Africa, India and Canada. A Member of the Order of Canada, he is regarded as one of the most important South Asian African diasporic writers in contemporary literature. Vassanji is a two-time winner of Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize, receiving it in 1994 for The Book of Secrets and in 2003 for The In-between World of Vikram Lall. He also won the Governor General’s Prize for nonfiction in 2009, the Commonwealth First Book Prize (Africa) in 1990, the Harbourfront Festival Prize, the Bressani Prize and the Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts in 2015. His novel The Assassin’s Song was shortlisted for several major literary awards, while Nostalgia became a finalist for CBC’s Canada Reads. His major novels include The Gunny Sack, No New Land, The Book of Secrets, Amriika, The In-between World of Vikram Lall, The Assassin’s Song, The Magic of Saida, Nostalgia, A Delhi Obsession, and Everything There Is. Vassanji has also written important nonfiction works such as A World Within: Rediscovering India, And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa, Mordecai Richler and Nowhere, Exactly: Essays on Identity and Belonging. His writings have been translated into numerous languages and are widely studied for their engagement with postcolonial history.
Interview
Nishat Zaidi: Today, I feel privileged to have with us none other than M.G. Vassanji, or Moyez Ghulam Hussein Vassanji, an internationally acclaimed writer, of course. He was born in 1950 in Kenya in a family of East African Asians and raised in Tanzania. He attended MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in nuclear physics before moving to Canada as a post-doctoral fellow in 1978. From 1980 to 1989, he was a research associate at the University of Toronto. During this period, he developed a keen interest in Indian literature and history, co-founded and edited a literary magazine, and began writing fiction. His fame as a writer began in 1989, when he published his first novel, The Gunny Sack, which to this day is celebrated for its nuanced treatment of India, Africa, Canada, transoceanic connections, movement of men and materials across spaces, and linguistic and national boundaries. Not surprisingly, the book won a regional Commonwealth Award in 1990. Ever since then, there has been no looking back for M.G. Vassanji. He is the author of nine novels, two collections of short stories, a travel memoir about India, a memoir about East Africa, and several biographies. He is the twice winner of the Giller Prize for the Best Work of Fiction in Canada, the Governor General’s Prize, and many others. It’s not possible to list his accomplishments here. His 2007 novel, The Assassin’s Song, was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize. I wonder if any one of us who has read the novel, and I’m sure most of us have read it, can ever deny the overpowering influence of this novel. I also taught this novel for many years to MA students. His works have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Portuguese, Spanish, and so many languages of the world. He has written introductions to edited works, and he has also written the introduction to the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi.
So, what are you, M.G. Vassanji?
No, this is not a question to you; it’s the title of his forthcoming collection of short stories. Thank you for taking out time and coming to us. What an extraordinary trajectory of life, vocations, and locations you have been affiliated with. Without much ado, we can start the conversation and we can begin at the beginning, as you know, in The Gunny Sack, Salim’s teacher tells him. In The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, you write that it was poverty at home that pushed Indians across the ocean to Africa. But surely there is that wanderlust, the itch in the sole, and the hankering of the soul, that puffs out the sail for the journey into the totally unknown. In your novels, you have related medieval Indian Ocean migrations to colonial and postcolonial migrations. Do you have any thoughts on how an Indian Ocean history of migrations has contributed to the making of the modern globalized world? Do you think history has shaped the modern world? What are your views about this, as your novels keep going back to these roots, from history to myth? How do you think that medieval history shaped this modern world or contributed to the creation of the globalized world?
M.G. Vassanji: I look at people as individuals. My stories are about people, so, you know, in terms of contributing to any large-scale movement, it’s just by existing and being who they are and being in the part of the world to which they have moved. By being in East Africa, they have contributed to life in East Africa. By moving to the West, they have contributed here and, for me, it’s hard to see people as a novelist as more than just individuals. It’s only when you move away from the novel and look back at what you have written that you see maybe, you know, it could be a part of a global movement, but everyone is, in a sense, having come from somewhere and being in a place, contributed to the place and in the places where they live. And I think that is what I think in terms of contribution. If you look in East Africa, there are people who became cabinet ministers and important intellectuals. In Canada, you have the mayor of one city. In England, you have the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was the son of a miner in Kenya, and so on. But, you know, in terms of ten years down the road, who might remember them? I think, in terms of contributions, it is just people being where they are and, in minute ways, adding to what we are and to humanity.
Dilip Menon: I think it’s interesting what you said because what you’re saying is, instead of thinking of the big great forces of History with a capital H, you’re looking at individuals, you’re looking at their movements and the ways in which all of these lives come together in order to create these bigger histories that we know of as also individual achievements, you know. The Indian who is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, no greater irony of the after-empire there can be. What I’d actually like to follow up on is this: if one is looking at the Indian Ocean world, as Nishat Zaidi said, and these movements of people, does it make sense to think with nations and national histories anymore? What do you feel?
M.G. Vassanji: But for me, of course, I feel that, ironically, that’s how the world has gone, becoming more and more rigid. The more independent we become, the more knowledge we have, the stricter the boundaries we put around ourselves. So even with the use of the internet and global communication, you find that people use the very instrument of the internet to communicate with people who think like them, so basically putting walls around them, and this I find personally not to my taste. I find the fact very disturbing that we come out into the world in Canada, or Australia, or the US, and they reach out to each other because they, in one example, belong to a small community. It may not be more than a hundred thousand. That’s what we have become, nations in India and Pakistan, stricter and stricter boundaries, more hatred, close to the brink of war. In other places, you know that before there was fluidity in our identities. We did not identify as one exclusively, or, you know, one to the exclusion of the other. That’s what we have become and that, of course, for me, coming from my background, is antithetical.
Dilip Menon: This is something that, you know, what you pointed out, this fluidity, and I think it’s a wonderful word to think with also because Nishat and I have been engaged in this larger project, she in literature and me in history, trying to think about histories on the ocean, histories of the ocean, and it’s been difficult, as you said, to pin down identities, territories, as this is part of the conversation we were having with Amitav Ghosh and Yvonne Adhiyambo Owuor. But one central idea in your work and in the title of your book The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, I think it’s a wonderful phrase to think with. You know, where one lives one’s life in between places, between the water and the land, between nations, between races, and so what I want to ask you is around this word itself, this idea of being in-between, on the threshold, between places, between races. You might be familiar with the Indian mythological figure King Trishanku, who is suspended in an in-between space. It’s a very potent metaphor, and a literary critic has actually referred to this when writing about you. It’s central to your work. I think what we would like to hear from you more is how does one think about this idea of belonging, because belonging is so central to our idea of being human, of being rooted, and so on. In all your work, this experience of belonging is related to the question of non-belonging, or, in fact, it is being in-between and non-belonging that is actually a very strong belonging, as it were. So it’s kind of a paradox, and it’s a wonderful idea to think with. I’m just wondering if you could speak to us about that.
M.G. Vassanji: It is a very painful concept for people. My background or my experience because, you know, when I think about it, wherever I go again in this part of the universe, I’m always an alien or a foreigner or the other, wherever I go. Pakistan, Africa, even in Canada and the United States. And I’ll give you an example of what I think of as belonging. Nothing that I can actually achieve, but I was about twenty-two or twenty-five years ago at the home of a friend of mine in India and I observed that, you know, before she left she went to the cabinet and did a small puja and left. I was struck by that. I’ve never forgotten that. It was like to have the sense of she was praying to a god who, at least in people’s beliefs, has been there for thousands of years, at least two thousand years. And she comes from a country where you can go to a site and say, “Oh, Lord Rama passed by here,” or “Sita was here.” I can never say that, you know? I wish I was there but, of course, I can’t and, of course, in my own life I have a freedom which I enjoy. But that sense of belonging, just complete to the land, to the sounds, you know, to every symbol that is around you, that you feel it. I’ve been here, my parents have been here, we have been here thousands and thousands of years, whether that’s true or not. It’s profound and, for someone who has never belonged, it creates a sense of longing. But I would say that this sense of belonging has created a lot of wars and so on.
Dilip Menon: We rue our sense of belonging and you rue your sense of non-belonging.
Nishat Zaidi: Just wondering, belonging is also non-belonging because you’re tracing not only individual roots but the roots of the community. For example, the Parsi community, the way they have travelled from the Middle East to India, from India to Kenya, from Kenya to African countries, and from there to Canada. So, is non-belonging also a kind of belonging?
M.G. Vassanji: It’s an identity. I don’t know if it’s a belonging because if I go to Africa, when I land in Africa, I won’t be able to speak in Swahili right away. I have a familiarity with the people, which, after forty years in Canada, I don’t have in the same way. I work out of my house, I behave in a certain way with the people, and there are certain forms. If I’m in Africa, I’m totally different, you know. My accent, speech, which is my diction and speech, is really different. If I go to India, I have the same problem there and I’m probably considered a foreigner there, but India has been very kind to me. There’s a sense of certain relief in knowing that all these problems exist, especially for a person of my background. There is a familiarity in the air, in the sounds, the way I talk to people. It’s just the way I am. I’ll give an example. When I was travelling around in Transylvania with a friend of mine, who is from Kenya, and we were at the town Moazab, and we reached a crossing, a crossroads. We were loitering at the crossroads when a woman came and said, “Coffee?” So we went in and sat on a broken bench and ordered two cups of coffee. A child was playing there and it very much reminded me of myself and the woman reminded me of my mother working in a shop. I looked over at the street and there was a man outside and I told myself, “How much do I belong to this place?” I could walk to anybody and talk to them as if I’d never left but then I also have to remind myself that I have a bank account in Toronto. So it’s this sense of, for me, it’s never been easy. Other people laugh it out, to hell with this, and never go back, but for me, it’s not been easy.
Nishat Zaidi: You know you remind me of what Meena Alexander also says in her memoir on life. Her experiences have been similar. She grew up in Sudan and, like you said, the moment you land in Delhi, the accent disappears and Hindi comes to my tongue, and the moment I land in Kerala, Malayalam automatically comes to my tongue and something like that. Before you, we had Yvonne Adhiyambo Owuor, and she very rightly pointed out that while the movement of Asians and Africans to Europe is seen as migration, the movement of Europeans to Africa is never registered in a similar vein. So how do you respond to this colonial, imperial view of Africa and Asia that seems to persist even today? In your book And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa, you have referred to this situation. So how do you think writers can deal with this or set this straight? You are a writer who has been travelling, as you describe in your collection of stories, between the streets of Dar es Salaam, Toronto, and Delhi. So how do writers and novelists deal with this situation, or segregate this narrative distortion that has been prevalent? Do you see writers who are not necessarily pedagogic but still have to deal with it? What are your views about it?
M.G. Vassanji: It’s just words because we all knew that the British are migrants, but because they came from the ruling class and capital, they called themselves settlers, but they were migrants here and I don’t think anyone would deny that. The only difference was that they would immediately go back to England and be accepted as before. I might not be accepted. I was harassed every time I passed through London and in Boston. When I was there studying, if I would walk around for half an hour or one hour, they would question me as if I were without a visa and not studying at the university in the United States. I would want to go out and look for a job. But I think they were settlers and some of them are still there and their attachment to the land cannot be questioned. And now they are part of the ruling class because they are from the West. So I think it’s something that I don’t worry about. We know where they come from. It’s just that they come from the wealthiest part of the globe and still have great influence there.
Dilip Menon: Yes. And I think this idea of globalization that a lot of people speak about, that the world has become without borders, we all know that there are no borders for some and many borders for others and that if you have the right skin color, or the right passport, you’re able to travel much more freely. When you speak about this harassment that you experienced as a young man coming to London, do you feel that even now, as you travel through these various spaces, because I’m assuming you do travel between Canada, Africa, back home, and India and so on, is crossing one border necessarily easier for you than crossing another border?
M.G. Vassanji: No, I think everywhere I go, it’s just suspicion. I went to Africa, they welcomed me at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, but you may also face resentment. “Oh, you escaped.” The same in Kenya, “You escaped,” or “You are the former colonizer,” or whatever. In Britain, I don’t know about now, it’s just that with a Canadian passport, you are treated better, which is why many people accepted Canadian passports. The best years of my life were spent in Canada. But it’s always a worry because the people at the border are like dogs. They may not reflect the people in the house, but they are there to bark at you and you have to live with that. It’s not easy!
Dilip Menon: Actually this is one of the things that puts the brakes on all these academic theorizings, in which one speaks about fluidity and the ocean as a space of movement, only the land being divided into national territories and borders. So travel is difficult for certain people and it is not difficult for other people. I think when you write your novels, one of the things that does come across is this distinction that you make between identity and belonging, that one has an identity and that identity is a national identity or it is marked by the passport that you hold. Here, you are M.G. Vassanji with a Canadian passport, which allows you greater freedom of movement. But this question of where you belong and whether you still have that nostalgic belonging is not necessarily connected to that identity, or it’s something you move between, back and forth.
M.G. Vassanji: By identity, you mean citizenship? Yes, I have many identities. We grew up with a purely communal identity. Not in the Indian sense, but what you call jaati, belonging to the Ismaili Khoja community. That was our identity. Nothing else, from a small town, Dar es Salaam. Of course, now it’s a big city. Then we absorbed the national identity. We were Tanzanians, and only later were the other identities imposed on us. You were basically a victim also of global politics.
Dilip Menon: That’s true. Actually, can I ask you something about your location in Canada right now? I mean, because of course, this is a place where you have been for a large part of your life. And there are many writers like Michael Ondaatje from Sri Lanka and Rohinton Mistry from India, and there is seemingly a different kind of politics in Canada. Because in the United States of America, you would be classified as a South Asian writer or an African writer, and you write within certain frameworks and to certain constituencies and so on. Has your Canadian location allowed you a greater freedom to write about your experience? Not merely that of any particular community, be it Kenyan or Indian, or multiple hyphenated identities. Has the location, Canada, allowed you to speak to something more universal than when you were a writer in the United States, where this question of identity and identity politics is much stronger?
M.G. Vassanji: There were several questions, so I lost track, but I think you’re right.
Dilip Menon: Are you freer in Canada to write as you wish than in the States?
M.G. Vassanji: But I’ve evolved over the years. When I wrote my first novel, the situation here was such that I didn’t feel too comfortable, although I was editing a literary magazine basically to promote the new kind of writing that was emerging. But when I finished my first novel, which I wrote with complete abandon, for me, if anything, it was whether it would be published and read in Africa. So I didn’t even submit it to a Canadian publisher because I knew they would not understand it; they would not publish it. So I submitted it to the African Writers Series, which at that time was Heinemann in England. And I also knew that one of the early editors of that series was Chinua Achebe, who had come to our school. For me, it was a big moment when they said they would publish it. It was only later, when the Commonwealth Prize was announced and people were asking why this guy had to go to England to get published, and other people were coming out, that things started changing. So my second novel was accepted in Toronto, and they would put it in an ad in the newspaper, so that Islam could appear to move much more freely than it could. So things changed, and at least some of us who were lucky could write about what we thought was important. There is no point raising a flag of Canada, as some people try to do today, to get accepted. So there was that freedom. But we see even in the United States that this also has come about; local politics and global politics also play a part in how you are accepted. So for me, Canada is a small country. I came from a small country, a small community, and that of course hampers me in many ways. If I was in England or the United States, I’d be a part of a bigger enterprise. But it has also given me freedom. I feel lucky, but there are many others, because I edited this literary magazine. It gave rise to a small publishing company, which we eventually called Mawenzi House, Mawenzi being the second peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. So we have not forgotten also to add to the publishing company its identity as an alternative publisher. And you realize there are people who write important books whose works are of no interest. So, you know, it’s like I’ve been lucky, but others have not been lucky. But the situation is much better than it ever was.
Nishat Zaidi: Right. It’s actually about the politics of publishing and marketing, the market for books. And before that, you referred to politics with citizenship. So I want to take you back to our theme, which is the Indian Ocean. Historians of all kinds who have written about Indian Ocean spaces have described the cosmopolitan nature of Indian Ocean spaces. But your works do not necessarily endorse this view. The boundaries of the nation-state, class barriers, they seem to be imposed on, carried across the space of the ocean, as people who migrated carry their biases along with them. So Asians in Africa continue to nurture racist views about Africans, and the local population in Africa nurtures or mistrusts Asians who migrated there. For example, Idi Amin, in his wahi or dream that he had, in which Allah spoke to him that Asians should be shunned. So can we say, in a way, that the imagination of a cosmopolitanism born of movement and living within multiple geographies always contends with land-centric nationalist aspirations in your work? I mean, do you think that territorial politics is too powerful to be ignored, or too overwhelming?
M.G. Vassanji: The national question is what I dealt with earlier when I said about how I see people in India and how they belong totally to the soil. But in terms of caste and the other divisions from India that we brought, they were there in a much milder form. They were not as strict as they are in India, or have been in India, because for us, we just knew they were Hindus and Muslims, but we played pretty good together. We went to the same schools, and when we met in Toronto, we would go ahead with each other like friends. The store we buy Chevrolet from in Toronto had someone inside from the place that I went to in Tanzania. They were not as strict. Some castes may have had this problem, but we never knew about it. It was only after coming to Toronto and then going to India that I realized that some of it is distinct. And then reading, because through my work as an editor you read about other castes and how they were treated, Dalit writers, Valmiki and others, which we didn’t have there. We had the Kumhars; they made the pottery. All we knew is that they were poor. Nobody said, “You shun them,” or “Don’t talk to them,” or anything like that. So it was a gentler form of casteism that remained, and I think it remained probably to retain our identities. But as soon as we were out of East Africa with that baggage, people here intermarry and all kinds. It’s not, in fact, people who come from India are appreciated when they come here. So that distinction is not there. Racism was there basically because Indians are racists, even in India, we know that. I was reading the Mahabharata, you know, ten volumes, and in volume eight, by the end of it, he talks about different colors and different castes, how the Shudras came about and how they are black and so on. We have the ancient baggage. We should not forget that this doesn’t go one way. We are not superior. Other races too had opinions about us. When I did my national service in Tanzania, the Africans had names for us, manjis and all little names. Anyway, I think racism is vicious when it’s associated with power and prestige. That is where European racism was different from ordinary racism, like the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper may be racist, but the people who come to the shops, now they sit around and some of them are from the deep interior and they don’t take showers. And we live with that and we learned the language, especially the boys. For us, I didn’t think of it as a lasting form of discrimination. As I said, it was for us almost unknown, to be honest, to my community. We are remnants. When I now think about it, there was this group of people among us, then I realize maybe they came from a lower caste. As I say on my heart, because I don’t think of them as enemies or as different. I was not there during Partition, my father was not there; it was rather imposed on us.
Dilip Menon: But I suppose, you know, one of the things that you’re trying to say, which is great and very interesting as well, is that when people live cheek-by-jowl with each other, they share intimate prejudices about each other as well. It’s like I come from Kerala. Kerala is on the southwest coast; it’s largely cosmopolitan. There are no known instances of communal riots, as they’re called, no deep-seated animosities between religious communities. But when you live in Kerala, you’re quite aware of the fact that people share a lot of these prejudices about other communities. They talk about each other in terms of particular characteristics and so on. So I think what you’re probably trying to say is that when one thinks about the intimate relations between Africans and Indians where you grew up, they had prejudices about each other, but they didn’t necessarily hate one another or look down on one another. Is that what you mean?
M.G. Vassanji: It is in Tanzania, I think, and I can say that on the coast. On the coast there was almost a digression. Here in Kenya there was, because some of the Indians directly came post-independence, so they took that prejudice with them. And they were upper-class lawyers and so on, and the British were stronger there. So if you wanted any kind of business, you sided with the British and English. So in Kenya, especially in Nairobi where I was born, things were different. It was racism. But I’m pretty sure the Africans, they’ve changed.
Nishat Zaidi: Yeah, I mean before Dilip asks his question, I just want to add to this, you refer to the Mahabharata, and we noticed that mythological and historical registers tend to coincide in your writings. So, I mean, how do you reconcile the two?
M.G. Vassanji: Well, for me, that is people from Indian heritage. You don’t seem to understand. For me, my roots are in Gujarat. I would say that deeper than anyone from Punjab because they probably were more polluted by the Greeks and the people who came there, but my roots are in Jamnagar, Gujarat. So, you know, my daughter’s identity didn’t die. India is my heritage, ancient heritage. So I don’t see the Mahabharata as belonging to them or to this caste or to that person. I read it because I find it interesting, and I think I should read it because so much is talked about it, and I’m learning a lot. You know, when I was in Vegas, I took two years of Sanskrit because I was trying to understand my own Gujarati heritage. And I thought I would try to find out where some of the songs we sang came from and what they mean. So for me that was important. But, you know, because of the divisions we have created in the 20th century, it’s either this or that. I don’t think that’s correct. In the epigraph to my novel The Assassin’s Song it is definitely neither this nor that. We do this or that, and I’m neither.
Dilip Menon: True. Actually, since you’ve mentioned The Assassin’s Song, it allows me to segue into my question, because I was going to ask you about that. It’s my favorite novel of yours, and I suppose a lot of people have read your work. There is a particular power to it, and you observed in interviews and elsewhere that The Assassin’s Song is actually closest to your heart as well. And the novel, for those who haven’t read it, takes us from 13th-century Gujarat to 1960s United States of America and 1980s Canada before returning to Gujarat in 2002, the site of the Hindu nationalist pogrom against Muslims. The narrator, Karsan Dargawalla’s father, is the keeper of a Sufi shrine, and also a guardian of the bol, a mantra of arrival, harmony, and reconciliation. This is a question that I want to ask you; it’s a specific question. Can you speak to us about the question of being Muslim? And this question of memory and return? And I know you’ve been saying a lot about this collective heritage of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and the multiple texts, which because of their sheer longevity are available to everybody in India across communities. But in The Assassin’s Song, you address the particular moment in India’s history which then brings back this question of being Muslim and the question of return to India. And there is a longing in this novel which actually spoke to me. There is poignancy and yearning. They are very different from the early V.S. Naipaul’s work, An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization, where there is a sense of distance, the sense of, “Oh, this is not what I expected to find”, a certain sense of horror. So this question of both belonging and this question of being Muslim, and being reminded that the composite culture that you spoke about just a few minutes ago was somehow under threat in 2002, why did that become the focus, in some sense, of that point of return?
M.G. Vassanji: First, some clarification. It was not a Sufi shrine but a syncretist shrine. Syncretism was very common. Even now it exists, but it isn’t in focus. Mahatma Gandhi’s mother’s family came from a community called the Pranami sect. This is not spoken about because, in today’s India, you have either this or that. The Pranami sect had verses of the Quran on the wall of the temple. Ours was even less of that. It was syncretistic. There’s a shrine, which I visited about three times, outside Ahmadabad. It belongs to many people. Hindus go worship there, the Shias worship there, and the Sunnis go worship there. It belongs to a Pir called Pir Imam Shah in our community. The keeper of the shrine is a Patel, a Hindu from the Lohara caste, from which my people come, and they call him Imam Shah Baba. This is the same one. So the story has changed a bit. There is a bit of politics going on. Everybody goes to worship there and the prayer there is in Gujarati. Some of these we call ghinans, like bhajans. They’re in old Gujarati. They’re saying them and they’ve changed them, we’re saying them and we have changed them, I’m sure. Other people also. The identity was Khoja. So when I go there, when I go to Gujarat, especially Kathiawar, and I say I’m a Khoja, they say that they know the Khoja people because that’s a jaati. It’s only later that the Islamic imposition was made because after Partition you are either this or that. Well, I have refused to buy that, as I say, because I’m not a religious person, but I have spirituality that came from hearing these bhajans or ghinans since childhood. Those were the ones that I tried to understand when I studied Sanskrit and Prakrit and tried to deal with in The Assassin’s Song. So The Assassin’s Song belongs in a sect. The founder of the sect came from somewhere in the Near East. After that, the name got changed, the stories got changed, the mythology built up. Communities started forming around it, which you find in all of these shrines, and for the poor people it means everything. What I imagined was what would it be like to grow up there and then go out into the wider world, where it no longer has the same hold on you as it had once, and then also a sense of responsibility. What responsibilities do you have to the people for whom it means so much and for whom you mean so much? And of course, it’s an analogy or allegory of our responsibility to the poor countries we come from. Because for me, it is leaving Africa, where I thought I would always return and go to teach. It has left a deep impact.
Nishat Zaidi: Yes, thank you for pointing out the syncretist culture. I grew up in a small town of Uttar Pradesh, and this is a nearly similar culture that I was raised in where Akhand Ramayan recitation was a part of my oral world and the dargahs that we went to were visited by Hindus and people from different castes and communities. So yes, this is the world that we were raised in, and it’s strange that those things are crumbling down. That takes me to the question of language in your work. You know, speaking of syncretic culture, the language registers that you use are enmeshed with registers from multiple languages. Gujarati is there, Kachhi is there, Punjabi, Swahili, German, English, Dutch, Portuguese. In fact, your novel The Gunny Sack opens with an epigraph which contains a three-line excerpt from a classic Swahili poem by Saiyad Abdullah Bin Nasir and six lines in English from Yeats’ poem “Vacillation.” So this mixing, this plurality of languages, discourses, and voices coexisting within the framework of the text reflects the kind of long process of mingling of people and cultures in the Indian Ocean region. So, because you come from, as you mentioned, Gujarat, where there have been migrations and mixing of people and cultures, could you tell us about these connections between migrations and history in the Indian Ocean and the question of a gunny sack of memory and languages that your novels keep returning to?
M.G. Vassanji: There was a mixing, obviously, of languages and foods. Very important. If you look at a cookbook from Kenya that recently came out and how it began, that is another condition. In East Africa, many young people think chapati was from Africa, a kind of concoction. At least a few years ago, at any bus stop you would find a woman making chapati. But everyone is different, their chapatis are different from what they make at home. The languages just happen, you know? It’s not ever planned or anything like that by the people, or by the novelist. It is the language you belong to, that you spoke, and it has idioms from all the other languages that were around you. And of course, as you grow older and you move out here for a long time, you find that in the home country, in the country you come from, the language has changed a bit more, new concepts have arrived. Last time I was there, “pro-constitution” was very much in vogue because a new constitution was being debated. And it was not a word that I would have come across as a young man or a boy. Here in Toronto, you find yourself suddenly breaking into English, even if you’re just speaking Kachhi with your spouse. But when I speak with my cousin, who’s also from Kathiawar or whatever, from Nairobi, I automatically speak Gujarati. So it just becomes a wonderful part of what we are. Although one also misses the sense that people who’ve grown up with single or two languages, like the British, have knowledge of the literary tradition of the place that I never had. I marvel at how they suddenly break off into Shakespeare or North Indians. Suddenly you’re walking and someone behind you is reciting Ghalib. It’s wonderful. I can’t do that. What I can do is some of the Swahili songs that were all around us and we used to hear from some of the restaurants. Those were the sounds I grew up with.
Nishat Zaidi: Yes, I mean, when a writer writes about it, obviously the writer writes about it consciously and it’s a part of your being as a person, which translates into fictional text.
M.G. Vassanji: You mean there is some business to be conscious of being honest in dialogue. For me it is like a painting. It is unreal, and it only sounds real. See, if the syntax is arranged a certain way, if certain words appear and they cannot be avoided. So it’s just to be honest to the environment, to the people and the way they speak. And this has been done by Jewish writers. If you look at Jewish writing, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a beautiful thing. Even before, you find that people speak English differently. There’s a distinct cultural touch about it. They put some Yiddish words, and we do the same thing. It does not mean we invented it, and I think the Jews did it before.
Nishat Zaidi: Yeah, but as a writer, I mean, are you also trying to use this to make sense of the past? I mean, do you approach language also as a material object through which you are trying to release those hidden meanings and try to get to the basics and to the bottom of reality, past truth?
M.G. Vassanji: I think, for me and many others, it has to be unconscious. Once you start analyzing what you’re writing, you’re finished. This is why a lot of academics, if you’ll forgive me, find it so hard to write novels because they’re criticizing others. Whereas, when I write, I don’t care what they do. I never ask myself, if I’m writing, will I be understood? And I have to make a decision. One is tea versus some kind of drink. Sometimes what we do is put a word or phrase or something and then at the end, in English, give the meaning, but it has to follow the rhythm. Little tricks like that. But you know, it has to come from within, otherwise you would not even write. It is like labor. For me, it’s not like labor but a compulsion. I have to do it. It’s the only way it comes out. Even when you give birth, you can’t say, “I want to give birth to someone who’s fair or dark or has blue eyes.” You just give birth.
Dilip Menon: Certain things that you said are extremely interesting. One is this thing when you said that when you write, you have to be honest, and that when you write a sentence which incorporates another language while writing in English, you have to be faithful to the rhythms of English as it was spoken, and faithful to the rhythms of the other language as it is spoken. You also said that when you go back, each time you go back, the language is also changing. Swahili is changing, you come to India and Gujarati is changing. New words are coming and new ideas are coming up. So do you find yourself caught up in this sense of a language which was the language that you left behind, in some sense, when you write?
M.G. Vassanji: What I’ve written is about a certain time period, so it makes sense. But it was really such a language that in the rhythm of the language, there isn’t much change in its aura. So if I go in my travels in Tanzania, when I went by bus, I would go to a place and they’d say, “Where do you come from?” I’d say, “Uhuru Street, Dar es Salaam,” and they don’t question me because of the way I speak. They know he’s obviously local. But it’s only in India. I understand Hindi, but then my friends speak Hindi they learned in school. It’s literary Hindi. I can’t speak literary Hindi; I don’t understand it. In the case of literary Swahili with new kinds of words, because for me, I know that. But the rhythm of the language, how people speak on the street, how they shout to each other, that’s the main crux. I stopped writing about the present period because I don’t write about something that I’m not intimate with. So when I write about now, I may have a character, as in my last novel, that comes from Kenya, then goes to India. So I can’t write about what Kenya is like now unless I stay there one more year. So writing also changes, right?
Dilip Menon: It was a very academic question on my part, I realize. We all have our failings. But yes, the thing that you said about the fact that people speak one language, there is this sense of a tradition, a sense of a canon, a sense of belonging. They could be somebody who had grown up entirely in English, speaks only English, and has access to Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc. But I think, you know, when I read your work and when we think about other polyglots, and you speak three languages at least, right? Swahili, Gujarati, and English, and maybe other languages that I don’t know of. So it’s a much richer life of the imagination that you can summon up than if you were in possession of only one language. Do you not see this as something that is a distinct advantage that you possess?
M.G. Vassanji: Advantage, yes, but we live in a world which we have not made. And it’s a world dominated by English and a world dominated by the West, by Western civilization. And I live in the West. If I lived in East Africa and wrote only in Swahili, I might not be so advantaged. But I would still be grateful and comfortable, even though at times Swahili is changing with English. So it is an advantage. But as I said, there’s this constraint by where you are, not only globally, but also nationally. But in my new collection of stories, I wrote stories where two older men are quoting old Hindi songs to each other. And I used totally Hindi, and I would explain sometimes, but then each line reminds them of their mother they used to go to the cinema with. Some of it is, of course, as the narrator finds out, fused memories that are made up. But it’s a story that is made up of just lines from songs because I had thought I had to do it once in my lifetime. And I do what I want to do.
Dilip Menon: I know exactly what you mean because a lot of our affective relationships as Indians with each other are woven through Hindi film songs. And an Indian who’s grown up in Kenya or anywhere else, immediately, you can sing the songs that are part of that collective heritage. Well, I’d like to ask you one final question from my side before Nishat closes off and we go on to questions from the audience, who I’m sure are eager to ask you even more questions. I just wanted to ask you about the very pointedly titled A Place Within, which is, at one level, an account of your travel to India, rediscovering, as you call it, and it kind of resonates with Nehru’s Discovery of India. Just going into the ideas of expectations and longing, the idea of engaging with the homeland of one’s ancestors. However, there’s also a sense of distance, and that’s something that you have spoken about earlier as well. But I just want to ask you something connected to that. You said in an interview that in the fiction of the Indian diaspora, you get upper middle-class stories, but not the heart and soul of India. The real stories, you say, are told in Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam and so on and so forth. I couldn’t agree more. Since I speak Malayalam and I come from Kerala, I find this speaks to me. But could you speak to us about this aspiration to authenticity? This distinction that you make between some who have early access to a middle-class life, they write in English, and those who write in the regional languages who somehow manage to capture something of the soul of India, the essence. Is there a real India? Is there a real Africa, since literature is the basis of imagination?
M.G. Vassanji: When it comes to authenticity, perhaps people object to it and maybe they’re right. But if you’re writing in English, and your major publishers are in Britain or the United States, and if you’ve been educated in England, then it’s natural that your writing is somehow shaped by the expectations of your readership. Your language changes, the subjects change. I don’t think there’s anything else in the West, at least based on my experience there. There is a lot of interest in politics, for example India or Africa, or something of global interest: politics or corruption or anything drastic that’s going on that you can put your hand around from here. But the life, for example, of a family in a little town, or even a big town, doesn’t hold that much interest, I think, in the West. But let’s say the life of an ordinary person in Ontario, that’s the big thing here, you know? It says something, it gets published in The New Yorker. Yeah, and it does nicely or whatever. So you know, that’s the kind of life that is shown to be read about. It is my experience, you know. People can prove me wrong. But I find that when I read Indian literature, and mostly in translation these days, some of them are not good translations but you can still get an idea. So I read Mohammad Basheer, whom I was able to meet, another Punjabi author whose name I forgot, I think it was Krishna Sobti, and I’m reading the rest and editing. I just finished editing a translation of a Tamil book set in Sri Lanka. So those books, when I read them, and find the village life, and maybe it’s because of my own simple affairs, being from a humble home, they speak to me. For example, reading an Urdu story by Qurratulain Hyder. I don’t know the names of others, but I happened to have edited some as the editor of the literary magazine. I’ve seen a lot of Urdu stories. Somehow they do tend to be highly depressing. I kind of click with them. Whereas the stories written in English, of course they are for a certain audience, but maybe it is some form of bias, they often tend to deal with global politics or with exoticism. Once a person told me, this writer’s works have been sold to so many countries, they’ve been to so many countries and they are doing so well. Now she’s doing research in India, going back to look at all these yogis and elephants and so on. So, you know, you get the sense. I have an affinity for writing like Basheer’s and Krishna Sobti’s where I feel like the works touch the people.
Nishat Zaidi: Before I pass it on to Grace to take questions from the audience chat box, two more questions. Both questions are academic maybe, but I’m tempted to ask these questions since you mentioned your reading choices and the type of fiction that you read. Your novel The Gunny Sack has often been seen as kind of a mirror image of the book In an Antique Land. I’m just wondering, as a writer who has been affiliated with three continents and whose works have consistently engaged with entanglements of religion, geographies, memory, material objects, etc., how do you see your work vis-à-vis the works of other writers like Amitav Ghosh or Abdulrazak Gurnah, who have used this paradigm of the ocean in tackling these simple, intersected, complicated concerns. My second question is, we often talk about colonization, the impact of colonization, we’re obsessed with this subject, but your works also point towards the negative impact of decolonization. So I was just wondering if you’d like to tell us more about your views on decolonization.
M.G. Vassanji: Going back to just the first question, I know writers don’t necessarily read other writers. I have not read Amitav Ghosh, except his book In an Antique Land, which, by the way, I was asked to read because I had to interview him on stage here for a festival a long time ago. And I thought it was a marvelous book. It was an honest book in terms of his voice. I enjoyed it. But I’ve not read his other books. It’s the same case with Rohinton Mistry, even though I published one of his stories in a literary magazine a long time ago. Same with Ondaatje. I’ve read excerpts from him. So we don’t really read authors, I know, because we are so absorbed in our own work. There’s a lot of vanity involved, to be honest, to compare yourself. As soon as I read about another book, I read a review and I say, “What am I doing?” and go back to my own work. And you don’t want to be influenced by Naipaul, right? I read certain books by Naipaul, but then I kept away from him because, again, there was a certain resonance there, and I didn’t want to be influenced by anyone. I read his essays and I thought they were brilliant. I didn’t agree with them, but still they were good. So if anything, that’s easy to answer. I think they’ve not read me either. In terms of colonization, I think, you know, because colonization had a very profound impact on the people of my generation. I was brought up in a place which was considered a British territory and then Canada was still considered a British colony. We looked up to the British. I never faced any negative experiences. The teachers, the British teachers, were excellent teachers and we still remember them. But this feeling of a difference of race, of superior and inferior, it takes decades to go away, if it ever does. In fact, if anything, it makes you more bristling, you know? You look for racism and it’s not there, and when you’ve suffered a slight, you only discover it a day later. So that’s a very profound damaging impact that it has had. But I do realize that. I’m not one of those who blame the British for everything. If you are asking about corruption, you look at any African politician, big belly, and lots of money. Enough. What are we doing? You get on with it, you know. People have suffered. And I’ve been researching medieval India for my future work and you find that the wars were so savage, there was slavery there, they would enslave people by the tens of thousands. If you read the biography of either Nadir Shah or Timur Lang, and the amount of people they killed, they took away women and children as slaves. People have suffered. They moved on. So there is no point saying, “Oh, the British did that!” Forget about it. We are adults, you know.
Nishat Zaidi: No, but I was asking about the impact of decolonization that you talk about in your novels.
M.G. Vassanji: Decolonization is the same thing where you blame the colonists. I guess what you are saying is the same thing as Ngugi said about getting rid of the baggage of colonization. One, of course, is racism, how to get rid of the impact of racism. The other is because you can’t even get published or reviewed in English, and the other African writers don’t agree with writing in English. So we don’t understand it, and our grandchildren might fit in better than when we started. He said, get rid of italics for using Indian words, you know? We will put old Indian words in that language in writing and you find your own children don’t understand it. So it’s a very complex thing, decolonization. I think just being honest and independent is decolonizing. Changing names of cities and names of streets, I do to some degree agree that it is, of course, necessary. You know, when we had Queensway and Kingsway and at some point it is like, okay, enough. So we already did that in the first decade. Now what? Sixty years after Independence, damn it, I’ve been defending that you still blame the British. I don’t know, I mean, there’s some blame to be put there, but we should move on. India is a huge country. That’s a rich country.
Dilip Menon: We thank you so much. Thank you for that expansive sweep of your talk and also for leaving us with much to think about at the end. Even when one thinks about the deep wound on our lives, you know, the deep wound of colonialism, whether it’s in Asia and Africa. And it’s also time for us to think about the other histories that were happening at the time of colonialism, which allowed the movement of people from India to Africa, from India to Europe, and the huge diaspora that was created at the same time as colonialism happened. And that’s a space from which to write and think. So, thank you so much for joining us. And Nishat, any last words before we pass on to the audience?
Nishat Zaidi: Oh, I echo your thoughts, Dilip. Thank you so much, Dr. M.G. Vassanji. I mean, we expect writers to talk in the same language that academics are used to, or assume that writers should. So you have given us again a kind of different language, different grammar, and a different writerly perspective. With that, I pass it to the audience for questions.
Steven George: Thank you. I mean, extraordinary questions and magnificent answers. So now I will club a few questions together so that you can answer them together. So there is a question by T. Vijay Kumar. He asks how does this in-betweenness get reflected in the language of writing? The other question is by Madhuri Lehri. She asks what role the ocean plays as an in-between space for those who left the Indian shore as indentured labour.
M.G. Vassanji: The second question I remember. It’s obviously indentured labourers. In East Africa, most people came as traders, especially in Kenya. Some Punjabis came to work on the railway as indentured labourers. I don’t think the lives of Punjabis, if I end up dealing with that in my new book, were as negative as they were in the Caribbean, for in the Caribbean Indians arrived mostly as individuals. Whereas in East Africa they came as communities. That is why they are more conservative, but at the same time, more secure than in the Caribbean where people went as individuals. So they formed these bonds on the ships, which they called Jahajibai. So basically, people of the ship, and very quickly they evolved. A lot of them lost their language, a lot of them lost their faith, which some of them are now reclaiming. I happen to know a lot of them in Toronto and Canada where I have worked as an editor. So I know their stories, and some of the stories they tell are really tragic. If you look at Ismet Khan or the other writers who died earlier, and also Cyril Dabydeen, Neil Bissoondath, they write about broken homes, broken lives, abuse, and so on. So I don’t think that answers the question, but that is the difference in between where you go via the ocean across the world. Ocean people went across the ocean to Africa, which is a very short distance, or went around the Cape, or to the Caribbean. The first question was in-betweenness. It’s just between places in terms of how you speak, what you eat, even what you worship. Sometimes in terms of worship, they become more conservative the farther they go. This conservativeness in worship can be seen in East Africa. We found that my people came with bhajans or ghinans and went, “This is my community only. We came with this bhajan or ghinan.” I found that our heritage was much more intact than it had been preserved in the villages of Gujarat. I was amazed. I thought when I went there, I would find manuscripts and books, and you know, there’s nothing of the sort. Those are the differences. I don’t know how much that answers the question, but in-betweenness, as you have sometimes, you have to find it between us. You can’t pinpoint it. It is in food, it is in language, it’s in faith, it’s in family relations, how much you keep in touch with your family in Gujarat. I didn’t know any of them, and then I learned of one of my aunt’s relations in Jamnagar. And then I would hear from my grandmother stories that, you know, she came from Jamjodhpur, and my mother said it’s in India, in Bombay.
Steven George: Thank you, sir, for those answers. The first two questions were about in-betweenness. Now the next three questions are about belongingness. So the first question is by Richard Sharma. She says the way you described belongingness, I feel a strong resemblance of your experiences to that of Munir’s in A Delhi Obsession. Does the character metaphorically represent your predicaments? Then Monica asks, does the question of belonging relate to one’s cultural values? Then Ninu Kumar is asking, you mentioned that you have multiple identities. Has that in any way hindered your sense of belongingness?
M.G. Vassanji: Munir has to, in some degree, although I have painted him, I’ve made him. He comes from a more orthodox community, at least his grandfather was, and also he’s directly from Delhi, which is not my background. So I wanted to put some distance between me and him. But in the sense of his being a westernized Indian, he does reflect my beliefs that, you know, when you say “the Muslims,” the disease is by the Muslims. But, you know, what do you mean by “these Muslims”? Some Muslims? Really? I wasn’t there. So, in that sense, yes. And the second question, about belongingness to one’s cultural values. Well yes, belongingness to culture for me is fundamental. For some people, belonging to their faith is more fundamental. For me, the culture, the ethnicity, is more important than belongingness. I was deeply influenced by the songs that I heard in my childhood, which is what brought me here and kept me returning back to India, the first songs that spoke to me directly. And these are cultural values. They were all positive cultural values. We were taught to respect our sisters and respect our mothers and elders. So if my son would be speaking rudely, it would not be good to be rude to my mother. I said, you know, you are not able to talk to me like that. So there are certain values. We thought they were Indian values, and we did stick with them because we thought they were Indian. They’ve come from our community identity, that you respect your women, respect your daughters, and so on. And the third one was about multiple identities, whether they hindered my sense of belongingness. Well, initially I was really bothered. When I first finished university, when I went to college in Boston, I said, “What am I?” which later took me decades to realize was the wrong question because you are what you are. Everything that has gone into you is what you are. So, you know, I’m an African because I came from there. Once I was traveling by bus and I looked outside in the grass and I said, even the grass is me. And then, of course, the language, the language of Swahili, but also Kachhi and Gujarati, and how we speak. That, of course, is also my belonging. There have been many things which I could not accept, but only a few things. One of the things was violence, which I thought, this is not me. But there are some things which spoke to me, and I thought this is the spiritual homecoming. Africa was the physical homecoming of the memory of my childhood, and I’m drawn to my home. Because everywhere I go and roam, I know exactly where I’m going. I know the streets. I know everything that’s going on there, and I feel the safest there. So it’s not a hindrance, it is what I am. The thing is not to ask, but just to accept. It takes a long time. It took me a long time to come to that awareness.
Steven George: There are many questions, out of which you have answered a few in your extended discussions too. But I’ll ask a question which my co-scholar Grace asks. She says that you were trained as a nuclear scientist. How did you start writing stories?
M.G. Vassanji: How did I think about this question? Because, you know, you just write that the physicists have been violinists. Music and physics are relatively more abstract. But it’s not something like a job description, “Today, I will do this.” It just comes to you. So I remember as a child, you know, wishing something. I was reading something where I lived, Agatha Christie or something. A lot of the reading was very popular. We enjoyed it, and I enjoyed those books, still remember them. But once in a while you think, but you know what, what about books from here? And the older you grow, the more urgent that question becomes. So I don’t remember what the question was.
Steven S. George: So, thank you so much for answering those meaningful things. And there are so many other questions as well in the chat box which we will have to skip because of the paucity of time. I would like to thank Professor Menon and Professor Zaidi for chairing this session.
Nishat Zaidi: I think it’s time for us to close. Thank you so much, Dr. Vassanji for being here.
© Nishat Zaidi and Dilip Menon