Quite A Riot
Shashi Tharoor talks about his new book, Riot, scheduled for release on August 13
Express Newsline
New Delhi, Wednesday, July 25, 2001
Ashwin Ahman

How did Riot come about? Is it based on a real story, that of Graham Staines?
It's based in part on a real story, but not the Staines murder. I had become increasingly concerned with the communal issues bedevilling our national politics and society in the 1990s, and I wrote extensively about them in my newspaper columns and in my last book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium. This was all in the nature of commentary. As a novelist, though, I sought an interesting way to explore the issue. Years ago, my old college friend Harsh Mander, an IAS officer, sent me an account he'd written of a riot he dealt with as a district magistrate in Madhya Pradesh. I was moved by the piece and urged him to publish it, and I'm very pleased that a collection of Harsh's essays about the 'forgotten people' he has dealt with in his career has just emerged from Penguin under the title Unheard Voices. But his story also sparked me thinking of a riot as a vehicle for a novel about communal hatred. Since I have never managed a riot myself, I asked Harsh for permission to use the story of 'his' riot in my narrative, a request to which he graciously consented. At about the same time, I read a newspaper account of a young white American girl, Amy Biehl, who had been killed by a black mob in violent disturbances in South Africa. The two images stayed and merged in my mind, and Riot was born. I began writing it in December 1996, immediately after completing India: From Midnight to the Millennium. But in view of the various demands on my time with my work at the UN, I could only complete it four years later.

You've written fiction and nonfiction. Is one more difficult or time consuming than the other?
Yes, fiction is, but don't forget I speak as one whose writing endures a lot of interruptions from my professional and personal life. With fiction, you need not only time -- which I am always struggling to find -- but you also need a space inside your head, to create an alternative universe and to inhabit it so intimately that its reality infuses your awareness of the world. But please don't ask me about my opinion of the two genres. I have never been a literary theoretician -- I always thought that for a writer to study literature would be like learning about girls at medical school. But on this book specifically, let me add that Riot is a departure for me fictionally, because unlike my earlier novels it is not a satirical work. Like the other two, though, it takes liberties with the fictional form. I have always believed that the very word 'novel' implies that there must be something 'new' about each one. What was new to me about the way Riot unfolded was that I told the story through newspaper clippings, diary entries, interviews, transcripts, journals, scrapbooks, even poems written by the characters -- in other words, using different voices, different stylistic forms, for different fragments of the story. It is also a book you can read in any order.

Till Arundhati Roy, the majority of Indian writers enjoying international success were those living abroad. What's your view?
Though I'm a great fan of Arundhati's, I don't think your assumption is correct. R. K Narayan, Manohar Malgaonkar and Anita Desai all did extremely well internationally while still living in India. I think a writer really lives inside his head and on the page, and geography is merely a circumstance. As for me, my expatriation is linked to my work for the United Nations, which at different times has placed me in Europe, in SouthEast Asia and now in the US. I have carried my Indian identity and passport with me to each of these places, and I have not made that leap of the imagination that emigration entails. Of course, staying abroad entails the risk of losing touch with the reality one's writing about, so it can't be said to 'help' in writing about India, but none of those who criticise expatriate writers can point to any egregious errors in my books, so I guess it hasn't hurt either!

Is there is a tendency to recognise Indian writers once they have achieved success abroad?

I am astonished that this still seems to be the case, but it seems to be true. Quite apart from the superstardom that has struck a Jhumpa Lahiri, for instance, after just one excellent volume of short stories, I will never forget the story of what happened to Shashi Deshpande a few years ago. After receiving rather modest attention in the Indian press for years, she had a novel turned down by her usual Indian publisher and found a home for it instead with a British feminist house. The mere fact of the British publication led to glowing reviews and major interviews in the Indian press, which she might never have got if her novel had been accepted in India in the first place! My point is that, of course, she should've been recognised here for what she'd already shared with the Indian public.

How will things change?

First, by more and better books being published in India. I was the first writer to insist on separate Indian publication, by withdrawing the 'territory' of India from the list of countries where the British edition of The Great Indian Novel could be sold. This is now a widespread practice. The success and high quality of a number of Indian publishing houses should also enhance the seriousness with which they are treated. But at the end of the day it's a question of attitude -- of our mentality -- and only we can change that ourselves.