With every message that leaves novelist Bilal Tanweer’s email account, travel these famous lines from Aleksandar Hemon’s 2008 novel, The Lazarus Project:
“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.”
It is easy to see why Tanweer should identify with these lines. Like the Bosnian-American Hemon, his sense of reality is both global and local and his understanding of the world, filtered by the personal, the universal and the political.
He won this year’s Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for his novel The Scatter Here Is Too Great and was praised for investing pulsing immediacy in a vast culturescape. And for fusing existential aches with the minutiae of chaos.
The Bengaluru-based Shakti Bhatt Foundation, set up in 2008 to encourage authors from the sub-continent, awarded him a cash prize of Rs 2 lakh, a trophy and a citation. His book was hailed as the “rarest of rare things: a novel whose form is a near perfect expression of its content… And, in the end, the reader is left with all that he needs to know — a deep and consolable sense of unease.”
In an email interview, Tanweer recalls his first reaction to the news that he had won: “My publicist wrote to me saying the administrator of the Shakti Bhatt award called that morning and said I had won it. I was pleased, especially because I was not expecting it. There were other strong contenders, and I was surprised that my book was shortlisted to begin with. I am grateful for it.”
He acknowledges that ‘scatter’ and tumult are common to both India and Pakistan. Both share the loss of the particular in the general, the delicate in the gross, the nuances of human life in the broad sweeps of politics and violence. Is there a way forward? Does he see hope, coherence and growth in India and Pakistan, a better understanding? Just what is at the core of this scatter? Mismanagement, religious absolutism, poverty, politics, corruption?
He responds, “We live in terrible times. Insecurity—economic, political, physical—is common to most societies everywhere but more to some like India and Pakistan which are experiencing serious displacements of large parts of their populations. What is more disturbing, however, is that we don’t seem ready or willing to deal with these changes. As an increasingly complex world exposes the limitations of our ways of understanding it, our response is to take refuge in simplistic ideological notions of religion, nationalism and so on.”
Tanweer adds, “Our task as writers and citizens is to challenge these ways of understanding and try to portray a more nuanced way of looking at things because while ideological notions of nationalism or religion might be comforting in the short term, they allow the destruction of the world and our lives to continue unabated. The only hope I see is to improve our ways of seeing and understanding. It’s a long and impossible project but it is the only one of hope.”
When asked if he has ever been to India and what his impressions were, he says, “I am not too much of a tourist. I like to live in places and make them a part of myself and vice versa. It happens over a period of time. So I find it difficult to form opinions over short visits. I have been to India three times—once to Bengaluru and Delhi, and twice to Goa. I have particularly loved Goa. The organisers of the Goa Literature Fest have been exceedingly welcoming towards me, and I find the place endlessly charming. I have some friends in Mumbai and would love to spend some time there, if an opportunity arises.”
Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah, like many other admiring observers of the creative voices emerging from Pakistan, believes that great art stems from turmoil. Does Tanweer believe that Pakistan’s conflicts are throwing up resonant books like The Scatter Here is Too Great?
The writer says, “Look, to be fair, there is no comparison between the cultural output between India and Pakistan. If you honestly compare, you will see that perhaps one Indian city like Kolkata or Mumbai has had greater and more significant cultural output than all of Pakistan during the past 50 years. Having said this, I do take Naseeruddin Shah’s point. We humans simply don’t confront difficult subjects unless we really have to. So it is true that, for instance, if you are living under circumstances where violence is part of daily life, you are forced to reckon with it. It certainly allows for a deeper engagement with things you might not engage with otherwise. But if I were given a choice between ordinary happiness and great literature, I’d choose ordinary happiness.”
‘Writers must express universal truths’
Considering that the diminishing of small and big human freedoms always concerns those who write and create, is he conscious of filtering what he says and writes?
Replies Tanweer, “I think the freedom of expression afforded to writers and thinkers in the West are an historical anomaly. One of the main challenges facing creative writers in any society has been to express truths—personal, social, universal—by staying within the limitations of social discourse imposed upon them, including limitations of language itself. (Indeed, language for many writers is itself a hindrance.) In that sense, our times are no different. The only difference is because of globalisation, now you risk offending people globally; and with the widespread means of violence, the matter becomes nearly impossible to contain at a local level.”
And yes, he says, “Another book is in the works. An average writing day requires me to write for about two hours (a lot of which is just day dreaming). Unfortunately, I have not been having many of those lately because of teaching, other writing assignments and deadlines.”
As a reader, he is drawn to writers with great insight into human concerns and he names Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace, Naiyer Masud, Kundera, Marilynne Robinson, Faiz, Ghalib, Sarmad Sehbai, Jack Gilbert, Bruno Schulz, Zbigniew Herbert and E L Doctorow as just a few he loves. He adds, “I think there are moments in literature that become part of your way of understanding the world and continue to reverberate within you—and they are many. Each writer I have mentioned has given me such moments. They make me the person that I am.”
Picture credit: Paul Langton
with The New Indian ExpressReema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be.