'The best words in the best order'

Anyone who has written for a reasonably long time must have dealt with the following questions: Why do I write? What use are my words? What’s my location in the canon of literature? Who can be called an “Indian writer”? Am I one if I’m writing in English either here, in my homeland, or abroad?

Over the years, several writers have tried to wrestle with these questions. No one claims to have addressed them fully. In the Indian context, if someone has meditated on these questions with sensitivity and clarity, breaking away from the cabal of entitled male writers, then it’s undoubtedly Shashi Deshpande.

Her latest collection of reflective essays, articles, and book reviews, featuring published and unpublished works from 1992 to 2020, Subversions: Essays on Life and Literature, compiled by Prof Dieter Riemenschneider and Dr Nancy E Batty, is a testimony to that.

Assembled in five sections, Ms Deshpande’s perspectives touch upon an array of subjects, from the role of a writer and the significance of the writer identity to feminism and writing by women, the construction of genres, and politics of book-reviewing. She also pays tribute to Prof P Lal, founder of the Writers Workshop, Calcutta, who in her words “never hesitated to push writing that he thought was good,” and unfailingly encouraged “home-grown” writers, in this collection.

Known for her defining fictional works such as The Dark Holds No Terrors or That Long Silence that explored “the gaps, the silences, the ambiguities, the complexities, the contradictions” of everyday life, Ms Deshpande also made a unique place for herself as a critic with her razor-sharp and argumentative essays.

Ms Deshpande, who wrote out of “anger and confusion”, finds writing to be a “process of discoveries” and fees that no one “starts from a position of knowledge”, rarely with a message, for a written work is only a writer’s “individual response” and may amount to little in the grander scheme of things; however, she notes that it’s crucial to write, reflect, and engage.

But such an environment has to be engineered. In several of her essays, she has addressed the attack on freedom of expression and on a few writers’ complicities with the majoritarian narrative. Note that this collection is a compilation of three decades worth of works. Governments have come and gone during this period and the threat to dissent has always been looming over the Indian democracy. However, the difference is, as Ms Deshpande observes, that now we’ve entered an “Era of Mobs”.

Not only the bullies in positions of power, Ms Deshpande also wrote about decorated writers such as Salman Rushdie and V S Naipaul. The former called Ms Deshpande a “stony-faced judge” after losing the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize to J M Coetzee. Ms Deshpande, who chaired the jury, had noted that she was alarmed at Rushdie’s “sense of entitlement; that, because Rushdie had come home, he deserved a reward”.

The encounter with the latter is rather interesting. In a literary gathering ambitiously titled “At Home in the World”, which was a celebration of the then recently awarded Nobel Prize in Literature, Sir V S Naipaul, Nayantara Sahgal and Ms Deshpande were on a panel with him. In the essay “A Missed Opportunity”, Ms Deshpande notes that Sir Naipaul “turned on us for having the temerity to speak about subjects he considered “banal”—these two being colonialism and gender oppression.”

Someone who always struggled with being boxed in as a “feminist writer”, Ms Deshpande never wrote with any anxiety of remaining relevant. It’s the clarity in writing that mattered to her, which is why her approach towards criticism on subjects that might come across as boring is more appealing. For example, here’s her take on an issue gaining currency today more than ever, that of declining readership. Ms Deshpande opines that reading was always a “minority interest” and, to borrow Hartosh Singh Bal’s words, like any form of culture, literature has always been an “elitist pursuit”.

On the importance of the choice of words in writing, she notes why she can’t use, gay, for example, as it will never convey “joyous” nowadays. Not only when it comes to words, but with the world’s pace, Ms Deshpande seems to be agile. She writes about globalisation and bestselling phenomena as affectionately and closely as she writes about cultural appropriation and tokenism in literature. Almost nothing leaves her attention and, as a poet, she uses “the best words in the best order” to describe it.