It’s insulting to be called a migrant: Hanif

Hanif Kureishi’s family had lived for generations in India — his father grew up in Pune and Bombay, played cricket at the Bombay Gymkhana, and fought the daily commuters’ battle to get on the train at Churchgate. His mother is British.

And yet, he had to accept a Pakistani identity because his family moved to Pakistan during the Partition and his father took up a job at the Pakistani embassy in London.

“I’ve lived all my life in London, and all the migration I’ve done is 20 miles — from one part of London to another,” he said. And yet, he is a ‘migrant writer’. Kureishi, one of the first South Asian authors to write about how “Britain was changing from a society of white people into an Indian one,” was speaking at the Jaipur LitFest on ‘Migrant Words’. And he unpacked the discursive baggage around the term ‘identity’ with his trademark crispness.

“How does it matter to a writer whether he is a Pakistani or of some other identity? All issues of identity and exile come into play after the act of writing. When you are writing, it’s just you and the blank page, and all you’re worried about is whether you can put together a story that can entertain other people. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a personal story that can have a wider resonance.

That’s all you’re bothered about. All those labels attached to writers — ‘ethnic’ or ‘migrant’ or ‘post-modern’ or worse, ‘post-colonial’ are the work of academics and critics,” he said, to loud applause.

Interestingly, he also spoke about how, as he grows older he feels imprisoned by any notion of identity. “I don’t want any identity” he stated. “But then, you find that the world wants to give you one anyway — you need an identity for your passport, to cross borders, and other people need to give you an identity so they know how to respond to you, to your books. So the best way is to write from wherever you are. The trick is to know how to use your identities and how to get rid of them.”                            

*****
Time was when writers were scruffy-looking, unkempt individuals, who dressed strangely, smoked endlessly and suffered from alcoholism (or looked like they did). Their glamour most certainly did not - with some exceptions — stem from their looks.

You were attracted to their books before you engaged with their looks. At the Jaipur Literature festival, it’s been the reverse — you run into a wildly pretty woman and then scurry to find out what book she has written. This year, it is striking  how extraordinarily pretty and well-toned the writer community has become.

Perhaps there is a secret cult of fitness fanatics for whom writing is part of a wholistic ‘wellness’ routine, like pilates and meditation.

How else does one account for the fact that the younger women writers all look like — and have the proportions of — models? As for some of the men strutting about like prize bulls, one gets the distinct impression that they put in more energy into their workouts than into their works.

You can’t help but wonder if there is some kind of inverse
correlation between a writer’s looks and the quality of her prose — the worser the book, the more glamorous and attractive an author has to be.

To test this hypothesis out here at the Festival, I decided to rank all the female authors around in terms of their looks (I’m neither qualified nor interested in doing this exercise for male authors).

Right at the top, is former Miss India contestant Ira Trivedi. If a photographer can achieve an orgasm by sheer clicking, many surely attained it this evening at the Diggi palace, as she simpered and flirted with Chetan Bhagat in the session titled ‘Teen Deviyan’.

Her lush dark hair hung exactly as they had been trained to. If only
she could have just sat there, like that, forever. No, she had to open her beautiful little mouth.

Anyways (to use a favourite word of Trivedi’s), if you really want to test out my hypothesis for yourself, I invite you to buy her brilliant book, The Great Indian Love Story, and read it — read it right till the end no matter what.