'We haven't dealt with Partition'

Shauna Singh Baldwin

Her book, What The Body Remembers, deals with a Punjabi family in the years preceding the Partition. Baldwin weaves the tumultuous times in India into the lives of her characters. Her protagonists are women, two women married to the same man actually, and her writing is sensitive and feminist at all times.

She has recently been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book in the Canada and Caribbean region this year. What the Body Remembers has also been shortlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize, meant exclusively for women writers.

In this quick interview to Amberish K Diwanji and Suhasini Haidar, Baldwin says it is fitting that she has won in the category meant for the Canadian and Caribbean region, rather than in the Eurasian region representing India.

It obviously irritates you to be pigeon-holed in terms of your origins, so let's start by clearing this up. Where are you from?

I just don't like being excluded from any country. I am certainly a part of India and I am certainly part of Canada and I am also part-American. I have never held an Indian passport, so I can't technically lay claim to being Indian... So when somebody says I am an Indian writer, this is not technically true. I am a second-generation Canadian and an American passport holder. And that is why I resent being pigeon-holed.

I find we are in the "third phase" of Indian writing now. First, we had Indian writers writing from India. Then, we had immigrant writers. And now, we have something called diasporic writers. We are all of Indian origin, but our perspective is different from that of Indian writers. Shani Mootoo, Jhumpa Lahiri and I fall into that category.

There seems to be surge in what you call 'diasporic' writers, especially from India. A case in point being Jhumpa Lahiri, who recently won the Pulitzer. What do you attribute this to?

Time, and food, clothing and shelter needs being taken care of. Writing takes a lot of resources and, as the immigrant community gets more self-sufficient, you are able to look at art and the finer things of life. But art takes money, it doesn't happen from starvation. It takes funding, it takes grants. It takes competitions like the Commonwealth Writers Prize to encourage people. I have a background in systems analysis and that's what paid for the three years I had to take off to write What The Body Remembers.

Is this one of the reasons why successful Indian writers tend to belong only to the upper classes?

Well, of course, writing needs a luxury environment. If you want to buy a word-processor today, a lot of Indians can't afford that yet. So it is the English speaking writers who are turning everything out. To be in this business, which is what it is today, takes resources, takes funding and grants. For example, it was a travel grant that took me to Pakistan to write this book.

Tell us a bit about the work that went into your book: you said it took three years.

Well, it would have taken me 12 years to write this book without the Internet. I did some research on the Net. Cyberfriends paved my way everywhere, they made appointments for me in Pakistan, showed me around.

I went to Pakistan to look for the setting because the problem that every writer on the subject in India and Pakistan has is that the setting comes from one side of the border, even if the story comes from the other. It's very difficult for an Indian writer to travel through Pakistan without someone breathing over your shoulder and telling you to sign in at the local police station. A Pakistani writer has to do the same in India and stand at a police station here for four-five hours a day. You don't get much research done that way.

Manju Kapur, the author of Difficult Daughters, was telling me how difficult it was for her even in Lahore. She didn't even try to go further west. I was able to go all the way up to the Khyber Pass because I am Canadian.

Don't you feel the theme of Partition has been overdone, with so many books out on the subject?

Do you really think that a lot of people have dealt with this? Indeed... and who? You are talking of maybe one book: Train To Pakistan. Do you think that is enough? Partition happened. There are 70,000 books written about the American civil war. About Partition, I can count the books on the fingers of one hand.

What about the Holocaust? Do you know how many books are written about that?

Let's put it another way: do you think the Partition still strikes a lot of chords here 50 years later?

It should. We haven't dealt with it. In the Punjabi diaspora, we are still feeling the effects of this. In my book, I am mainly dealing with patriarchy and colonialism and that sort of thing. But there were 17 million people displaced by Partition/Independence.

And the slash is very important in that statement because that's what it was. It was a slash right across the country. And we have not dealt with what we did to each other. This was not state-sponsored violence. We don't have anyone to blame this on.

And if 1984 (when the Sikh riots took place) taught us nothing else, it should have taught us that this feeling is not dead. Or dealt with. Did the Babri Masjid riots teach us anything? No, because if you don't talk about it, write about it, deal with it, it will still be out there.

Do you think recognition for Indian writers has to come from abroad before they are recognised here?

That's a good question: Speaking as an Indian now, I think we have a certain amount of mental colonisation and I have tried to show that in my book too. My character, Mr Cunningham, is the ultimate symbol of mental colonisation. But that is changing.

I asked the owner of a bookshop today to recommend some books to me. A few years ago, this lady would have given me names from all over the world. But every book she recommended to me today was by an Indian writer. Which also means these books are being read by the readership here. But that wasn't the case earlier. We have to own our own writers first, enjoy them first, or we can't expect the rest of the world to.

Could you recommend some books for our readers?

First of all I would say all the books written by Margaret Atwood and then, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces.