The (thrilling) Art of a Serious Literary Pursuit

This is about living in a twilight world of a romance with fiction as well as non-fiction. It's a ménage à trois that I wouldn't ever end.

Quite often, non-fiction tops. If this is a bit in flagrante delicto for lovers of fiction, so be it. There is art in non-fiction too. You would see it if you left yesterday's wardrobe at a charity sale and wore a new second skin of mind and matter. Non-fiction mind and matter.

Sexual metaphors aside, this is a serious literary pursuit.

In South Asia we've generally been raised, irrespective of the language, on a diet of fiction. Mood, both personal and political, is usually seen as being best expressed in a poem, story, novel, a play, and more. Absolutism that so often carries over from colonial times into these allegedly post-colonial times is enough reason for fictionalizing angst, crafting a statement, rootling for appropriate allegory.

Our non-fiction was largely born in hagiography, spiritual treatises and the occasional travelogue. Ironically, many of these are taken as examples of glorious history and sanctimonious fact—but that's another matter. Following a globalized tradition, this trend segued into memoirs, autobiographies and biographies, life made plump or life laid bare, to supplement the non-fiction that most of us have known since our schooldays: various academic texts, postulates and scholarly works in an ever-growing array of 'disciplines'. (I place that word in an apostrophic embrace only to highlight the irony of the word discipline in realms where the best work has almost always come from leaps of research, thought and faith. Other ironical words? Civil war. Civil society. But I digress. Indeed, pleasant surprises and finessed by-lanes exist as much in non-fiction as in fiction.)

As I evolved in my profession of journalism, narrative writing allowed deeper dives into the very causes and effects that make both low-key and tawdry realities, and triumphant human existence born of gritty survival, dignity, elegance—and arrogance and hubris, of course. This is where I learnt to fly. It was on the wings of the histories, events and lives of others, but it was a rare privilege to be accorded such access, and to carry the responsibility of telling stories to—hopefully—weave a fuller fabric, contribute to understanding and change. All the fiction and non-fiction that I read, all the years of wonder and delight at the art of words now translated into a living: as much a joy as a vocation.

Non-fiction was truly revealed to me in my first ever job, in media. I soon devoured incisive journalistic histories of Vietnam—A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan comes to mind. Ryszard Kapuscinski took me to the surreal warzones and universe of dictatorships in a manner Gabriel Garcia Marquez did—or his spirit children like Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie. Amrita Bazar Patrika showed the way with brave writing on the Marichjhapi massacre. Mahasweta Devi showed the raw power of both fiction and non-fiction. Firmly rooted in her world of activism, Hajar Churashir Ma could so easily have been written as non-fiction. In any case it brought outraged tears and a great chill of both fright and anger in the two avatars in which I saw the story translated, as a finely wrought movie in Hindi and as arresting plays in languages as diverse as Marathi, Hindi, Bangla and Meeteilon.

As I evolved in my profession of journalism, narrative writing allowed deeper dives into the very causes and effects that make both low-key and tawdry realities, and triumphant human existence born of gritty survival, dignity, elegance—and arrogance and hubris, of course. This is where I learnt to fly. It was on the wings of the histories, events and lives of others, but it was a rare privilege to be accorded such access, and to carry the responsibility of telling stories to—hopefully—weave a fuller fabric, contribute to understanding and change. All the fiction and non-fiction that I read, all the years of wonder and delight at the art of words now translated into a living: as much a joy as a vocation.

Then came a break in my life, by choice: no more writing for media moguls who had lost sight of genuine storytelling that drew me to the profession in the first place. The Nadir of such Moguls, if you will.

Three novels arrived from this lateral shift. A bildungsroman set in a great time of oppression and reclamation of liberty in an India of the mid-Seventies. A set of angry novellas set in an India of almost apocalyptic and bloody change of the 1980s and 1990s garnished with all the hope and despair of my generation. A novel set in Goa, my adoptive home of nearly two decades, is a study of the hubris of paradise.

As much as all this carried me, writing narrative and literary non-fiction transformed me.

I live a life of revelations and mostly unfettered freedom—a treasured commodity even in the most seemingly generous society: Freedom can disappear like mist. Until then, freedom arrives in applying a narrative approach that tries to marry the skills of a journalist, researcher and writer.

If it means merging travelogue and novelistic writing with reportage and research, as I attempted with Red Sun (on India's Maoist rebellion) and Highway 39 (set in the conflicted lands of Nagaland and Manipur, not far east of Bangladesh), so be it. If it means taking these aspects and adding human rights, business imperatives and case studies, as with Clear.Hold.Build, a study on business and human rights in India and South Asia, fine.

If it means writing a mix of history, culture, ethnography, politics, memoir and satire—as I attempted with The Bengalis: A Portrait of a Community—who is to stop me? If I approach history, attempt myth-busting and make it accessible to lay readers, as with Plassey, why not? If a book requires aspects of conflict and conflict resolution from a regional and geo-strategic perspective, and use of every suitable multiple-genre device for it—field notes; reportage; archival research for history, politics; hatreds; hopes; interviews; analyses; aspects of climate change, and to merge it all with storytelling—as I have done with my latest, The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India's Far East—then it's on account of acknowledging the stupendously complex aspects of the subject and attempting to simplify it with the tools of research and reflection, context and narrative.

In any case why restrict non-fiction when a smorgasbord of life, of stories to tell, present themselves? To do otherwise would be to invite solitary confinement. Non-fiction with a vast palette of options is immensely liberating—as liberating as writing a short story, a novel, a poem, a play, a screenplay. It permits a journeying into genre-bending flights of information and analyses combined with a certain thrill seeking. How far can I push the envelope of narrative non-fiction without ever jettisoning the rigour of research?

It is good be a part of a growing community of such writers, relatively old and relatively young, in India and South Asia. A Ghazala Wahab who questions the indignity accorded her identity in an India of engineered violence. A Manu Pillai who offers elegant, less told histories. A Meena Kandasamy who is a force of nature. And so many, many more names beyond the enlightened literary firm of Rushdie, Ghosh & Roy—and even they glory in non-fiction!

My next book is a narrative history of modern Delhi. It's also a crime thriller. And it is also a socio-political commentary.

Sue me.

Sudeep Chakravarti has written several works of non-fiction. He has also written three novels and several short stories. He is at present Visiting Faculty at ULAB–University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh—where he teaches journalism, literature, and South Asian Studies.