Within the nautanki tradition, Sultana Daku was perhaps one of the few plays that talked about the here and the now. How does his past relate to today’s present?
I tried very hard not to impose my 2007 values on a novel set in 1924. Sultana possesses almost no insight into his criminal destiny, and accepts it as would any other regular bhantu, or any other Indian, except the most enlightened ones. And Samuel Pearce, perhaps a soft liberal for his times, also comments on the malaise of Sultana’s blood. So those were my firm attempts to stay within the limits of that age, because I’m pretending that the novel was written then.
Sultana once says that in the absence of the police in certain villages, he was a panchayat of his own. Is Sultana a closet Maoist?
Sultana is a poor oppressed man and is a tribal, so banias and thakurs are his natural enemies, but he fully accepts the lordship of the white man. So he is a Maoist in as much as their interests might coincide, but we should be clear that Sultana isn’t seeking justice or equality, he is seeking revenge. He really isn’t conducting class warfare.
The sense that I get is that you intend the book to be a straight story. Any larger narratives such as post-colonialism are just projections on our part …
In my opinion, we have begun to project these narratives in hindsight while consumed by nationalist fervour. I believe that except for the one million Indians mobilised by Gandhi, the other 345 million thought of the whites as natural rulers and were engaged in their own caste or class conflicts. I don’t want any great nationalistic feeling to contaminate the novel.
Caste and communal divisions play a large role in your book. Does it bother you that not much has changed in the decades that followed?
No, it doesn’t bother me at all. In Sultana’s world, these caste distinctions are a fact of life. He is very conscious of the fact that Muslims are different from Hindus. The only thing that should bother people is when these divisions lead to violent conflict. I personally don’t have much respect for oneness; this sense that we are all the same. In my opinion, these divisions are real
because they are very old. A society can learn to live and prosper by recognising differences and then negotiate. Isn’t that how democracies are meant to run?
Toward the end of the book, Sultana does endorse this view of individualism …
I don’t think that Sultana would say the kind of things he does in the last paragraph. You can argue that it is a license that I took and gave him this moment of illumination. I just want the reader to end the book with a sympathetic view of Sultana, and not be indifferent.
At some level, Sultana is more a conformist than a rebel. He is more Gabbar Singh than he is Robin Hood. Would you agree?
That is correct. I don’t know about Gabbar Singh, but he is certainly no Robin Hood. And he is a conformist, doing exactly what his grandfather taught him. He is no Phoolan Devi, who was from a low caste, raped, tortured and dispossessed. There was no real injustice meted out to him as a child. He was raised with relative love by the Salvation Army.
You are a space scientist by day. So which of the two do you think when you look into space? “How utterly beautiful!” or “Oh, no! Not work again!”
When I look into space, I probably calculate a geosynchronous orbit. [Laughs] I’m only joking. Sometimes, I just admire it. When you see a beautiful sky, you see a beautiful sky.
— Goswami is a Creative Writing major and is currently working on a collection of short stories called The Conversationalists .