‘You are shaped by your soil however far you go’
In some ways author Omair Ahmad can be said to be a writer of period pieces. What he explores in his books, however, is the arrangement and re-arrangement of power at the cusp of historical change. His novel Jimmy the Terrorist was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. Tall Tales by a Small Dog (Rs 499, Speaking Tiger) is his latest book. Excerpts from a conversation:
Why did you choose a dog as a literary device--the narrator-- of all the stories of ‘Tall Tales by a Small Dog’?
I had originally thought of using a dog as one of three narrators – the other two being a village mukhia, and the third, an SHO. But I think that would have been too affected, and as the stories came together, I think the dog naturally had the best viewpoint, because so many of our stories are lived out on the street. And on Indian streets there is almost always an observer, and that is a dog.
Did looking at Gorakhpur from Delhi help in its creation?
Dilli has no insights to give on Gorakhpur, or cities like them, the opposite is more often the case.
The Gorakhpur you have drawn in your book, both with realism and fabulism, seems to be a hyper-masculine place.
The stories in the book are set largely in the streets of Gorakhpur from roughly 1857 to early 2000s. The streets of the city during this time were almost exclusively male, and certainly the fabulism draws from them being hypermasculine. Even the last story, that goes into the IT revolution of India, is largely set in an engineering college at that time, and there were very few women in such classes then. Women’s stories would largely not have been witnessed by a street dog, nor would they have been spun into those type of tall tales. It would be different if I was writing about a much more contemporary period.
Bilal, Knownto Sharma, Gangu Ram, Pintu, Haggu and Tharki--all of them have an aspect of criminality. Did you set out to write a bad boy book?
Ha. No. I didn’t really have a template. But the most interesting characters are somewhat delinquent, especially in our smaller cities which rarely have space for flair that is not looked down upon.
Who was your great-great-grandfather and what was his role in 1857? Is Jalali Saab’s story based on him?
Gorakhpur was one of the very few cities that operated as a liberated zone during the 1857 uprising, and it is a tragedy that the history of it has never really been written, of Mohammed Hassan and Bandhu Singh [Hassan of Jaunpur, and Singh, a satrap of Raja Sattasi, liberated Gorakhpur under the name of the Mughal Emperor in Delhi]. Although Shahid Amin, in his brilliant book on Chauri Chaura has written about its after-history. My grandmother’s grandfather, I am told, was an angrezon ke zamane ka jailor, and set the convicts free when the British were thrown off. Sentenced to hang, his hanging was called off because general amnesty was declared in 1860. His name was not Jalali, although he and his family were exiled to Indore afterward. I doubt anybody really remembers him.
Could you explain the centrality of the railway station for the people of Gorakhpur?
It has never featured in any other book I have written, but the airport was – until fairly recently when the civil airport was expanded – the principal means of travel. Gorakhpur, at one time, had the biggest railway platform in India, and the biggest railway colony. A huge amount of life and how you lived, revolved around the train station, as it still does for most of India.
What are you working on next?
I have three or four manuscripts open, one is about an old man and an unresolved love in the detritus of old Lucknow, another is a contemporary novel about a serial killer – from his point of view, a third is a non-fiction long essay on militancy in the name of Islam in Kashmir and mainland India, and a fourth is a fantasy novel that I need to rewrite.
After having lived away from Gorakhpur how would you describe your relationship to it now?
I write in Hindustani in my head, Gorakhpur is my dadihaal, or father’s city, but my father was a petroleum engineer, and spent much of his life outside Gorakhpur. Even his father, a doctor, spent years on the Burma front as a major in the Royal Medical Corps in World War II, and then later as a civil medical officer all over north India. I guess I have only followed in their footsteps. But you are shaped by your soil, however far you go.