Suketu Mehta interview - 1

Mayank: Maximum City – there is no book written on a city like Maximum City. It is the first of its kind. And I don't think there have been many that have followed that were as ambitious.

Suketu: About once a month, I get a request to write a blurb for a book that is the Maximum City of Johannesburg, or the Maximum City about Beijing. There have been some books similar to Maximum City. But to me Maximum City evolved into the book that it became.  When I began, I had no idea what I was doing. It was part memoir, part travelogue, part investigative journalism. And it was my first book. I began with an idea – that I wanted to go home. I was a Bombay boy who had been abroad long enough, and I wanted to go home. I wanted my children to have a sense of what home meant to me and to them.

But that home turned out to be very different from what I thought it was. So, I just followed my nose and wherever I found interesting story I just followed it. When the book came out, no one had any expectations of it. I remember the editor of The Times of India’s Bombay edition, asking me, “Why would the Knopf reader be interested in a book about Bombay?” And I said, “You live here, and you don’t understand why?” I met Murli Deora, who was this long-time Member of Parliament. I met him at a party at the US Consulate, and he asked me, “How long will you take to write the book?” At that time, I was being optimistic, and said, “a couple of years.” And he responded, “Couple of years? Bapa na paisa bahu vadhi gaya chhe? Chha mahin ma patavi do.” (Couple of years. Does your father have a lot of money? Complete the book in six months).

Nobody had any clue what I was doing. One of the gangsters who I had interviewed, asked me, “Book likh rahe ho? PhD thesis jaisa book?” (You’re writing a book, just like a PhD thesis).

But it was a big book. It took me seven years.

I attribute its success to the interest that people have in the notion of a global city, the megalopolis. Since then, there have been a few wonderful books on Bombay.

I wanted my book to reach more than a certain kind of audience. My book is widely pirated on the streets of Bombay. So, once while I was in Bombay, this kid came up to me at the traffic lights carrying a stack of books and on the top was Maximum City. And he is shouting, “Chalo le lo, Maximum City, Maximum City…”

Gavin: That’s probably the ultimate compliment – to be sold a pirated version of your own book on Bombay on the streets of Bombay.

Suketu: I asked the boy, “Kitne ka hai?” (How much is it for?” And he replied, “Panso rupiya.” (Five hundred rupees). I tried to bargain with him and said, “Panso ruipya? Tere ko malum hai yeh kitab maine likhe hai?” (Five hundred rupees! Do you know, I have written this book?) Without losing momentum, the boy replied, “Thek hai, agar apne likhe hai to charso rupiya de do.” (OK, if you have written it, then give four hundred rupees).

I called my publisher and told him, “David, fire your sales force and hire this kid.”

Mayank: I don’t know whether Gavin has introduced himself, but his book of poems is being published next year.

Suketu: Congratulations!

Gavin: Thank you. I have a story about this involving Ranjit (Hoskote) and Nissim Ezekiel. I don’t know whether you know Nissim.

Suketu: Oh, I know Nissim. I’d meet him at the Theosophical Society at Churchgate.

Gavin: Yes, me too.

Suketu: And then, he would take me to the Udupi across the street, and then when I put in the tip, he would, with his boney hands, push back some coins to me, muttering, “too much, too much.”

Gavin: My goodness! You have a Nissim story. I can’t believe it. So, the story I have is that Nissim was to publish me when I was young, as part of Rupa’s Young Poets series, which I believe now doesn’t exist because they went bankrupt. They published Ranjit and two other poets. They were to publish 14 poets in that series. And that was the end of it. Now, I am an old poet, and some of the same work is being published now in 2020. Jerry, I think, was among that group, too. Do you know Jerry? Jerry Pinto?

Suketu: Maybe a little too well.

Gavin: I was a member of the Bombay Poetry Circle. I was there at its very first meeting. Ranjit was there, I was there, so was Anju Makhija, and a couple of others, George Oommen, and Nissim was also my professor when I was doing my MA at Bombay University. He was wise, witty, gentle, all-in-all a remarkable man.

Mayank: Coming back to our Q&A. You have written a book on immigration, and as you explained earlier today (at Toronto International Festival of Authors) it is a manifesto. You are very angry with the situation and you want the world to know that the entire debate around immigration has been wrongly construed. But immigration is not a new phenomenon. Opposition and resistance to immigration is also not new. Why now?

Suketu: There is a global backlash against immigration. There is this new populism against immigration and immigrants. Around the turn of the century, it seemed like globalisation had won the day. It was supposed to be end of history and we could all go wherever we wanted to go. Tom Friedman wrote in the New York Times that no two countries that have a McDonalds ever fought a war against each other. But then Russia and Ukraine went to war. There was a kind of backlash against this kind of global invasion and around the same time, more people started moving than ever before.

I felt my position as a migrant being challenged. I can’t stay silent as a writer.

Suketu Mehta interview - 2

Mayank: Immigration is relatively new in the West. But that is not the case in India. Indians have immigrated to Africa, to Fiji, to the Southeast Asia and other parts of the world long before the process of formal immigration began in the west.

Suketu: Immigration is also not new to the West. Every single western country has witnessed mass migration. We have been taught that Europe is where nationalism was born. Where geographical boundaries defined national identities. We were told to be like the British and the French. They were all united. But then it turned out that the French had their separatists, so did the Spanish and the English and all the rest of them. The notion that we have one identity – that we are Indian, or Canadian, or American is hogwash.

Mayank: Let me rephrase the question slightly. Would be correct to state that the West has an issue with non-white immigration. So, in essence, the problem is not immigration. It’s racism.

Suketu: It is both. America had the alien exclusion act where in the 1920s when they excluded Chinese immigrants. Non-white immigrants, particularly Asians, have traditionally faced difficulties in North America – both in America and in Canada. Australia had an only white immigration policy.

That has changed. Now, we are seen as good immigrants. Everyone wants Indians and Chinese because they are nice techies and doctors and they don’t make trouble. We are the ideal immigrants.

What is new is that the anti-immigrant prejudice is global. I recently went to India and gave a speech at the India Today Conclave. It’s gone viral, it has a quarter million views and counting.  They thought I will talk about global migration, and I began with that, but then I turned my attention to the NRC; it is horrific what India is doing. The NRC is basically an anti-Muslim policy.

We have seen that kind of a situation in Bombay with the Shiv Sena. I have known Bal Thackeray and I have interviewed him. I wrote in the New York Times comparing Trump to Bal Thackeray, and how both are gifted story tellers. Remember Thackeray’s Dushera rally?

Gavin: I wonder about Brexit. The worse own goal in British history. That is the example of anti-immigration not only having a race element but also anti other Europeans. The Poles are strong presence in Britain, and the Brits and the people in the countryside don’t want Polish people around them. This is a backlash of white against whites.

Suketu: Yes, in Britain absolutely. Yes, they don’t want Romanians, they don’t want Poles. They want to retreat into old England. All the sins of colonialism are being visited upon them, and it stems from an incredibly stupid fear of migrants. This fear is doing more damage to country after country. All the goals of the fascists are re-emerging – Hungary, Poland, Austria, Germany are being driven by fear of migrants.

And the fact is that this fear is based on illusion and an unwillingness to understand their realities. These societies are not producing enough babies and people there are growing old. They need young people to work and pay their pensions, and as they aren’t making enough of their own babies, they need to import.

They will be screwed without migrants. Look at Japan. It is stagnating under 4 percent because they have kept migrants out, and now they are desperate.

Gavin: This is so interesting because I am a real mongrel. My mother is from East Africa, my father is Anglo-Indian, and we almost moved to Japan in the 1970s when my dad was in the merchant navy.  He wanted us to live there because he loved the place, but we were not allowed to live there. I have a question – we look at the US and India because we are familiar with these societies, and we exclaim, “Oh! My God!” but are there are other flash points that we should be watching with even more fear and caution because the world’s eyes are not on them. As Indians abroad, we are always watching India, and the world watches the US.

Suketu: I don’t think that the focus on India is adequate. The subject of my talk in India was that Indian Muslims are being systematically being ‘othersied’ which I have never seen in my life. The situation is changing. When I was in Bombay last, a Muslim man came up to me and told me about his predicament. He went to Cathedral. He went to Stanford. He came back and joined a private equity firm. He is part of the elite of Bombay. It is just that he is a Muslim. He has always been glad that he is an Indian and not a Pakistani.

After Mr. Modi gets re-elected, this man’s Hindu friends tell him not to worry in case the private equity market tanks, “Aap kyun fikr karte hain? Aap ka toh ek tang Pakistan mein hain! (Why should you worry about market collapse. Your other leg is in Pakistan).

To say such a thing to a person like that is unimaginable. He was truly shocked. He has never felt like this in his entire life. He is around 50. Even during the riots, he didn’t feel like this. He realised that there was a fringe that was indulging in rioting. Now, the rot is throughout the Indian society.

I for one am truly scared about the Indian situation. What we are witnessing is a change in basic humanity and values. My grandfather had a jewelry shop in Calcutta. He was a member of the RSS. But when a Muslim man ran into his shop, he protected him and told the mob that chased him to his shop that he would shoot all of them if they so much as even touched him. That man was now his guest and it was his obligation to protect him. Such values are fast disappearing from India, I think.

Among this generation there is no knowledge of this past because history is so badly taught. There is an absence of intimate knowledge of the other. My grandfather, despite his RSS allegiance was deeply appreciative of the Persian language, which, he said, was the purest of languages.

Suketu Mehta interview - 3

Mayank: Also, there is mainstreaming of the fringe globally. The fringe of two decades ago is now at the centerstage. That is probably responsible for what is happening to the Muslims in India. But there is no other in the US. Immigrants are an amorphous group, with no easily identifiable ethnic group emerging as a target group.

Suketu: I have more hope for the United States at the moment than I have for India because in the US just about one-third will vote for Trump, but in India, a majority of Indians are convinced that Modi is a strong man. He has been able to create a seductive narrative around beating Pakistan, which Indians are loving.

Gavin: Ingeniously, Modi has succeeded in fanning anti-Muslim sentiments even among other minorities in India. I known there are some within the Christian community who now openly express anti-Muslim sentiments and they love Modi. But they don’t realise there is nothing for them.

Suketu: That’s right. After the Muslims are done with, they will go after Christians and Paris and other communities. In America you go after Mexicans, the gays and women are next.

Mayank: You ended your talk (at the Toronto International Festival of Authors) by emphasizing there is hope. Where do you see hope?

Suketu: In the US certainly. Demographically, the country is going to turn majority non-white. People who support Trump at on their last gasp. They are practically screwed. The Republican Party will be obsolete in about a decade. 

Demographically, they are alienating huge sections of the population. I mean look at Texas – the entire state of Texas is about to go Democratic because it is becoming very, very multicultural. Houston is more diverse than New York. Houston has the country’s biggest Pakistani community; Vietnamese, and they are now voting.

But, more than politics, what climate change will do to migration, the world has no coordinated response. The shit’s going to get real. Nearly a billion people globally are going to be displaced by climate change.

Gavin: Obviously, the only option is going north, and the global north will have to be prepared mentally to take a lot more immigrants than today.

Mayank: Your book is from a specific western perspective. Would the arguments still remain relevant in India where immigration – legal but mostly otherwise – of Bangladeshis remains a constant factor.

Suketu: Actually, that is a myth. I have analysed the numbers and there are a fewer Bangladeshis coming into India now than a decade ago. It’s the narrative of invasion of immigrants that catches the imagination of the masses. There aren’t that many Bangladeshis in India. India is a large country and it can easily take in many more Bangladeshis.

Mayank: Paradoxically, even sane, rational citizens of India, who are not necessarily enamoured by the Hindutva propaganda, and who make wise economic decisions about their lives, resist the influx of immigrants from within India’s other, especially northern states, and, oppose Bangladeshis.

Suketu: These are the same people who will at the first opportunity come to America and Canada and protest loudly against discrimination.

Gavin: And all of them are Modi supporters. When Modi came here, I was protesting outside the venue with placards.

Suketu: Good for you.

Gavin: Every other Indian was in the stadium.

Suketu: It is the hypocrisy that is mind-numbing.

Gavin: There is another factor – immigrants get in, and then they want the door shut behind them.

Mayank: How would you compare the situation between Canada and the US. We just had an election and the Liberal Party has returned to power with truncated numbers, but the important point is that in the Greater Toronto Area, voters preferred a racial mix.

To the credit of the Conservative Party of Canada, even their candidates in GTA comprised diverse racial background.

Suketu: When it comes to immigration, Canada is a rare success. It wants to triple its intake of immigrants. The system is very immigrant friendly. They have done the whole immigration thing intelligently by not letting one ethnic group dominate. So, when things turn for worse, there isn’t a particular group to target.

You have the Bengali Canadian Consul General in Silicon Valley going around telling everyone, “Listen, America doesn’t want you, but Canada does. Move to Canada.” America is actually shooting itself in the foot. America is telling immigrants, “Don’t come, don’t come. You’re taking away American jobs. They’re actually creating American jobs.”

Gavin: I have my own experience to share. I’m an immigrant. I have my own business and I provide employment to Canadians. The systems should be happy that we’re here. One of the major problems in settlement of new immigrants in Canada is that they find it very hard to get jobs here and they are left with little choice but to start their own businesses, and eventually they hire other people. But the political system is in favour of immigration.

Suketu: I say this in my book. In the section on Canada in my book I have said that the political system is in favour of immigration. Except perhaps the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec.

Mayank: But now we also have the People’s Party started by Maxine Bernier. But even he fielded non-white candidates in the GTA. A close friend of mine, Tahir Gora, who runs a TV channel on which I did a program a couple of years ago, was his candidate.

Suketu: That is extraordinarily ironic.

Mayank: You have called your book a manifesto, and manifestos are generally written in anger.

Suketu: Yes, we must be angry; very angry. All the immigrants, like me, who have been angry, have always had to apologise. “Thank you for letting us in. We’re going to be nice people.”

Gavin: We silence ourselves. We have so much to say, we have so much burden to carry but we silence ourselves. We have to fit in, changing our accents, not eating spicy food, eating food that doesn’t smell.

Suketu: My purpose in writing the manifesto is to give ammunition to everyone who feels aggrieved at being an immigrant. To feel affirmed and then demand change. We should have no doubts about our places in these countries as immigrants. I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post saying, “I’m an uppity immigrant. Don’t expect me to be grateful.”

My book assigns historical blame – on colonialism, on corporate colonialism, on war, on climate change, and western powers are responsible for all of these ills. My simple argument to the west is: ‘We are here because you were there, and you continue to be there.’

Tanya Tagaq at Literature Matters 2019

The fifth edition of the Literature Matters The third annual Literature Matters – the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature Lecture Series featured Karen Connelly, and Tanya Tagaq. Connelly is a renowned novelist, poet and a travel writer, and Tagaq is a Canadian Inuk throat singer, novelist from Nunavut. Smaro Kamboureli, the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature, moderated the program. Connelly read from Handwriting Memories and Tagaq spoke about Unknown Bones.

I have participated in all the five Literature Matters readings and interviews since 2015 when it was launched, and without any doubt, I’d like to say, as emphatically as possible – and without belittling the contribution of the all the authors who have participated in this series to Canadian literature – that Tagaq’s chat with the audience was the most original.

All authors who have participated in this series have all made original presentations that often also included an A/V component. Dionne Brand (2018) and Madeline Thein (2016) were expectedly amazing, and Tagaq this year has set the benchmark higher.

I am producing an extract from her chat below:

I am from Cambridge Bay. I am Inuk. My father is English. He was the product of two World Wars Two veterans. He immigrated to Canada when he was three years old. He was born in England. He immigrated to BC. He went looking for work and ended up doing geological service work for the Government of Canada off an island in Halifax. They offered twice the pay to work in Resolute Bay, which is where my mother was relocated. My mother was born and raised in an igloo upon an island.  And this is what a lot of people don't understand about the colonial processes that the very high Arctic affected people in many ways. So, like notoriously now, Inuk women give birth very quickly, because we have unassisted birth to millennia. And my mother, being raised in an igloo was pockmark until she was 12 years old has full access to the land and the sophistication that comes from that knowledge. She's a magic person.

I love her so much. So, she was relocated by the government along with the people from Northern Quebec, because the Canadian government needed to establish mineral and water rights throughout the Northwest Passage. Without that, we would have been overtaken by other people. So, they needed Inuit or Canadian citizens to be placed into communities. And they did that through the relocation. They did that through killing our sled dogs. They did that by forcing us into Christianity. They did that to ensure their capitalist benefits, which seems to be the demise of society right now.

With our ecological crisis and climate change, this attachment of us from ourselves from our land, who we are, how reluctant are you to turn around to a stranger tonight and bury their heart and confess your mortality? And to ask for help and love? How scared are you to accept yourself? And I think it's this disassociation from the land that has caused us to be living in a state of anxiety and lack of self acceptance.

My mother went on to lie and say she had a high school education and get a Bachelor of Education from McGill University. Fucking badass woman, she is so awesome. And my father moved to Nunavut when he was 19 or 20 and he had lived there ever since.

And this is what I mean about what we're, well what I'm going to monologue about basically is like, how do I cover all this? Talking about blood, and culture, talking about literature, art, talking about how we associate with each other, right now, talking all the time, about reality and how we live and how people judge each other. And what the dominant culture considers sophisticated and help people and Being a replication ultimately of how the universe expands and evolves.

I recently watch a documentary about galaxy – there’s a massive black hole that's sucking all the life back and use it to. And I was just thinking about the inhalation and exhalation of the universe of Big Bang. And what we're all doing here and how we're just this beautiful, perfect extension of the energy of the universe, and how foolish we are to squander it and how ridiculous we are not be thankful of our breaths.

How ridiculous we are to not realize that every single person in here has felt self-hatred, extreme desire, love, shame. Everybody refuses to lean on each other cuz we're just so dreadfully embarrassed of our bodies. Well, you know what? Not me. I'm not. I was put here to eat and birth and come and not be ashamed of my size of my age of myself of my thoughts. Nobody can take this from me because I'm not going to go into the grave ashamed of who I am.

And I was not born in sin and I refuse to think that there's anything wrong with me other than why most ridiculous novels. I am ridiculous. But I love myself so deeply and completely. And if anything, by the end of the night, if I could give you one thing, please just do your best to accept yourself and love yourself and leave this place knowing that you're so very lucky to be alive right now. And knowing that no matter how hard it is, your ancestors didn't survive for you to be ashamed of who you are.

Anyway, I sound like a fucking preacher.

To hear more, click here: Tanya Tagaq at Literature Matters

Tanya Tagaq photo: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/authors/2133411/tanya-tagaq