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Kunal Basu and Aparna Sen with moderator Pritha Kejriwal at Starmark, South City, on Friday. Picture by Saikat Das
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Vikram Seth once wrote a libretto that his composer didn’t quite warm to, even though it was titled Fire. Alec Roth wanted Vikram to write something else. “I can’t do that,” Vikram was aghast. “I can’t just go back to my muse and say my composer doesn’t like it, I need something else!” That’s how much hold the muse has over the creative creature.
But why are we talking about Vikram Seth and his predicament here? Because the artist’s muse kept popping up during a conversation between author Kunal Basu and film-maker Aparna Sen on Friday evening.
Titled ‘Does the novel have a future?’, the chat was organised by Pan Macmillan India and Starmark at its South City outlet, ostensibly to “celebrate the publication” of Kunal’s latest novel The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, but possibly also as an excuse for some good ol’ adda in the last chilly weekend of the season.
And quite an adda it was, from the future of the novel to the novels of the future and much more.
Kunal declared at the very outset that the existential question was easily answered — “as long as there are women, there is a future for the novel!” Ninety per cent of fiction readership was female, he said.
The question was, he continued — at once a novelist and the Oxford professor that he is too — what kind of novels will be written in the future. He offered three observations:
a) with an assumption of the reader’s reduced attention span, there’s a great tendency among writers and publishers to reduce complexity.
b) there’s a tremendous propensity for topicality — “If Anna Hazare happened in 2011, there will be books on him in 2012”.
c) there is a tendency among writers to see the novel as a mirror. So, there is great likelihood that novels that take the reader out of his skin will be put on the back burner in times to come.
But the true writer — or film-maker or any artist, for that matter — does not or cannot create to please the demands of the time. “You have to write the book that is inside you. If the book within me is about a disease set in 19th century China, I have to write that book. I cannot write anything else,” said the author of The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, which is, in fact, the story of a Portuguese doctor’s quest to find a cure for syphilis in China in the backdrop of the Boxer Rebellion.
Aparna, who made The Japanese Wife from Kunal’s short story of the same name, said these days people either want a disaster movie or a comedy. “I read The Zoya Factor [by chick lit writer Anuja Chauhan] because I was asked if I would make a film on it. The book is funny, but you know, I wouldn’t go back to it as a reader.” A film-maker, she insisted, has to find some truth in a story before deciding to make a movie on it.
And the storyteller does not know when the muse will strike. Kunal was travelling through rural Bengal with a “comrade” during his days as a young political activist when he was shown a villager and told that his wife was Japanese. Though intrigued, Kunal didn’t ask any question. It was 25 years later that Kunal — now no longer a political person but a business professor — actually wrote The Japanese Wife, as a snowstorm raged outside his Montreal home.
Film-maker and actor Goutam Ghose, who joined the discussion in its closing chapter, said the novel would continue to exist because a novel was not just a story. “The novel will exist till we exist,” said the maker of Moner Manush.
The novel will exist till the novelist submits to his muse, we say.
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