I met Feroz Rather for the first time in the summer of 2005 in Delhi. A lean young man, he was adrift in the city. But he was one of the few people from Kashmir the cause of whose restlessness immensely delighted me: he had come to Delhi with the aim of reading novels and learning how to write. Last month, when Harper Collins India published his hard-hitting debut novel, The Night of Broken Glass, I called him up and congratulated him. Because he was in Tallahassee, where he is a doctoral student of Creative Writing at Florida State University, we talked about the book through email.
Excerpts from the conversation:
One of the first things that struck me was the iconoclasm and rage of your characters. For instance, Tariq, the rebel embodies not only a fervor for aazadi but also a rationalistic and trenchant critique of Kashmiri society. Likewise, one of the revolutionaries, Jamshid, who is a ‘watul’, a person of so called low zaat, challenges the caste like structure and hierarchy of Kashmiri society. Would you consider your novel a tale of rebellious multitudes and of an existentialist will to freedom?
I like how you are qualifying the book. I got so involved while conceiving the characters of Tariq and Jamshid and Rosy. I often felt as though someone had placed heavy rocks on their chests and the boys and girls of their generation, and that none of them could speak freely and think freely and act freely. With these characters, I share how they feel about the brazenness of political violence and social injustice in Kashmir; the heaviness in the air, the despondency and hopelessness, the sense of absolute physical and psychological siege. They want to talk and if no one is listening, they rant on and utter monologues.
You see how Jamshid Sheikh replaces Syed Anzar Shah as the imam of the mosque in Bijbyor in “Robin Polish.” It was an inversion of how caste in our society functions or has functioned until recently. I think it is ridiculous that if there is a village called Fuddah—as there is just across the river Sandren from my village, Bumthan, in Anantnag—that it should be divided into “Pir Fuddah” and “Grees Fuddah”. I think that such nomenclature—no matter the degree to which caste is relevant or institutionalized in Kashmir and what that means in terms of segregation of labor, marriage and other social phenomenon—is violent. And you see how Rosy in her love letter “Rosy” exposes and negates that sort of violence.
The year we met in Delhi, you told me a story about a young man you had seen in Freiburg. I remember you saying that it was Gunter Grass’s son you had seen, and he worked at a cycle shop as a repairman. Over the years, I have thought about that story and what it means that the son of the Nobel laureate and one of the greatest writers in the entire world is working as a repairman in a cycle shop in Freiburg. And it did tell me a lot about the nature of that society—post-war Germany—that has the ability to create such an arrangement.
It is shameful that if my father is a relatively rich man in the village and I go with him to the local branch of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, that he should directly go into the manager’s cubicle and not wait in the queue. It is also shameful that the next time I go to the bank, that the manager would tell me: “Oh, Rather’s Saeb’s son! Peon, make some tea!” In a thoroughly corrupt society, such kind of favoritism becomes dangerous when it couples with the caste. If your caste is X, the manager will give you the job of the clerk and if it is Z, well, he will for sure exclude you.
I do think that as far as Tariq is concerned he sees humans as fundamentally free, azad beings. He has travelled the world. He has read Dante and Will Durant and has had the ambition of being a historian. This fictional character thinks we as Kashmiris want to realize freedom because we are actually free. His longing for freedom is existential because it precedes both society and religion. As the propaganda media machines would have the world believe, his longing for freedom is not posed against the nation states whose universities have rejected him, and who he has rejected in his heart.
There is also another category of characters who are extremely alienated and face terrible moral dilemmas? I am thinking about nameless narrator of “The Old Man in the Cottage” and Ilham, who lingers as a ghost in Inspector Masood’s basement or for that matter Gulam who is poor cobbler? Tell us about them?
They were difficult to write. When one is beginning to write fiction, it is not easy to create a character who has nothing in common with you, and whose existence you only know while you arrive at it. The narrator of “The Old Man in the Cottage” is such a character and creating him seemed to alter something in me.
Now that you have classified them, I think it is the darkness of the political and social worlds that contain them that makes them who they are.
Are you saying their inability to speak becomes their voice?
In a way. But probably, also their scalding desire to be heard in a world that wants to silence them.
Can you tell us about your evolution as a writer? To what extent would you credit your training in creative writing at California State University Fresno and Florida State University in nurturing the writer in you?
Ever since I came into grad school—some seven years ago—I have been a teaching assistant. I think what really helps me is that I teach essays and short stories to some fifty college students every semester. I do not often realize it, but it’s been a great help. The amount of reading and thinking you do while you are helping your students and reading their papers which are fresh and full of beautiful mistakes and imperfections has been a great help.
Odd as it may sound, I am not a great fan of writing workshop. I have been in a plenty of workshops with great professors who have written Pulitzer-winning books. I am grateful that they have read my stuff and spoken about it critically. But ultimately writing is a solitary act and you do it yourself. I often ignore what others say about my story. I also believe after writing a few drafts, if I am paying attention, the story itself will tell me where it wants to go.
The greatest benefit for being in the United States has been that I can recognize myself as an individual. America has enhanced my individuality in a way that I think of myself as myself not as a son of my father or a member of my family, or a resident of my village, or a mentee of a mentor, and all the other outer crusts of identity you assume because all that is too easy. Writing or producing art means you unearth the most original parts of yourself. It is scary because that terrain is a terrain of vulnerability, shame, guilt, uncertainty.
As a Kashmiri writer writing in English on Kashmir, what are the challenges of cultural translation and representation?
The challenges are many, but it is also an opportunity to not only bring Kashmiri sensibility to English and make it available to the global readership, but you can achieve a lot of in terms of language itself. There are sections in Heart of Darkness where it seems that reality of Africa exceeds the limits of the English language. This builds a sort of pressure on the syntax, resulting in taut prose that is mysteriously beautiful.
I think we live in a time where if we attain a certain mastery over the English language, we stand a great chance to tell the world our story.
What role do you see fiction can play in nourishing the imagination of a subjugated people in an occupied zone?
The role is crucial. Language is a realm of violence, and the novel is no less than a battlefield. Flaubert understood more than anyone else the ache of Madame Bovary. What is it that afflicts Emma? The answer is not only that outside her boring marriage she wants lovers. What she wants is not only an alternative to the quotidian monotony of her life. What Emma wants is aazadi and the aazadi to realize her imagined world where she would be desired and loved.
(Wajahat Ahmad teaches Sociology at Jindal University)