India's Literary Leaders

By: Menachem Kaiser

Vikas Swarup, the author of “Six Suspects” and “Q & A” (the book that became “Slumdog Millionaire”), has just been named India’s Consul General in Osaka, Japan. With the appointment, Swarup joins a long tradition of Indian authors-turned-government officials. Most prominently, there’s Shashi Tharoor, the Minister of State for External Affairs, who wrote “The Great Indian Novel,” and “Show Business” (which was made into the film “Bollywood”).

There’s also Pavan Varma, the Director General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, who wrote “The Art of Making Love to a Woman,” an updated adaptation of the “Kama Sutra.” Navtej Sarna, who penned the novel “We Weren’t Lovers Like That” has, according to his Web site, served as a diplomat in Moscow, Warsaw, Thimphu, Geneva, Tehran, Washington, D.C., and as India’s Foreign Office Spokesman in New Delhi. He’s now the Indian ambassador to Israel. The late Nina Sibal, who was the first secretary of the Indian delegation to the U.N., wrote the novel “Yatra.” The country has also attracted foreign literary-inclined diplomats: Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning writer and poet, served as the Mexican ambassador to India from 1962-1968.

What’s going on here? Do Indian writers feel that they must supplement their work with a more respectable profession? Or is an Indian diplomatic position cushy enough to allow novels to be written on the job? Tharoor, in a 2004 article published in The Hindu, has a more charitable rationale:

"Are diplomats uniquely suited—provided they have the gift to begin with—to be good creative writers? My friend and former United Nations colleague Jayantha Dhanapala, a former Sri Lankan Ambassador in Washington who is now his Government’s envoy in the ongoing peace process, certainly thinks so. He argues that the professional diplomat, like the sensitive writer, has to be able to mix with both elites and masses; be firmly rooted in his own culture while open to the experience of others; have inner resources to fall back upon in coping with the isolation of a foreign posting (what Auden called “this nightmare of public solitude”). And most tellingly, as Dhanapala put it in a 1997 lecture, diplomats see creative writing as an escape valve for their professional compromises and frustrations—“an act of expiation for the bruising of the soul they have experienced in their working life.” The alternative, for less talented diplomats, has often been alcohol."

From: the New Yorker