‘The end of all our travels,’ T.S. Eliot reminds us, ‘is to come back to the place where we began and to know it for the first time.’ What attracts me to India is a fine word, dharma, which can mean duty, righteousness or law. We are taught in India not to question the dharma of our fathers. I believe, however, that one should question it and discover it for oneself. Our dharma should come from within us and not be dictated by society. Like Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata, I have come to believe that my dharma is the godlike quality of not wishing to hurt anyone. This is also a method of survival.
The most important lesson I have learned from the business world is that it is not intelligence but the will which moves the world. Just as the barber’s basin appeared to Don Quixote to be a knight’s helmet, so is the world what it seems and wisdom consists in making it into the image of our will. You have to insist loud and clear and courageously defend your claim with your life. The more you believe in a thing, the more it exists. It is not intelligence but the will that imposes truth and martyrs make a faith, not the other way around.
All writers, I think, seek continuity between their writing and the life they live. Writing needs commitment to a time and place and it brings release from loneliness, which is the human condition. Hence, writing is a classic strategy for survival. But the act of writing also creates distance between the subject and the object and a writer risks becoming too much of an observer, uninvolved and unconcerned. He also risks becoming self-righteous—a most disagreeable quality—and subjective. Yet he needs to withdraw from his environment to be authentic. A writer must always be aware of this dilemma and find some sort of balance in his life.
It is common for a writer to stand outside his own culture and be critical—Aristophanes, Euripides, Dante, and Shakespeare were passionately and incurably sceptical. But this does not mean that they were adversarial to the ideals of their culture. In fact, they celebrated their culture. It is ironical that the culture that educates us, the patterns of perception learned in our schools, is unfriendly to the commercial civilization in which we live. Business people tend towards optimism. I am no different and hence my writing lacks the angst that has been the defining quality of modern literature and theatre. According to the modern ethos, an artist should be tormented and die young. He is not expected to create beauty but reveal the sordid truth behind our bourgeois lives. The irony is that modern literature and art are hostile to the bourgeois world although they are financed by uneasy bourgeois money.
Indian intellectuals carry the additional burden of having to reinterpret their tradition. Our nineteenth-century thinkers tried to do this either as revivalists or as synthesizers or reformers from Rammohan Roy onward. Dayanand Saraswathi, Vivekananda, Tagore, Aurobindo, all of them struggled with this task. Today, however, I do not see enough intellectuals doing it. Hence, right nationalists are able to get away with a confused and false view of our past. Indian writers need to examine our rich, rational traditions and not be swept by the mystical side alone.
After thirty years, I finally decided to call it quits. I felt that I had gone to work each weekday morning. I had fed and looked after my family. My wife and I had raised two children. Gradually, I had moved up the corporate hierarchy. Then one day I asked myself, what had all this been for? With a feeling of futility I wondered: How long could an adult come to work and peer over the market shares of Pampers, Tide, Oil of Olay, and Vicks? There must be more to life? So, after a long career in six countries, most of it reasonably absorbing, I decided to take early retirement at fifty to become a full-time writer.
Writing in English
I am comfortable writing in English. If my business discourse can be in English, why not my literary discourse? For me, not unlike many in the Indian middle class, English did not come as a matter of choice. I inherited it from the British Raj. I was sent to English-speaking schools, and as I grew up I found that my command of English was better than my Hindi or Punjabi. My mother knew all along that English was a passport to my future. With globalization of the economy, English has become more than ever the language of the world, and my mother’s gamble has paid off. In the twenty-first century I do not have to be apologetic about writing in English, as I did in the late 1960s and 1970s when I wrote these plays. Although the criticism of those who questioned my right to write in English has diminished, I still feel that there is a problem with performing in English for the theatre in India.
I have learned to write as I speak. In my case, this is the language that middle-class Indians learn in English-medium schools throughout India. It seems to have become a national language, for all Indians speak it in pretty much the same way. It is no longer imitative—nostalgic of ‘London fogs’ or ‘Surrey dews’—as it used to be before Independence. It is a nice sounding idiom that is flourishing under the bright Indian sun. It is virile and self-confident despite the efforts of our politicians to make us forget English.
The English that I speak and write originated with the professional middle class in the nineteenth century under British rule. This class not only produced clerks for the East India Company, but also lawyers, teachers, engineers, doctors, bureaucrats—all the new professions that
