The Double Life of Shashi Tharoor
ABC RadioMagazine
October 1994
By Michele Field

Shashi Tharoor was born, he says, under two horoscopes that didn’t match. Now a senior UN diplomat as well as a prize-winning author whose latest novel, Show Business, has recently been published in Australia, his life, not to mention his work, seem full of contradictions.  But as MICHELE FIELD found out, this Melbourne Writers Festival guest is consummately skilled at finding the middle ground between black and white without reducing everything to grey.

Questions about the relative cultural clout of writers and politicians spring to mind as one talks to Shashi Tharoor.  Tharoor is both a novelist twice-over and a director of the United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Bosnia.  I am reminded of the Martin Amis short story Career Move, which describes a world where attitudes towards poets and scriptwriters are reversed. 

With Tharoor, if you want to talk politics, he talks prose.  And when you want to discuss the hitches in his work as a writer (given that his mind is usually four-fifths fixed on some crisis), he discusses the rewards of being an arbitrator.  This idea of the two-streamed life is at the center of Show Business: Bombay film stars who venture into politics, and politicians who act as if they’ve been cast as ‘stars’.

He reminds me too of the handsome French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy (whom the French describe as ‘one third Rimbaud and two-thirds Rambo’) who stood briefly as a political candidate on a platform advocating the lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia.  ‘There is a real difference between Levy and me,’ says Tharoor, ‘because unlike Levy my work in public life is not public.  It is discreet, and when I write reports they go out under the name of the Secretary-General.  I work for an institution and it is the efforts of the institution which matter.’

Show Business is full of silly puns and fatuous love songs; it is the story of a weak-willed actor who achieves all the compulsory adulteries and cop-outs required by his career.  And it couldn’t be further, one imagines, from the altruistic, sober-suited side of Tharoor’s life.  Ironically, the actor’s name if Ashok Banjara, which is a pseudonym Tharoor used when he wrote at university, though Tharoor flinches when I refer to Banjara as his alter ego.

Nothing in Tharoor’s background drew him to the pathos and desperation with which he wrestles in his UN job.  ‘"One would imagine that growing up in India there was no shortage of opportunities like that, but I was always busy at school and never found time to engage myself with the world outside.  I didn’t go off to the slums as my wife did – she once worked for Mother Teresa, during the Bangladesh refugee crisis, for example.  That was the year I was preparing for my school-leaving exam. But there was no shortage of opportunities – I suppose I just did other things."

After a few years working with the UN’s High Commission for Refugees in Geneva, Tharoor was sent to head the refugee office in Singapore.  For the first time, he says, he was able to ‘put my head to the pillow every night, feeling I’d made a difference to the lives of real human beings’.  His office ran the Vietnamese refugees’ camp, so he could meet the people whom his schemes had rescued.  He tells me of one particular family which had drifted to Singapore: the parents had slit their fingers and made their children suck the blood.  ‘They lived on rainwater, blood and hope,’ says Tharoor, and though that sounds melodramatic, melodrama is Tharoor’s forte.

In 1989 when his first novel was published to great acclaim – The Great Indian Novel won the Commonwealth Prize for a First Novel in 1990, the year the prize was presented in Sydney – Tharoor decided to re-establish himself in India.  He had left as a postgraduate student with an American scholarship to study diplomacy; he had married another Indian student whom he met in the US, and in 1989 they were living in Geneva with five-year-old twin sons whom they wanted to educate in India.  ‘I had an attractive job offer from a leading Indian newspaper (not the Statesman, the paper on which my father worked).’

However, having resigned from refugee work, he was offered other jobs in the United Nations.  Being a ‘peacekeeper’ was a tantalizing prospect, and he accepted the New York-based job as an experiment – leaving his family in Switzerland for six months while he re-examined his options.  ‘That is why ‘Show Business’ got written, because I didn’t have the family with me – I had evenings and weekends.’

I ask Tharoor whether he believes in predestination.  His demeanour is so statesmanlike and self-possessed, this feels like a presumptuously personal question.  But his reply is a candid ‘Yes’ to a great extent.’

‘Mind you, I don’t believe one can actually predict what one is destined for – I think one still has to strive.  Otherwise it would be a formula for lying back and letting it all happen, which I’ve never done.

‘My Hinduism is infused with a very Protestant work ethic, which I think is very much part of Hinduism.  The Bhagavadgita speaks of karma, the work ethic, the idea of working without thought of the reward.  You do something as well as you can and if the reviewers don’t notice you, and if the book-buyers don’t buy you, tough.  You still have to write that book because it’s in you and it’s got to come out.  That’s a Hindu way of paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw’s line, that I write for the same reason a cow gives milk.’

Show Business is about the way mass-market films, the lowest form of culture, can preserve our stories for us – and revitalize and reinvent them. “Crass entertainment’ on one level, but the book is a subtle argument, I think, for ‘Bollywood’ (as the Bombay film business is called) and for I Love Lucy and Neighbours.  If Tharoor can throw his heart into that argument, why doesn’t he write fiction which appeals on the same level?

Tharoor avoids answering the question about writing for one market (the ‘up’ market) while praising the taste of the proles.  ‘Of course, it would be lovely if my novels were mass entertainments but I’ve specialized in wonderful reviews and very poor sales. No, I don’t think of fiction as mass entertainment, but like Molière I do think you have to entertain in order to edify.’

In fact, when I press him, he admits to not reading the literary equivalent of the Bollywood film – the Jeffrey Archers and Jilly Coopers of this world. He has written a justification of mass-market taste but he wants to lock it into an intellectual context.

‘Fifty per cent of the population of India is still illiterate, so films like Ashok Banjara’s are the primary vehicle for the transmission of the fictional experience.  Only three per cent of the population of India can read English anyway, and that’s the audience for my novel.  But they have all seen at least some Indian films and the other 97 per cent has seen far more of them.  Over and over again.

‘These films are  shabby, but they represent a kind of art of their own.  They are what incarnates escape for such a large number of people – they given them an opportunity to dream with their eyes open.’

But, I say, it is a strange mesh – this fit between a novel which is so sophisticated, describing a means of storytelling which is so unsophisticated.  I tell Tharoor that I am never sure how much he is making fun of his alter ego’s wild world.

‘I suppose there is some ironic detachment but at the same time some affection for that world.  Largely because it matters to so many people.  The idea of my hero dying in a hospital bed and being visited by the masses, is something which has happened not just once but twice in real India.  Why is it that these people who, like my hero, are immoral, corrupt, superficial, exploitative, essentially winging it and making an extraordinary success for themselves without any great commitment to their art of their audience – why is it that people like this get such a following?’

So, it is unfair, that this exasperating alter ego of his gets the acclaim, instead of writers with higher ideals? ‘Well,’ Tharoor says with his statesmanlike smile, ‘the world is unfair.  If you work in the international environment for as long as I have – 16 years is a fairly long time – you realize very quickly that this is true.  There is a gap between the “ought” and the “is”.’

Tharoor is leading a very influential life in the Bosnian negotiations, but he is not a famous name as a peacemaker.  Show Business is about fame and its attractions, so I asked him why – since he seems cut out for a frontline political career and the famous side of politics – he didn’t choose that instead of background diplomacy.

‘I was tempted to go into politics – I was president of my students’ union – but I was profoundly aware that I didn’t have the right background.  In India people of my background and education, the salaried middle classes, go into bureaucracy; politicians are either extremely rich or they are the poor on the make.  I didn’t have a poor man’s constituency (the rural area, or a vote-bank of my caste).  Nor was I a maharaja or the son of a terribly rich industrialist who could buy himself a party ticket.  There is no feasible political life for people like me.'

This should not sound like a criticism of India, and maybe his sons’ political chances are better.  Tharoor’s evenhandedness has deep roots – it is not just new United Nations sheen. He says he does not see a world of blacks and whites because ‘the problems I try to solve involve choosing between two bad alternatives – or three or four.  Seeing that people who act out of conviction and sincerity, even out of loyalty to themselves and those they hold precious, can do such great harm to others, has changed me.  I have transported that, to some degree, to my fiction.  There are people I like, who I am sure have faults, and people I don’t like who I am sure have wonderful characters.

That confession makes me bolder and I quote from a speech in which he said that the best literary energy is generated within iniquitous social structures, or comes from writers in exile.  I wonder whether Tharoor fits into either category  and feels any advantage if he does.

‘Not really.  Unlike an immigrant writer, who has acquired a new home and a new set of local commitments, I have been an Indian wherever I’ve been.  Even though I was born in London and am theoretically entitled to a British passport, I have always used the Indian one.   My work obliges me to be abroad, and that’s the distinction between me and some very fine Indian writers who are nonetheless expatriates. I don’t have a “new country” – I am not American nor was I Swiss or Singaporean.’

So we cannot apply to him personally what he said about the advantages for a writer in exile? ‘No, what I said was that the experience of suffering and resisting and subverting, is something which produces fine literature.  I certainly wasn’t trying to apply that to myself.  But many Third World writers do arrive at their fictional truth through a process of resistance.

‘Paradoxically, I insisted to Western publishers that I would safeguard, separately, the Indian rights to The Great Indian Novel & Show Business - they must go to an Indian publisher who could only pay me Indian fees [which wouldn’t be] as much as a Western publisher would pay me for that market.  I wanted to reach an Indian audience through an Indian imprint.’

This is what Vikram Seth did too, with A Suitable Boy,  but Seth raises his eyebrows skeptically when Tharoor’s Indianness is emphasized.  The lines being drawn between who is and who is not an ‘Indian’ writer with an international readership are very fine lines, but they remind me of debates around the Miles Franklin award to Frank Moorhouse, and journalists’ questions to Tom Meneally.

In the past Tharoor has also spoken about the danger of rich countries – places like the United States and Australia – not developing the same sort of richness of soul as Third World countries.  I am quoting words back to him which annoy him; as a UN leader he does not want to accuse paymasters like the Americans and Australians of ‘soullessness’.

‘No.  The article you read slightly misrepresented me.  The point I was trying to make was about development, and my argument was that for god’s sake let’s not think that “developing countries” are not rich in other ways.  Calcutta is a hellhole, frankly and some of the most wonderful Bengali writers and poets have come out of it – at least one Nobel Prize winner and others who deserve as much.  Cultural riches should not be lost sight of as we focus on material poverty.  To say that there are developing countries whose richness lies in their soul more than their soil, is not to say that developed countries don’t have souls.’

There we agree.  But his often quoted emphasis on the role which writers should play in serving the cause of national development is less open to misconstruction.  I explain that in Australia at the moment this is a sore point: how much is a writer supposed to help with the task of cobbling together a ‘national identity’?  Tharoor seems convinced writers should be cobblers.

‘Yes, absolutely.  For example, in both my novels – and certainly in the first one – there was a conscious effort to reclaim stories for the Indian people.  That’s important because each society is a world unto itself, even though it must exist among other worlds.  That is our duty – each Indian writer holding up the mirror to India. The business of reclaiming our narratives does matter to me.

‘In Show Business, however, I am telling the stories which Indians are still telling themselves and I am saying, let’s look at these stories slightly differently.’

Okay, I can see the narrative importance as a Homeric one.  But how can Tharoor put an emphasis on a united world, as in ‘United Nations’, and also on the construction of particular national identities?  I thought that, given his position, he might have more apprehension about nationalism and the possibility that fostering national identities might to damage.

‘Well, these questions are obviously easier for me – I am an Indian, and India is the antithesis of the conventional idea of the nation-state as one race and one language and one religion.  India in some ways is the principle of the United Nations in action: it has every ethnic group known to man, mingled over 3000 years; it has an extraordinary degree of pluralism, and I once said somewhere – in case you dug it up – thatthe singular thing about India is that you can only speak about it in the plural. We have a hundred and fifty different ways of cooking the potato.’

So (to summarise Tharoor) there is little risk of Indian nationalism because India is multicultural.  But is he also saying that there is no risk in nationalisms (the building of stronger and stronger local identities, at least) becoming a kind of ‘hobby crusade’ for writers?  There are nationalistic writers whose books are worsening the social divisions in Europe, and writers who have played a small but significant role in the Bosnian crisis.

Tharoor diplomatically skirts my question.  Point-blank, he refuses to make comparisons with Bosnia – ‘because each country has its own history.  For instance, India is not a “melting pot” the way Americans are.  More a thali, a smorgasbord if you like, with various kind of dishes on the same plate – that is India to me.’  To Tharoor the film industry in India is an ideal: ‘You have Christian dance directors, you’ve got Muslim movie stars, and in fact the most famous film publicist in Bombay is a Jewish Indian.  You have people of all backgrounds working together – that’s at the heart of my sense of what it means to be an Indian.’

It is hard to push Tharoor beyond his UN optimism to the warm but brittle cynicism which underlies Show Business.  Reading the novel reminded me of the unsweetened chocolate drink which once was to British bohemia what the ‘short black’ is to Australia today.  Because ‘chocolate’ had comfortable, cosy associations, this thick, sharp drink tasted 'cynical’.  Because novels about the film industry are generally apolitical, Show Business feels politically raw and bitter and close to the bone.

Show Business describes the insider influences which keep Bollywood on the rails.  The influence passes from fathers to sons, or from money to money – and it is the dirty grey area of what might look like a sensible industry.  When I refer to this Tharoor does not rise to the bait.  ‘No, it is the dishonouring of the “black and white”, rather than the word 'grey.’

Off politics and grey areas then.  I try to take Tharoor back to his personal life by discussing the way Show Business again and again, shows how the public, having seen an actor on screen, cannot help but extrapolate about the actor’s life as though it were an extension of his screen life.  Am I guilty of this as I talk to you, Shashi Tharoor?  Do readers presume they know you better for having read your books?

‘I have not yet written a novel about an Indian who goes to study in the States and becomes a UN official – so I tend to assume that my personality has not been of much account to readers of my books.  I’ve on and off had columns in Indian newspapers, and there I was in a position to use the first person.  Then people read me and thought they knew me, but my novels do not give much clue to myself.’

Tharoor is chuffed that the very industry which he satirises in Show Business is now making a film of the book.  He does not take on board my comment that a novel of his about the war in Bosnia, or the Vietnamese camps in Singapore, might be as true but not be wreathed as the one is, with cabaret numbers.  Tharoor has not seen any of Dennis Potter’s television plays (that’s what working long hours does, perhaps).  Anybody who has will know what I mean by describing Tharoor’s novels as having the song and dance and the surface eccentricity, but as lacking Potter’s pessimistic point of view.  When the Indian film company dubs the film of Show Business into English next year (and Tharoor assures me that I shall be able to buy the soundtrack), the contrast will be sharper.

So if he stands behind the signatory of the ‘Secretary-General’ when he writes with one side of his head, does writing his fiction take only the other side – and exclude what is devoted to the UN?  I have spoken to him in a week in which he is doing two days of interviews as an author, followed by two days in which he has barred all doors to his publisher and the press because he is at a peacekeeping conference at the Royal College of Defence Studies.

‘It is difficult keeping these compartments watertight.  But I was born under two horoscopes.  My parents had one chart cast in London where I was born, and another cast back home’ – he laughs – ‘I am sorry, but an Indian without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card.  Anyway, the two didn’t match.  But I know I am a Piscean, pulled in opposite directions. If I did only one of my two careers I might end up feeling terribly lost to the other.  At the moment there is a part of my psyche which feels it is withering on the vine, and that is the writing part.’