issue 22: winter 2020

IRWIN ALLAN SEALY & SHARMISTHA MOHANTY

The Past Is Always With Us

An interview with Irwin Allan Sealy

Sharmistha Mohanty (SM): What drew you to write two books back to back on the very far past? Zelaldinus and the forthcoming Asoca. And to two very distinctly different time periods?

Allan Sealy (AS): The past is always with us, at hand, so I can't say I was lured there by a predilection or even a preference. Take a book like Red, set in the present (or recent past) in this valley where I live, in that worldwide turn-of- the-century web of cybercafes that existed before home broadband connexions became commonplace. Part of the book—or a recurring image—is rooted in the remote past, a prehistoric past, far older than the Asoca of my new book or the Akbar of Zelaldinus. I would think the Ramapithecus figure in The Everest Hotel also runs close to that past, the caveman past which connects with the present-day “criminal tribes” Dom character in Red. I suppose it is a preoccupation, this paleo urge. After Sanchi my favourite holy place is the cave complex we mistakenly call Bhimbetka, mistakenly because it’s older by far than any myth-making that survives it. Here is where human life in this country began, not in some mythic past. Such places as these prehistoric caves are only to be understood in human terms by the signs we find painted on the cave walls, and every visitor must unravel them as he can. My response is to try to inhabit those caves as a cave-dweller might have and at the same time keep one foot in the present to understand what they might signify for us in the contemporary world. India glosses over its aboriginal past as if it never existed when in fact it was erased, and new myths superimposed, rather as the aboriginal past of Australia was erased. In recent times Australians have tried to make amends for their cultural—to say nothing of their armed—assault; we have done nothing.

SM: In Zelaldinus, Akbar and the narrator stand side by side as do the now and Sikri. You are also claiming the past as contemporary, the now. And there is never any nostalgia or sentiment in it. Would you talk about this a bit?

AS: We are not entitled to sentiment when it comes to the past. Nostalgia airbrushes, adds a rose tint and imposes our values where it should be uncovering the code of another period. Better to annex the past and work it in a modern idiom, so it speaks to us in our language.

SM: I know that in your other work too you often linger on Pahari miniatures, and from knowing you I also know that you are moved by our ruins and older architecture, and even that mud house we saw in Agra. There is something here too...

AS: We are entitled to be moved (we cannot help but be) by the beauty of the past as it appears to us in the remains we see around us. The traditions of those vanished artisans linger on in the ruins and it’s for us to make a connexion with them before we get swept into the uniform aesthetic of the global modern. The modern has its strengths and we should not neglect them, but complex cultures like ours afford us the luxury of a comparison lost to most. The cave drawings, Asoca, Akbar, each comes from a different place and plane; somehow we must place ourselves at the point where they intersect. Elements from each of those levels or worlds enter into an eighteenth century Pahari painting and make it possible; in the same way all of these, including the Pahari painting, make our own art possible. Mystics sometimes project a web of ley lines on the landscape; in a more materialist vein I would speak of a synchrony of planes: when I visit Akbar’s speaking dead city or climb Sanchi hill or enter one of those ancient caves (and return to my desk) I am caught in a vital crossfire of eras and enabling energies.

SM: There seem to be a handful of poets and fiction writers in India in recent times who have been drawn to the past as a springboard to the now—do you feel there is something in our times here in India that leads to this?

AS: Possibly in the past, the colonial past, people were inclined to look to the future, to a time when the foreign ruler would be gone, and to begin to envisage the kind of country this might become. We have the opposite need, a discontent with the way things turned out and an inclination to look backward. But pride should not enter that (or any) reflex. Better to address the past with the same scepticism and ruthlessness with which we criticise the present. At any rate without the indulgence we currently extend it (and ourselves) when we glorify it. History resents flattery; it will not return the compliment.

Photograph of the mud house by Sharmistha Mohanty.

Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of Zelaldinus, a collection of poems from Almost island, and most recently Asoca: a sutra. Penguin published the 30th anniversary edition of his novel The Trotter-nama last year.

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise. Her most recent work is a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. Her work has been published in several journals all over the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, and the Chinese journal Jintian. A chapbook made from a selection of poems from The Gods Came Afterwards appeared early 2020 from Ediciones Pen Presse in Spanish. The poems are translated by the acclaimed Argentinian poet, Mercedes Roffe. Mohanty is the founder-editor of Almost Island and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers gathering held in New Delhi. She has taught for several years at the International Creative Writing MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. She has also taught at the Creative Writing programme at Naropa University, set up by Allen Ginsberg. Mohanty has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany (2002), at Ledig House in New York (2004), had residencies at the La Napoule Foundation for the Arts in France (2004), and Yaddo, USA, 2009. She is a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Indian Ministry of Culture.