When the English translation of Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan came out in the late-1990s, I met someone who was barely aware that an international game of cricket was being played. So completely lost was she in 11th century Chozhanaadu that the roars and groans of her neighbours and the household passed her by.
John Ruskin described books as the life-blood of their creators but omitted to say they also enter our bloodstreams and become part of our emotional DNA. The books we read gradually take over our minds and often refuse to leave. Passages and characters become a part of us and linger for years after we have not only put the book away but possibly even lost it. There are comfort books and ones that change your life. They become reference points and instinctively, during a crisis, we turn to them.
Why do we read? Self-improvement is a large-enough project for the mind and spirit. Whether or not we realise it or want to admit it, we read in quest of a mind more original than our own and perhaps because modern-day despair requires consolation and the medicine of a profound narration. Harold Bloom said, “I urge you to find what truly comes near to you,” and went on to say that having failed in all its other conceptual modes — philosophy, politics, and religion — the West has only literature to offer. Literature gives us the option of believing the truth is as funny as it is grim. Literature is about stories which aren’t just told but told in powerfully original ways. India’s literature is so rich and so diverse that it is a literary historian’s despair and a reader’s delight.
The Seven Great Themes — love, loss, laughter, fear, hunger, hatred and justice — are the stuff of literature. It has been said that there are, in the whole world of fantasy and fiction, only 34 possible plots! It has even been said every writer of fiction actually has only one story within herself or himself. That theme is written and re written over and over again under different titles. Then there is the delicate territory between fiction and non-fiction, self-praise and memoir. When everything around us is becoming dehumanised, writing is one of the ways in which humanity resists imposition of reinvented traditions, fabricated myths and manufactured hates. Indeed, “closer than the bonds shared by those who have the same mother are those enjoyed by people who share words.”
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