“Style is ultimately your own character”

Inderjit Badhwar has recently won a French literary award

Veteran journalist Inderjit Badhwar, who has spent the better part of his life writing headlines, is now making them. His novel La Chambre Des Parfums, the French version of his novel Sniffing Papa, published in India in 2002, recently won the French literary award Le Prix Litteraire. It was voted the best foreign debut novel of 2004 by a jury comprising France's leading writers, intellectuals and filmmakers.

Badhwar worked with television channels in the US before coming to India as an executive editor with India Today. For a man who has to his credit exclusives on Pentagon scandals, CIA goof-ups, and FBI cover-ups, winning an award for a fictional work is a testimony to his versatility. In an interview, via e-mail, to Prerana Trehan, Badhwar talks about his book and his experiences as a writer.

From the early part of your life spent in Uttar Pradesh to a stint in journalism in the US to winning a French literary award, you have come a long way. How does it feel to have led such an eventful life?

Actually, it is a continuum. I do not feel any part of my life as fragmented. It was a natural progression that flowed from an innate desire to write. This is what led me to the Indian Express, then a scholarship to Columbia University in New York and then, again, as a writer to the world of newspapers and magazines and books in the US and in India. It happened without pre-conception or design. The writer in me led me to whichever event occurred in my life, as well as to authors dead and living in whose world I lived and still live. But I always think of myself as pan-Indian first and pan-world second.

For a journalist, the expected thing would have been to write a political book. What made you try your hand at fiction?

Fiction gives you more freedom to create — but with even greater integrity, honesty and verisimilitude. If fiction smacks of dishonesty it is more severely judged and condemned than if you get your facts wrong as a journalist. After all, Hemingway was a reporter for the Kansas City Times. And Jimmy Breslin wrote for the New York Post before they wrote fiction which is far more challenging because you have to lay open your guts, which you do not have to do as a reporter or journalist.

Does fiction writing require a different approach and skill sets as compared with journalistic writing?

Yes. You do not have notes of interviews. There is no editor to judge you. Your deadlines are your own. Your themes, which may not ever be part of a newsroom story budget, are your own risks. Your style has to reflect not uniformity demanded by a newspaper or a magazine but the dictates of your own soul. You have to have the guts to be judged and condemned, and yet persist in your beliefs and your inspiration. Style is ultimately your own character. And you have to break loose from everything you have learned.

There is a perception that most Indian writers write with an eye on western markets.

I agree. They all go begging to western agents and compromise with their styles — Rajkamal Jha, Ravi Shankar, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Deshpande etc. I did just the opposite. I wrote for myself and for the love of writing. I first went to a relatively unknown Indian publisher and experimented with my belief that if my work was worthwhile it would receive recognition no matter who published it. After all, Chekhov and Turgenev did not go running to European publishers.

How did Sniffing Papa (La Chambre Des Parfums in French) come about?

I thought of writing a short story like the book A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean which was about a fishing family in a small Midwestern town and became a bestseller. I thought this would be a good foundation for an aristocratic shikari family who love their soil and the short story just grew and grew.

At the time of the launch of Sniffing Papa, you had mentioned a couple of projects — one on surviving poverty and a fictional account of the lives of NRIs who veil their Indian origins. Are these in the pipeline?

Yes. But Sniffing Papa is already about the celebration of the ‘Indian Mongrel’ — a westernised English-speaking family quite proud of its western trappings, unapologetic about its eclecticism and yet quintessentially wedded to the smell and fragrance and odours of the Indian soil — the monsoon smells, the childhood smells of the mother’s dupatta.

You are a voracious reader. Which writers have influenced you? Other factors that shaped you as a writer?

Henry Miller, Erica Jong, Knut Hamsun, R.L. Stevenson, John Cowper Powys, Saul Bellow, Isaac Beshavis Singer. What has influenced me as a writer is the need to put music into my words. No one really knows why one becomes a writer. I don't think Joyce knew. Nor did Ezra Pound. You want to write just as someone wants to be an engineer or a doctor or a farmer and we all create in our own ways. If we writers are dishonest or disingenuous we are exposed faster than a crooked politician.

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