Мина Кандасами о культуре отмены, влиянии родителей и будущем книги в эпоху соцсетей

Meena Kandasamy took the literary world by storm with her first collection of poetry, Touch, in 2006. Two decades hence, her novel Fieldwork as a Sex Object is out. Her other books include Ms Militancy, a book of poems that take on the pretensions of a valorised mythology; and The Orders Were to Rape You, a work that documents the lives of women who gave everything to the Tamil Eelam struggle. Her novel When I Hit You was shortlisted for the 2018 Women’s Prize. In a conversation with publisher S Anand of Navayana, Kandasamy spoke about cancel culture, why social media feels so essential to modern existence, and how her parents shaped her as a writer. Recent developments regarding abusive literary “greats” recall the oft-cited directive to separate the art from the artist. How has this aged today? Is it possible to judge the literary merits of a novel when its authors are known to be bad people? Pablo Neruda, Pablo Picasso, Anne Sexton – almost every favourite of mine has had a fall from grace. I do not know how to quite answer this question. Obviously, in one’s lifetime, when we see abusers being lauded with awards and recognition, it makes you uncomfortable because deep within, you know it is not in spite of being miserable sociopaths but precisely because they are miserable sociopaths. The art is so often an alibi, an accelerant that lets them both perpetuate and get away with more abuse. With our problematic contemporaries this is quite straightforward because it all unfolds in real time – and I have not yet encountered a work so genius that it has made the swallowing of discomfort mandatory or palatable. I seethe when I see these men – and you know that some of these claims to literary merit are also just circle-jerk exercises in mutual backscratching, so I do not take it seriously at all. Most artists we encounter in life are most likely solitary creatures, but abusers often tend to hunt in packs, have a cult following, and, nine times out of ten, have their hands on the operating levers of power – so the actual tragedy is not whether we judge their work or not, it is the fact that these men are judging you, that these very men are the gatekeepers. As an artist, I do not know if we can reach out into history and thoroughly cancel everyone – we will be left with just a few sanctimonious pricks to read. We will have to complicate our readings in the light of what we have learnt. Having said this, I also look at this kind of thing very differently after becoming a mother. I do not want even people with views diametrically opposed to mine to be rude to my children, or to discriminate against them, or to treat them unfairly, unkindly. Maybe that has to be the way we console ourselves about works that we have received as classics – treating them with the kindness we reserve for children. I tend to have a lower tolerance threshold for what is ongoing abuse. Sometimes, people rally around accused perpetrators, citing a right-wing conspiracy as responsible for the accusations. What would you say to/about them? When it comes to self-avowed feminists who also do this, is it fair to judge them as accomplices or apologists, or is it more complex than that? I think we must begin with a basic fact: a false allegation of rape can function as a scorched-earth tactic, and is often used by occupying, genocidal imperial powers against resistance movements to completely discredit them and make their just cause impossible to defend. We saw sensationalist claims against Hamas on October 7 proven false, and for years we have seen similar anti-LTTE propaganda repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. So, do right-wing forces, fascists, genocidal rogue states, and empires spread such false propaganda again and again? Yes. But we must hold individuals to the same standards as movements. Yes, it is possible that someone is being framed. But who is making these accusations? It is not as if the enemy simply woke up one day and honey-trapped these men, as these predators and their apologists would have us believe. In almost every case, the accusations come from within the left ecosystem, from women who have suffered in silence or tried, unsuccessfully, to use internal organisational mechanisms to raise the issue. These men have been protected by their bum-chums who follow the bro-code because they are all in it together. One woman speaking out against one of them could set off something larger – and they know their own head will come under the axe. So, you see the panic with which all the men are lining up to defend one of their own. They are willing to sacrifice years of goodwill and artistic reputation at the altar of this defence. I also do not believe that only settled legal processes decide whether someone is an abusive culprit or not – very often such predators will have the best lawyers; the judicial process itself is extremely demeaning to women and is a series of orchestrated character-assassination takes. When the men and the entire system are on the side of the abusers – why are we focusing on the women? I will not single out the women and the feminists because we cannot use every single failure to throw stones at women: we are talking about cliques here, Delhi’s incestuous bubbles of who-knows-whom, favours exchanged, all of that – the entanglement is too deep. This vulgar, toxic, nauseating way is the only way they can behave if they want to continue to exist within those ecosystems, or they will face exile. Some of these feminists you are alluding to are also from a slightly older generation, so their reading of abuse will be tainted by victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and all these dregs of patriarchy. Look at Vairamuthu here – many of my own friends believe that it is some Brahmin conspiracy to smear his name, and these same friends will admit that the list of victims would run larger than the 17 women who have spoken out publicly against him. So you are asked to pick a side: are you supporting the Brahmin agenda to destroy one of our own, or will you stand with us? I think that sort of mob function will derail us as a species. I have stood with Chinmayi Sripada and the others – not because I want to redeem my reputation in the eyes of Brahmins – but because it is the just thing to do. An entire ecosystem has turned against me as a consequence; I cannot be bothered. Writers today no longer command the kind of readership they once did. Falls from grace notwithstanding, what is the role of present-day, active and aspiring writers in our society? Why do we continue to invest our energies in making books? I do not believe about the kind/scale of readership – this is nostalgia speaking, the same way we cry about the fact that none of us is writing letters or even emails to each other anymore. A hundred years ago, hardly 1% of our women were literate here in India, and now female students account for nearly 50% of higher education enrolment. Books are not an outdated format if they are done right – if they are capable of detonation. They become outdated when they have nothing new to offer, if they are glorified puffed-up creatures that should have stayed as essays or Twitter threads. Lazy writing, writing without any intellectual legwork – these will die very justifiable deaths in the hands of content creators because they are going to shrink your 300 pages of bollocks into a 60-second reel. They are not stealing your job; they are deflating it. What does a writer do in these circumstances? Come back with work that has gravitas and density, or reinvent themselves for bookstagram. I work across formats in my day job, but I do not see myself soft-launching as a reels-maker someday – I just want to be known for and associated with a form that shifts something within you. I want to make something and tell people, See, this took six years of my life to get right; go ahead, consume it in an afternoon – for me, that is absolutely precious. That is an unspoken pact you are entering with someone who does not know you in a personal capacity and it does not chase metrics the way social media does. And what about the internet? What role will social technology play in India’s future? What was happening to a small slice of literature (trade in your trauma for visibility) has now become the operating system for the attention economy – someone is ranting, someone is weeping, someone is signposting – once upon a time it took immense courage and conviction to outrage, and immense self-respect to talk about your vulnerability or experience of abuse. Right now both outrage and injury have become things that can be extracted and made into commodities. Big Tech is being arm-twisted by the Indian dispensation – and there is the laughable fact that all of social media is controlled by two or three misogynist and racist tech-bros. I also think the cheap labour for which Indians are well known has turned us into bots-for-hire and earned Indians a great deal of hatred online (what do you expect if you are typing out Israeli talking points?) That said, the internet has taken us into post-literacy; it has trashed our English-mania, it has flipped the idea of celebrity. It has also turned us into performative divas. We should be wary about the fact that the same tools which help us find each other can also be co-opted by the state for surveillance. We should also realise that the dopamine-high of becoming viral and living your day-to-day based on how well your metrics are doing (a Baudrillardian vulgarity) means we (and especially the young) place a lot of weight on what is essentially noise. Still, we see gatekeeping barriers being broken; we see traditional media being distrusted; genocide can no longer happen without being livestreamed into the world. We all need to turn just a little Marxist (or wherever else we can trace back this thought to) at this inflexion point: an injury to one is an injury to all. You began your writing career young. What kind of conditions allowed you to become the writer that you are now? Do young people today have similar prospects? I was 17 or 18, and I thought I knew everything about the big bad world already. When you are young, the world is so black and white, your moral compass is perfectly intact, and it is an absolute breeze to inhabit that innocence. One has a very, very, very low tolerance threshold at that age – so you are walking out of things constantly, burning bridges all the time. The instinct for self-preservation is very high at that age. You can rebel easily, walk out of abuse with less fear of the consequences, and generally take more risks (in terms of what you work on, how much you experiment, what topics you choose). When we are older, we suffer because we have not quite allowed ourselves to be conditioned out of the sunk-cost fallacy. I think I was incredibly lucky – not only to have parents who were educated but also very radicalised, politicised. Their extended friends’ circle was made up of all kinds of activists, artists, students, outliers. While their thinking was far-left and borderline guerrilla, they were also insanely, unimaginably strict with what I wore or where I went or what I did – and I think it provided a perfect equation for the beautiful chaos and rebellion that has been my life. It was a special brand of madness: they introduced me to one of their friends (and I inevitably fell in love), and then they placed me under house arrest. You know them, and you know that I absolutely love my parents. I became a writer because it was one of those things that I was “allowed” to do (on an internet which preserved your anonymity and was faceless) – instead of, say, acting, or appearing on TV, or joining a theatre group, or leaving home to study. I do not necessarily wish that lack of freedom on anyone. Writing should be a calling, ideally, not an escape hatch. The unedited version of this interview was originally published on Navayana’s substack, Kissing Buffaloes. We welcome your comments at [email protected].