On M G Vassanji's "The Assassin's Song"

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

The India International Centre was the venue for celebrated Canadian author M G Vassanji’s book reading session in the capital on Wednesday. The author read out passages from his last novel The Assassin’s Song (2007), which was nominated for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, two of the most prestigious literary prizes in Canada. He was joined at the session by Professor Harish Narang, the Hindi translator of the novel, who also read out sections from the translation, titled Qatil Ka Geet. Vassanji read three excerpts, one from each of the three main settings of the novel.

Karsan Dargawalla, the protagonist of The Assassin’s Song, wants to play cricket like any other little boy, but his father, the Keeper of the Pirbaag shrine (and hence, a de facto avatar of God) in Gujarat, wants him to follow the family’s traditional role as the Keeper of Pirbaag. Karsan flees to Harvard, turning his back on his family, before the horrific violence of the 2002 Gujarat riots force him to return. The novel also describes the beginnings of the Pirbaag shrine in medieval times, with the arrival of a mystical stranger called Nur Fazal, who is taken to be a Sufi by the locals, at the kingdom of Patan Anularra.

Speaking about the novel, Vassanji said, “The book was derived out of my extensive travels in Gujarat, where I came across a lot of shrines and dargahs. I realised that the culture around some of these dargahs had an intimate connection with my own childhood, and the people there welcomed me like one of their own. And so I began to wonder how it would be like to grow up in and around a dargah.” The religious pluralism of the Sufis has a lot of parallels with the Bhakti movement in India, of which the Vaishnavites were a prominent part.

Vassanji spoke at length about his childhood influences “I grew up in an environment which owed a lot to the Vaishnavite Krishna sects; the devotional songs, the culture... When I look at a woman praying in a temple, I see my mother. I can empathise with people who do that. Even though I’m an agnostic, I have religious sensibilities.” He added, “My family’s from the Khoja community, an offshoot of the Lohana caste near Jamnagar. Although a lot has changed in recent years, the worldview remains the same.”

The Khojas were also among a large number of South Asian communities who had been migrating to East Africa since a long time, in search of trading opportunities. Vassanji himself was born in Kenya, brought up in Tanzania and studied at MIT and UPenn in the USA, before moving to Canada as a postdoctoral fellow in 1978. No surprise then that his novels, like the much-lauded The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003) and The Book of Secrets (1994) bring out the plight of the doubly displaced African Asian in America or Europe.

Vassanji said, “I think it’s very difficult, as an author, to take on the voice of a person from a different race.” Professor Narang also pointed out a pertinent example in this regard: “Nadine Gordimer was once asked why she did not have a single black protagonist in her seven novels before July’s People. She replied that up until that point, the restricting forces of apartheid had not allowed her to understand how being a black person in South Africa truly felt like.”

However, Vassanji was also wary of his works being conveniently labelled using cultural tags. “You can perhaps categorise certain aspects of a novel, but people want to go ahead and put these labels on you, like ‘African literature’ or ‘immigrant literature’. They want to pin you down, so you can’t move from that category.” A nuclear physicist by training, Vassanji said that he now felt ready to tackle science in his forthcoming works. His next novel The Magic of Saida will be released in September this year.