‘Indian English writing is very inferior…’: Author Jeyamohan on language, Salman Rushdie

He discusses his reverence for the “god of language,” and his policy of refusing state honours. This is a rare glimpse into the mind of a writer who sees his craft not as a career, but as a tapasya, a disciplined spiritual pursuit rooted in the soil and soul of Indian culture.

Your latest collection of autobiographical essays is called ‘Of Men, Women and Witches’. It is an interesting name and it combines both lived experience and fiction. Why did you decide on this hybrid method of writing?

I tried to write these things as fiction first, but I could not. These experiences are really harsh and very direct. You cannot write a direct experience in fiction very easily. You must have experiences and then use your imagination to enlarge it, that is the way of fiction. If the experience is already very strong and very close to you, you cannot make it into fiction.

These experiences are very harsh and very close to me, so I chose the article form. All these things, my personal life, my wanderings, my spiritual quest, are very tough, harsh, and direct. There is nothing spiritual or nuanced in it; they are very emotional and deep.

In postmodern writing, mixing fiction with articles, data, and documents is a modern way of telling a story. So these are fiction articles, a dictionary, an autobiography. The fiction element is there to combine experiences into a particular form. Almost all personal, bio-critical articles have a short story format. To give that short story format, I used fiction; otherwise, it is a biographical account.

Q: Do you plan to ever write a proper autobiography, one that tells all the gritty experiences that have inspired your novels, without the filter of fiction?

As an Indian writer, particularly writing in Tamil or any regional language, we have a tendency to be outspoken at every level. We do not entertain a polished kind of writing. We should be very naive, very outspoken, and very loud while talking about something. That is why I selected this format.

I write my fiction with almost all complexities, using all kinds of literary devices. But biography should be very plain and outspoken. I am not going to write a complete biography of myself because I am not an achiever, I am not an adventure person, and I have no such role in history. So my background is not so important for a reader. My personal life is more interesting for a common reader. That’s why I wrote about my personal life.

Speaking about writing in regional languages, there is usually an anxiety about separating oneself from mainstream English novels. How do you make an effort to make your writing distinct from books in English, which are more globally consumed?

I won’t call Indian English writing as mainstream writing. It is a very, very inferior kind of writing we have in English. Because they are very stylised and they belong to the urban upper class, it has a lot of limitations. Personally, I don’t have any respect for Indian English writing.

I wrote a very severe article against the recent book of Salman Rushdie, Victory City. It has a stylised English. Apart from that style, it is a very shallow, very pretentious, very alien text.

I started writing in English 40 years ago. Then I suddenly stopped because I came to know that my linear language was actually changing. I was losing the rhythm of my natural language. So I stopped writing in English and started talking only in Tamil. After 40 years, I have begun to talk in English again, which is why I am not very comfortable with my words.

I restricted my mind to Tamil, and only then could I create a rhythm in Tamil. I have a very unique style and a personal language instrument because I restricted myself to one language. That is the major challenge for any Indian writer: he should not associate with English too much.

But for regional writers, English becomes a means to break into the global literary discourse. We have had an International Booker from Kannada, which was a translation. When we read literature in translation, usually in English, does it risk flattening the original work?

Not so much. There is a new tendency of translation recently. I never tried to translate my work into English, but a new generation, particularly women, emerged from Tamil and translated my work. They have a new policy of translation; they are actually keeping the Tamil identity, the Tamil taste, in the translation.

My first book appeared in English only in 2022, at my age of 60. Till then, no work was available in English. Suddenly, they translated my work, and one translation was shortlisted for an American Literary Translator Association award. My books are now being published in the US. These are excellent translations, but they are not “English” translations in the traditional sense. They are not translating the work into the diction of English persons; they are translating into a kind of “Tamil English.” That kind of English is actually very much cherished by Westerners now. The flavour (suvai) of Tamil is retained. For example, they won’t use the word “mother”; they use the word “Amma.” The relations, the food details, the micro-details are maintained. They are not translating idioms either. This is a new school of translation.

You have written in both Tamil and Malayalam. How do you navigate the literary culture between the two?

Malayalam is my mother tongue, but my mind is in Tamil. So, while I am talking in English, I am thinking in Tamil and trying to translate it into English. I have the same problem with Malayalam. I am thinking in Tamil and automatically translating it into Malayalam. I cannot talk Malayalam very well. I am well only in Tamil. I am limiting myself to Tamil. To be frank, I consciously forgot my mother tongue to write in Tamil.

But while I am writing in Malayalam, the Tamil flair is appreciated as a new style. Almost every critic in Malayalam, while referring to new styles for the past 25 years, has to include my name. They say I have a very unique style in Malayalam, and I am one of the major writers in Malayalam. But actually, I am adding a Tamil flavour to Malayalam. Incidentally, Malayalam is an extension of Tamil. It means I am bringing the ancient flavour of Malayalam into new Malayalam. I have more readers in Malayalam than in Tamil because, naturally, Malayalam has a better reading culture.

Let’s talk about your epic novel, Vennmurasu. It is a modern retelling of the Mahabharata, over 22,000 pages, 26 volumes, taking seven years to write. What was the inspiration and what drove you?

I was born and brought up in an environment of Kathakali, and the main theme of Kathakali is the Mahabharata. I came to understand that the entire value system of India is based on the Mahabharata. We compare every character in our life with Mahabharata characters. The value system is created according to the archetypes, images, and emotions of the Mahabharata. So, if you want to re-narrate your culture, if you want to reconstruct your culture, you have to reconstruct the Mahabharata.

I planned to write a version of the Mahabharata at the age of 28. I talked to the senior writer P.K. Balakrishnan, who wrote a very interesting book ( Ini Njaan Urangatte) on the Mahabharata where the hero is Karna. He highlighted Karna and diminished the role of Arjuna. I asked him, “Arjuna is a great character, the real yogi for whom the Gita was told. If you want to do justice to all characters, you have to write the entire Mahabharata.” So, I took that mission. It took 25 years for me to start. I travelled throughout India, to almost all places referred to in the Mahabharata, including the Himalayas. I collected more than 200 books on the Mahabharata and my manuscript notes alone are over 20,000 pages. I started writing at the age of 51 and completed it within seven years, writing every day all over the world.

My novel is not a re-narration of the Mahabharata; it’s actually another version. In the original, Vyasa gives importance to sages and great heroes only, not to women or inferior persons. For example, Pandu is a very petty character. All inferior persons, blind persons, have absolutely no role. Only two or three major woman characters are there; all others are weak or not mentioned. In my Mahabharata, the woman characters are more powerful because I am from a land of women; I’m a Malayali, I have a lot of mothers in my memory. So, I wrote the story of the Mahabharata as a woman’s story. I never gave a new interpretation; I used the silences already there and filled them with my imagination.

You mentioned seeing the Mahabharata as a war between Vedas and Vedanta. Could you elaborate on that?

I belong to the Narayana Guru’s tradition, the Vedantic tradition. I had a vision that the entire Mahabharata is a war between Vedanta and the Vedas. The Vedas gave power to the Kshatriyas, who ruled the Ganga Aryavarta. A newly emerged philosophy, Vedanta, with Krishna as its major proponent, was  against the Vedas.

Vedanta is a unifying philosophy (Samanvaya, connecting and collecting everything), while the Vedic system empowered the natural inheritance of the Kshatriyas and was divisive. The war was between these two ideologies. The newly emerged kingdoms on the coast of India, allied with Krishna, fought against the Kshatriyas entitled by the Vedas. This is the real political and philosophical scenario I explore.

For an aspiring writer or reader in India, what three Indian texts should one read?

I am a great admirer of epics. So naturally, I would select the Mahabharata, the Kambaramayanam, and the Tirukkural. These three texts created me. I can re-read them and always find new perspectives.

What was the most challenging text you have written and why?

Finding the proper language is always the challenge. But the most tormenting is a novel I started around 2008. I wrote 2,500 pages over three years and then stopped. I have never been able to start it again. The manuscript is still with me. I look at it every day with pain, but I cannot continue. It is like a dream; you cannot force a dream, it has to come to you. This unfinished text makes me very humble. It informs me that I am nothing more than a tool. If it was possible it was written by you, you can complete this. But this text makes me feel very small, a tiny insect before the great god of language.

You have mentioned feeling like a “tool” before the “god of language.” Could you elaborate on this spiritual view of creativity?

Language is something more than our mind and intellect. It is the source of collective intelligence or the collective subconscious. I am getting my texts from the collective unconscious of the Tamil people. I have to do a kind of tapas to get the language.

Almost all epics in India started from a single line. That’s a common myth. In it, the poet is going towards a God, praying, and the God gives the first line. The goddess Kali gives the first line to Kalidasa. The God gives the first line to Kamban. So the language should come from somewhere else beyond you, entirely beyond you. That’s why I’m always very nervous about language, very humble before it.

Vikram and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in a still from Ponniyin Selvan.

You have also done screenwriting for popular Mani Ratnam films, including Ponniyin Selvan. How different is the process of writing for a film compared to writing a novel?

Adapting a creative work for a movie is entirely different. You cannot bring the grandeur of a novel into a movie. For a single movie, you need only about 50 scenes. So the first task is selecting those 50 important scenes from the text. For Ponniyin Selvan, we made it a two-part movie, so I selected 120 scenes. You have to select scenes with visual value.

A novel has its own pace; it can start slowly. Ponniyin Selvan was an adaptation of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. In the original, the hero starts in his village and travels to Paris, showing the landscape. But if a movie starts like that, the story only begins after half an hour, and the audience won’t be patient. So for the movie, we started immediately with the conflict: there are three aristocrats, and one is going to die. The story starts with “Who is going to die?” You have to start very early in a movie.

Given that you weave vast historical and mythological research into your fiction, how do you view the line between history and fiction?

There is no distinction between history and fiction. The postmodern perspective is that there is no history, only narration. Who decides what’s the important event in history? According to Europeans, their small tiny countries are bigger than any great Asian country in their history. Belgium is bigger than China. So it is a kind of fiction.

You cannot make a pure fiction without history. Take Lord of the Rings—it’s supposed to be pure fiction, but there is a very strong presence of European history in it. He was subverting the entire history of Europe. Even Harry Potter is not pure fiction; you can see it as a historical text emerging in a contemporary period. So, in every fiction there is history, and in every history there is an element of fiction.

You rejected the Padma Shri. Why?

Yes, that’s true. An officer from the central government’s cultural department called and informed me they had selected me. I have a policy that I don’t accept anything from any government. I had also refused the Sahitya Akademi award earlier. So I said no, I won’t accept an honour from any government.