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Journalism of Courage
The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia tells the story of Jagat, an anarchist politician who goes down in history for becoming a martyr and preventing civil war. Years later, a leader tasked with preserving the peace says, “The past is like a thread. If you pull at it, you can unravel something you don’t expect.” With Bhatia, we discuss the dilemmas that birth all democracies and how they inform his novel’s politics. Excerpts:
Science fiction excels at tweaking elements of society we take for granted and exploring the ethics of that off-centre world. How did that work in The Sentence?
The main ‘what-if’ in this society is a technology that allows you to preserve the human body in a cryochamber and resurrect it many years later. That is applied to the death penalty, effectively making it reversible. If someone is proved innocent, you can bring them back to life. But when the concept of death changes, what does it do to ideas of crime and injustice?
Another ‘what-if’ idea was inspired by the (19th-century government) Paris Commune. What if that anarchist commune actually survived? How would it engage with capitalist societies outside?
Jagat made me think of Umar Khalid and Varavara Rao, how prisoners of conscience are used to inspire the masses to political action. What drew you to that idea?
Tolkein famously disliked allegory. I wouldn’t draw such obvious connections. But the book deals with how, by effacing yourself through death or imprisonment, you become a symbol. In this specific case, as long as you are preserved in the cryochamber, you become a symbol, and the symbol may not have any relationship with the actual person that you are. As you can be brought back 100 years later, the story explores how society deals with the inevitable gap between the real person and the symbol they have become.
The book’s peace treaties reminded me of Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas — what if utopia is built on a founding crime? Also of Britain, the United Nations and their role in Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Why write a novel about institutions that fail?
There are historical inspirations. In many Latin American countries, after coups and violence, they have this arrangement where, effectively, you agree to forget: you don’t want to rake up the past because doing so won’t let you move on. You have a treaty, agreement or institution (to enforce that). In Spain, after Francisco Franco died and you had the turn of democracy, there was a Pact of Forgetting, which meant you don’t rake up what happened back then, because you would be caught in a cycle of endless violence.
There are two views about that. One that peace is beyond all price, the other that a peace built on falsehood or injustice will never be durable. The book explores that dilemma.
Your novels often deal with the legacy of revolution. Do you grapple with your, perhaps, conflicting identities as legal scholar, artist, citizen and public commentator?
There’s a very interesting book, The Op-Ed Novel, about writers in post-Franco Spain who wrote fiction and also contributed columns to newspapers. They would test an idea in a column and transport it to fiction, or vice-versa. I think it’s the same for me. As a constitutional lawyer, the death penalty is unavoidable as a subject of thought. I’m an abolitionist. But in a novel, I can’t be pushing my view as the view. That defeats the purpose of the form.
In The Dispossessed, Le Guin is unsparing in revealing the flaws of a seemingly perfect anarchist society. But you see her sympathy for that ambition. (My goal is) to have those sympathies but not force them on the reader.
