A NEw Take

Cities and contrasts,we seem to presume,are almost synonymous. The occasional convertibles tearing through Park Street and sooty wisps of boys tapping on their windows with packets of gums – are sights that familiarity doesn’t let us spend a lot of thinking on. But Dame Gillian Beer,Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature,says it’s not without reason that ‘amazing’ has turned into an oft-used cliché when it comes to Kolkata. “I visited the city in the nineties and when I came back now,I was expecting a set of obvious changes. But it’s strange how the body language of people hasn’t changed over a decade. There’s extreme poverty one hand… wealth on the other,but people just manage to look unaffected,” says Beer,who was in city to deliver a lecture organized by the British Council Library at the Kolkata Book fair. She should know,given that human behavior must be something she has spent a lot of time on,given her prolonged involvement with Charles Darwin’s works. Accorded the Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1998 for her contribution to English literature,Beer’s interest in Darwin and hence science,is something that might come as a bit of a surprise for some. But it was literature,says Beer,which introduced her to Darwin’s world. “I was contemplating writing a book on Victorian fantasies and was reading a lot of Victorian literature. Works like Alice in Wonderland,Waterbabies… And the impact of evolutionary ideas propagated by Darwin on Victorian authors was immense. That is when I got curious about Darwin’s theories,” says Beer.

What followed was a literary career that seamlessly fused entities that seem to be always at loggerheads – literature and science. With works ranging from critiques of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’s works to theories on Darwin’s ideas,it’s not surprising that Beer was twice inducted into the panel of judges of the Man Booker prize. “I was a part of the panel when Arundhati Roy won the Booker,” she adds with a smile.

Roy’s work,says Beer,almost turned into a point of reference of sorts for the 1997 Booker judges. “Every work in the 100 ended up being compared to hers. The panelists,while talking about the other writers,always ended up using Roy as a yardstick,” she recollects. Finally,the inventiveness of the Roy’s language in The God of Small Things and her ‘experimental form of writing’ walked away with the cake. “I had been to south India and heard Roy address a gathering. The cadences of her speech which reflects her proximity to where she comes from is beautiful. She brings in that intimacy with the native language,the beauty of ordinary conversational speech in her works in English too,” she adds.

Of the crop of celebrated Indian writers in English,Jhumpa Lahiri is another name Beer has great admiration for. While reading Lahiri’s latest,Unaccustomed Earth,Beer felt compelled to reflect on her own inner conflicts. “It talks about a specific situation,an immigrant’s sentiments,something that we wouldn’t easily relate to. But there’s something very sad,very beautiful about her work that makes you want to understand an unfamiliar microcosm,” says Beer.

Beer expresses her interest in the largely unsung body Indian English writing,which is struggling to overcome the ascendancy of a handful of names that have almost condensed the genre within themselves for a greater part of the world. “There’s a lot of interest in Indian writing in indigenous languages. There are very few publishers who are translating vernacular literature,but the West has come to realize that works in Indian languages hold an unflinching mirror to the real India,as opposed to the one constructed to please a certain section of readers,” says Beer.