Conversation in a Dead Language: Interview with American author Lee Siegel
This interview first appeared as part of my Book Chaat series on Rediff.com
An American by birth and nationality, Lee Siegel is no foreigner to India in the literary sense. He’s a trained magician and professor of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. Formerly, he was with the University of Hawaii, where he penned Net of Magic: Wonder and Deceptions in India and City of Dreadful Night: A Tale of Horror and the Macabre in India.
With Love in a Dead Language, Siegel returned once more to his favourite culture, with a marvellously entertaining romp through Indian sexuality, heritage and academia.
A charming and darkly humorous “character” himself, Professor Siegel is blessed with that great literary trait–to be able to absorb and retain more from a single visit than most people acquire in a lifetime of living. I had the pleasure of conducting this interview with him during a visit to India to launch the Indian edition of Love in a Dead Language.
Q1. You seem to have made a career out of writing books about India. You’re also a Professor of Indian religions. How and when did this fascination with India originate?
When I was in the third grade–each kid in the class had to do a notebook on a country and I was assigned India (even though I wanted Israel for no other reason than I had heard of it). I cut pictures out of magazines and books (really amazing, evocative pictures of just what you’d expect: snake charmers, the Taj Mahal, maharajas, Gandhi, nautch girls, lepers, sadhus, and the usual gang) and, of course, I plagiarized snippets of information like “More people die of snake bite in India than anywhere else in the world,” and “people in India worship the cow.” I love stuff like that. While doing “research” for that school project, I remember reading in the World Book Encyclopedia about child marriage in India and thinking: “Gee, if I was an Indian I wouldn’t have any homework or even have to school–I’d be married.” All my books have been attempts to rewrite that third-grade project, that lost notebook.
Q2. And the inspiration for Love in a Dead Language?
I teach at the University of Hawaii where one day I was sitting, having a beer, with a very serious male graduate student, discussing his dissertation topic (nothing to do with snake charmers, nautch girls, or child marriage) when a very beautiful girl, obviously Indian, passed and said hello to him. When I asked him about her, he shrugged: “oh, she’s just some hippie chick. Her parents moved here from India when she was a kid. She doesn’t know anything about India. She’s not interested either.” That planted the seed for the plot. I’ve never spoken to the girl.
Q3. The novel is a grab-bag of virtually every kind of literary technique under the sun: Letters, diaries, quotations from real books and nonexistent ones, translations, footnotes, illustrations, caricatures, scrolls…. Why did you choose this approach over a straight linear narrative?
Well, the book is, I hope, about many different ways of trying to describe love, about the way words fail, (although often attaining something in that failure). So the form provided a context for a wide range of voices engaged in that endeavor.
Q4. You’re careful to mention at one point that despite the title, Sanskrit is not really a dead language. But to us in India, sadly, it’s just that. It often seems as if only Western scholars and academicians have any interest in studying this rich motherlode of our culture. For instance, most of the major translations of ancient Indian epics, including The Mahabharat are being conducted in US universities or countries like Germany and Sweden. Why do Westerners have such an enduring interest in our culture?
I can only speak for myself. When I decided that I needed to go to graduate school (to avoid being drafted and being sent to Vietnam) I knew I wanted to study an ancient culture, a great civilization, one that had survived: you couldn’t go to China; there was no longer the Greece, Egypt, or Rome of antiquity. But my impression was that you could still see ancient India today, that wonderful traditions persisted. And I was right–I ended up studying with a pandit in Puri whose methods were thousands of years old. This is, of course, very charming for a foreigner, but I can very well understand why a young person in India would not be interested, or might even feel such persistent institutions were preventing economic development. I’m sure that, on my way to India, I must have sat in airport transit lounges next to Indians on their way to study engineering or physics in America.
Q5. Do you see a great increase in popular interest in things Indian in the USA recently? Perhaps in the wake of the popularity of authors like Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and others–including yourself of course!
Like everything else, cultures come in and go out of fashion. India was very groovy in the Beatles period. Now, I’m not sure. I don’t want to have to look at people in bell-bottom pants again, but I’d love to believe that Americans are interested, culturally and politically, and in other ways as well, in India. There are so many truly great Indians writing in English and it’s very exciting to me that U.S. publishers have not been afraid to make their work available. The enthusiastic response of readers to that availability has been spectacular enough to encourage more Indian writers, a new generation of gifted authors. This has nothing to do with me as a writer, but a great deal to do with me as a reader. I’m a big fan of Roy, Seth, Rushdie, Mistry, Ghosh, Tharoor, and the list goes on. G.V. Desani, R.K. Narayan, and Valmiki would be on my list of favorite authors of all time.
Q6. The biography for the dust jacket of her book that “Tajma Hall” provides to Professor Roth in the novel reads remarkably like the BSP (Blatant Self Promotion) that’s motivating so many socialites and celebrities here to turn authors. Have you had a chance to swim in the shark-infested waters of urban Indian high society?
No. My friends in India are street performers who live in the Shadipur Depot, an amazing Delhi slum. That’s a snooty answer. I love shark-infested waters. I’ve just never been invited to jump in for the swim.
Q7. Your novels suggest that you’ve met a fair number of interesting characters in India–you seem to know some of the familiar ‘types’ here. Could you share with us some of your encounters with Indian characters–famous or otherwise?
The only famous person whom I know in India is Khushwant Singh–he’s one of my great heroes, a man that I am so utterly charmed by that I always telephone him as soon as I arrive in Delhi in hopes of drinking some of his scotch right away. I’d like to meet Phoolan Devi and Miss Universe (especially at the same party and I hope Khushwant’s invited too). I’ve written about most of the other characters who have enchanted me.
Q8. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you in India? And the best?
The great thing about writing about India is that when something really
terrible happens I can say to myself “this is going to make a great story.” And so the worst things that have happened have also been the best.
Q9. How similar is Professor Lee Siegel to Professor Leopold Roth? Are there any Lalita Guptas in your life? Or any Anang Saighals?
Professor Roth was a jerk. That’s why I killed him. No, no Lalita Guptas or Anang Saighals, thank god.
Q10. I believe you’re also a professional magician? Tell us something about how that came about.
No, I’m not a professional magician, that being someone who gets paid to entertain in Las Vegas or at children’s birthday parties. But I wanted to do a book on Indian magicians and so, in hopes of being able to meet them, I learned magic. I didn’t want to introduce myself at a Professor but as an American magician. The result was my book, Net of Magic. Traveling and performing with the jadugars of Shadipur was truly one of the most wonderful experiences in my life and I remain friends with them. I recently went to India with Penn and Teller to make a television film on Indian magic. It will air this fall.
Q11. Has magic influenced your work as a writer? There’s clearly a lot of sleight-of-hand in your books! And in Love in a Dead Language, there’s almost a sense of a Houdini-like attempt to create a spectacular, epic theatre of ideas.
Oh, yes, for me writing is fundamentally prestidigitorial. My involvement in magic taught me that everybody needs, craves, loves to be deceived. I know I do. Good magicians and good writers give us the pleasure of seeing the reality of illusions (or is it the other way around?)
Q12. Let’s talk about films. The novel mentions a great many old Hollywood films, some real some perhaps imaginary. Even in your previous novel City of Dreadful Night, the influence of cinema seems pervasive. Does cinema influence you a lot? In what way?
I loved movies as a kid. I remember the scene in Around the World in Eighty Days when Cantinflas and David Niven saved the Indian girl from being burned on her husband’s funeral pyre. It was utterly thrilling and the sowing of yet another seed of Indological fascination. My parents were in the movie business and so I was explosed to it throughout my childhood. I don’t go to movies anymore because I can’t smoke, drink, or talk in the theater. But I rent videos. Usually old ones. Yes, usually the pleasure is a regressive one.
Q13. In a related sense, you’re able to use tropisms of various fiction genres–mystery, suspense, horror, even porn–while not succumbing to the cliches. That suggests you read a lot of popular fiction. Do you? If so, what are your favourites and why?
No, I don’t read that much popular fiction, although sometimes I think I ought to. When I was writing City of Dreadful Night, I tried to read popular horror books but without much gratification. It’s a genre for teenage boys. My interest in romance and (to a slight degree) porn as genres, when I was working on Love in a Dead Language was, again, an interest in the sundry conventions of writing about love. Bad writing can be very interesting, more revealing about certain things than great writing. Great writing defies us.
Q14. Do you think there’s truly a dichotomy between popular genre fiction and ‘literature’ in modern fiction? Or are some critics right in asserting that some popular authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice (just two examples) paint valuable portraits of the consumer and media culture of our times?
Sure. I have great respect for anyone who writes a book that ten or more people actually buy and read. Stephen King is a great storyteller. So is Anne Rice. And yes, their popularity reveals a lot about us. But I don’t read authors like that these days. Right now, I don’t want to know too much about us. I’m reading the Mahabharata.
Q15. Coming back to films. Have you seen many Indian films? Hindi films? Any favourites? Could you share with us your favourite scenes, stars, movies, etc?
I loved Bandit Queen and the old black and white Nagin–truly a sexy movie. When I’m in India I love watching the music channel playing the song and dance clips from Hindi movies. But, as I mentioned, I don’t like going to movie theaters. The Bollywood women are amazingly beautiful and thrilling in the way Hollywood movie stars used to be. I like the hype around them, the mystique, the glamour that’s exuded like honey–so sticky, sweet and irresistible.
Q16. Several new Indian books deal with Indian sexuality–Sex, Lies and AIDS by Siddharth Dube, Bitter Chocolate by Pinki Virani, An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma, and your own. It’s interesting to note that most of these books-not your’s–deal with deviant forms of sexuality such as incest, rape, sexual abuse. Do you feel that the India of the Kamasutra has lost its way somehow? That the healthy robust sexual openness of those times have given way to a guilt-afflicted, shame-bowed social outlook on the subject?
The issue is not the sex, but the “openness”–and I’m not sure if openness is such a great virtue. Maybe it is. I truly don’t know. For some years sexual pleasure in India has been private, not flaunted as it is, say, in America. Just as defecating has perhaps been more public in India and less proudly flaunted in America. But people everywhere are doing these things, and enjoying these activities, in exactly the same way. The differences are merely in how much we talk about what we do. I see big changes in India–young people going to clubs, bars, holding hands, going public. The signs of sexual openness can be seen in the Indian press, on TV, in movies. Are congratulations or condolences in order? I don’t know.
Q17. Why do foreign films, books, reports tend to either glamorize India–elephants and maharajahs, Kamasutra and yogis–or relegate it to the cliches of ‘turd-world’ backwater? How do you think those authors, film makers, reporters escape these extreme points of view and zoom in on the real India as, for instance, you’ve managed to do so successfully? Or do you think it’s impossible to deal with the teeming morass of contradictions that’s contemporary India?
Indian films, books and reports tend to either glamorize the west or relegate it to the cliches of materialistic inhumanity. Is there a “real India?” If so, I’d love to see it. I’m flattered that you feel I’ve been successful, but perhaps that’s the impression only because I’ve used all the cliches as cliches, without attempting to claim that they have any reality to them.
Q18. A related question: There’s a great deal of sensitivity about religion and culture in India right now. Especially among the so-called ‘rightwing fundamentalist Hindu’ factions. Do you think Indians are in danger of being mocked, satirized or even insulted by comic references to their Gods, icons or culture? Wouldn’t books such as your’s, for instance, capture the spirit of self-deprecating humour that’s so much a part of the Indian storytelling tradition from ancient times.
I hear this and indeed, the Indian edition of Love in a Dead Language, has been modified: the chapter called “Fucking” for example was changed to “Sexual Union” in fear of the actual power of that puritanical “right wing fundamentalist Hindu faction.” The good news for Indian writers is that right-wing fundamentalists cause real satire to flourish. Nothing is funnier than people without a sense of humor.
Q19. What’s next on the anvil for you? Another novel about India? A non-fiction book? How’s it going?
I’m just finishing another novel and about a third of it takes place in India (in Calcutta in the 1920′s). I’m having fun with it. Speaking of which, I’d better get back to work on it now.
Q20. Anything else you’d like to add–about almost anything? Please, here we are now, entertain us!
Yes, it’s very important for me to say that there has been enormous gratification for me, these many years after writing my third-grade notebook, in the positive response that I’ve had among Indian readers of Love in a Dead Language. I was fearful that it might be offensive. But, on the contrary, the response has been grandly good humored and generously generous. I’m grateful for that.
