‘Writing gives me another world’

By Manish Chand

“Exile is the saddest thing that can happen to an individual,” says the diplomat-turned author Navtej Sarna. Exile, with its emotional undertow of loss and homelessness, is not a state of mind one associates with the suave decorous man who served as the spokesperson of India’s Foreign Office for six long years. But having consorted with Maharaja Duleep Singh, Punjab’s last monarch, in the privacy of his imagination for nine long years, Sarna knows intimately “the loss of something left behind forever,” in Edward Said’s words.

“The most tragic aspect of his life was that he was forced to stay away from home. The pathos of his exile was a very elemental part of his existence and of his appeal as a subject for a novelist,” said Sarna, who is now India’s ambassador to Israel, in an interview.

“It’s one of the most fundamental ways a man can lose his identity. When you lose your roots, everything you are made of – your culture, history – it’s a very sad happening in an individual’s life,” said the author when asked about his preoccupation with the emotive theme of exile in his novel.

“It’s a story that has nagged at me since childhood. It came naturally to me,” recalled the author when he first heard of Duleep Singh from his mother forty years ago. The process of writing a novel based on a much-written- about historical figure was creatively challenging, but he found out a way out “to push available facts about Duleep Singh’s story towards the realm of fiction, by pushing them gently, so as not to distort them.”

“It involved a fair amount of research. It’s a delicate matter, trying to convert a historical subject into fiction. Thoughts and emotions of Duleep Singh are based on what could be possible in different situations in which he found himself,” recalled the author about nine years that took him to convert the documents, files, memoranda and recollections into “a fictional narrative that would fill the gaps left by history.”

Did he hear the snarling hiss of historians warning him not to trespass into their privileged turf as he set about reconstructing the life of Duleep Singh? “It’s a novel that has tried to be true to history,” is all Sarna would say, adding that the praise by famous author Khushwant Singh, who has written a monumental A History of the Sikhs, encouraged him to think he was on right track.

The prolonged imaginative cohabiting with the 19th century monarch and his consorts was a voyage of discovery for the author to understand the complex personality of Duleep Singh – “a child duped of his kingdom, a man who changed his religion twice, a king who yearned to come back to his people but never could.”

“He started off as a uni-dimensional cardboard box character. In the course of writing the book, I discovered his fears, his loves, how he felt as a young man, problems in his personal life, his problems with the British government,” he said. “In short, it helps me to understand him as a complete human being.” Sarna is not sure whether he will write another novel based on a historical subject, but feels that there is “enough scope” for those who wish to go down this path.

“This book does not belong to the genre of popular history books. There is a slight distinction. If people want to write books based on history, there is enough scope,” he said.

Wary of stereotyping and label-peddlers, Sarna is not amused when asked about the “IFS school of writing” – a fanciful attempt to create a headline-grabbing tag to club together a little more than half a dozen Indian diplomats who could write ponderous officialese and works of imagination with equal finesse. “If you are looking for a deeper connection, there isn’t any,” he said wryly.

Sarna, however, confesses his job as a diplomat enriched his literary talents. “There is a certain gypsy aspect to our life which is an extremely good catalyst for jogging your mind and opening your mind to new observations and ideas,” said Sarna, who has represented India in capitals as far flung as Moscow, Washington, Warsaw and Thimphu.

But how does he find time to write amid the blithe chatter of cocktail parties and the serious diplomatic business of diplomacy? “It’s an unnatural division. You do it once you want to do it badly enough,” he says.

“Writing is a very essential part of my life and my living. Writing gives me an entire world in which to withdraw and in which to live in,” says Sarna who has been writing his college days in Delhi. And for all his globe-trotting as a grey-suited diplomat, his favourite trip, he says, is always “that island of the soul where there is peace and writing can be a waking dream.”

Born with an itch to write, an appetite that was whetted during his college days reading all-time literary greats like Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, Sarna is upbeat about the impact Indian writers in English are making on the literary landscape in the world. But how much of the so-called Indian-English writing is hype? Not fond of journalistic attempts at pigeonholing writers, Sarna, for one, thinks it is for real. “It’s a very major presence in modern writing. It’s a major school of fiction writing. It’s the Indian experience which comes out in different ways. It’s probably what gives it depth and diversity,” he said.

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