Between the Lines with Gautam Bhatia

In an insightful conversation in our ongoing series, Between the Lines, Gautam Bhatia talks about how he reads, writes and sees the world around him.

Q. To ‘read widely’ is one of the most frequently cited advice for writers. Your personal library is truly enviable with books from across genres and countries. Tell us about your journey as a reader and a writer.

Gautam Bhatia: I grew up in a home filled with books. One of my earliest memories as a reader is climbing up a stepladder to pull down Donald Woods’ biography of Steve Biko from my parents’ bookshelf. These bookshelves had works by writers as diverse as Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Sandor Marai. My parents also had a great science fiction collection, which explains the trajectory my fiction took! It’s hard to grow up in such an atmosphere and not fall in love with books.

A love for writing came soon after. As a teenager, I wrote reams of what I later understood was fan-fiction: taking famous fantasy novels such as the Narnia series or The Wheel of Time, and writing my own stories in them. A lot of this writing was terrible, of course, but that’s how we cut our teeth!

Q. Talking about your books: Your latest book, Unsealed Covers is a portrait of the Indian judiciary and its many seminal constitutional decisions and fault lines—as witnessed in the last decade. How did you conceive the idea for the book?

GB: Unsealed Covers has its origins in the Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog, which began life almost exactly ten years ago – in August 2013. Since then, there have been around a thousand essays on the blog – which comes to an average of around two a week, for a decade – that’s a lot of words.At some point, I realized that while the blog was doing its job of responding to court judgments as they happened – in a way, a living chronicle – it had also become something of an archive, which could be used for articulating a longer view. For example, the first section of the book brings together essays on the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which of course everyone knows about. When you put these essays together – spanning a period of five years or so – you see lines beginning to emerge – for example, a pro-liberty line as exemplified by certain judgments, and a pro-State line, exemplified by others. The book tries to do this across themes – civil liberties, social rights, federalism, and so on – and to see how the jurisprudence has evolved over the last ten years or so.

Q. As with your previous work and writings on constitutional law, Unsealed Covers also focuses on underlining the importance of the individual vis-a-vis the State. Often advocating how social differences and cultural associations need to be evaluated in context of free speech and rights, the book engages with how deeply the personal relates to the political. What would you have to say about the much-used ‘personal is political’ adage?

GB: For me, ‘the personal is the political’ simply means that what we intuitively think of as ‘the private sphere’ – the family, the workplace, associations, and so on – has its own power structures and hierarchies, which need to be critically interrogated, and – where necessary – subjected to constitutional norms. This could be in the context of recent calls for socially boycotting Muslims, or discriminatory practices against domestic workers in Resident Welfare Associations, or the debates around wages for housework and community of property on separation. ‘The personal is the political’ means that political justice applies to the personal domain as much as it applies to the public domain. As a Kenyan journalist eloquently put it a few decades ago, ‘dictators in the household do not become democrats in public life.’

Q. In the last decade in India, various laws have engaged with and confronted religious edicts and traditions: From entry into temples, communal matrimonial laws, to the controversial citizenship amendment act, to name a few. You have previously talked about the interconnections between religion, politics and jurisprudence. Within the complex sociological conditions in India, how does this interconnectedness pose a challenge for policymakers and lawyers?

GB: B.R. Ambedkar had said this famous line in the Indian Constituent Assembly where he effectively said that the scope of religion over Indian social life is so large, and that religious obligations exist effectively from birth to death, that unless the Constitution restricts the right to religious freedom to matters that are essentially religious, social reform will be impossible. This speech later got corrupted into the infamous “essential religious practices test”, but that apart – the key issue, I think, is to ask if the religious edict or tradition has an effect that spills over into a domain beyond religion – into the social domain, for example.

To put it into simpler terms, when you take an issue such as temple entry, you have to situate it historically and contextually: you have to look at it not simply as a question of access to a physical space, but how – in our history – denial of access to temples has been bound up with social inequality and degradation; the practice of denial of entry is not isolated, but is an example – a feature – of this social inequality. That’s why the temple entry movement was so crucial for social emancipation. So, you have to ask if a particular religious practice has that kind of a social impact, if it sends a message of social inequality or subordination – and if it does so, then you apply the constitutional norms of equality, non-discrimination etc. This, I think, would be truest to the point that Ambedkar was trying to get at in his speech.

Q. Why do you think people should read Unsealed Covers?

GB: It’s a ringside view of the relationship between the courts and the state over the last ten years; it’s also an insider’s view, as I’ve been a practicing lawyer for five out of those ten years. I think that makes it an interesting contribution towards trying to understand our country’s recent past – and future trajectory.

Q. As a writer, you have written books on the Indian constitution law as well as two fantastic speculative fiction novels. What would you have to say about this incredible range as a writer? And how do you think your writing varies and straddles the forms, structures, functions and styles of the two distinct genres that you have written in?

GB: It’s chalk and cheese: when I’m writing legal non-fiction, my entire focus is on brevity, precision, clarity, and simplicity. Fiction, on the other hand, is all about the unspoken and the allusive, about the metaphor and the image, about things unsaid being as important as things said. Moving from non-fiction to fiction is like shifting between brain-spaces – the two are so distinct from each other.

As far as range goes, I had to unlearn a lot when I was working on my two SF novels – The Wall and The Horizon. In particular, I had to unlearn all my writing habits just to be able to write spoken dialogue in a way that wasn’t stilted or wooden.

Q. Crudely put, insofar as Literature and Law study and represent individuals with distinct lives, realities and histories, they have so much in common—do you think that is true? Do you think your career as a lawyer allows you to access literature with a different lens, and vice versa

GB: Working with Constitutions and constitutional law helps you to understand the way in which law constitutes a part of the hidden plumbing of society and the political economy. You then carry this understanding over into fiction – especially in science fiction, when so much depends on world-building! It’s a bit like how an engineer writing science fiction will ensure that the design of the spaceship is coherent; working with law gives you an insight into one part of the world that informs how you write fiction.

I think the relationship is much stronger in the reverse: being steeped in literature really enriches one’s engagement with the law: after all, law deals with human beings, and with power, two themes that great literature has always engaged with. I recall that while finalizing a legal written submission recently, I found that a point I wanted to make had been made by Antonio Salieri in the play/film Amadeus far better and far more eloquently than in any judgment – so obviously, I put it in!

Q. The Wall, your debut speculative fiction novel has been critically acclaimed as an allegory of the Indian state. Various speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy novels, from JRR Tolkien to GRR Martin have often been read as allegories (whether they were intended to be, being a different subject). Do you think these genres permit a space of representation (and also redemption), wherein the writer can critique the systems of power more effectively?

GB: I don’t know who has been calling The Wall as an ‘allegory of the Indian State’! I think that’s a pretty deep misreading of the novel, and I’ve stated myself quite a few times that it is not an allegory. Tolkien himself famously said that he “cordially disliked” allegory in all its forms – the point being that allegories are didactic, and therefore, uninteresting. The Wall is an SF novel that imagines how society would form and be shaped if all the world that people knew was bounded within a wall – and what they’d do to rebels or heretics who’d want to get out. Obviously, one is informed by the politics, society, myths, and culture of one’s country while writing – and The Wall has a lot of that – but that is a far cry from allegory.

Your point is correct that the genre of SF provides a space for critiquing power – but we do that not through allegories, but through imagination. The wonderful thing about SF is – for instance – that it allows you to change one thing about the world, and ask “what if?” (in The Wall, it’s the fact that the people living in the city within the Wall have never seen a horizon, and their language has no word for it). It’s in the asking of that “what if” that you – as an SF writer – can then reveal the contingency of the power structures that shape our world and which we take for granted, and create the space for imagining new ways of living.

Q. With fantasy and sci-fi, one of the most challenging bits may be the world-building. The immersive world of your novels has been celebrated by critics and readers alike. Tell us about the process of creating the dystopian city of Sumer, and what were some challenges that you faced while writing the novels.

GB: Just to clarify – Sumer is not a dystopian city. It does not have poverty or grinding oppression, and most people who live in the City are reasonably content with their lives, and have no great wish to find out what lies beyond the Wall. In that sense, Sumer belongs more to the category of what Ursuala Le Guin calls an “ambiguous utopia”, rather than a “dystopia.” World-building is one of the most interesting parts of writing SF – but also one of the most challenging (in fact, I recently wrote a whole essay on the subject!). Essentially, at all times, you have to move between the abstract premise (say, a city within a Wall) and many concrete moving parts (disposal of bodies? Food? Sewage? Social organization?). The premise and these moving parts have to be reconciled in a way that the world-building is both internally coherent and externally This process often continues until the last moment – I was figuring out how my characters would manufacture iron alloys – to be used in a revolution – right up until the end of the writing process! Basically, you have to link up the physical background, the economy it will give rise to, and the politics and culture and society that will spring up on top of that – and try never to slip up!

Q. Despite a rich pool of readers, sci-fi and fantasy in the Indian subcontinent is not necessarily a widely read genre. Even in terms of the writers, the list is limited. What are some myths and misconceptions about sci-fi and fantasy that you wish did not exist?

GB: Science fiction is not just about spaceships and lasers, and fantasy is not just about dragons and swords!

There is an entire genre of social SF – social speculative fiction – that explores (like you said) power structures and hierarchies in remarkably subtle and sensitive ways, whether it’s Seth Dickinson’s Traitor Baru Cormorant (exploring the political economy of Empire through the lens of epic fantasy – its main character is an accountant!) or Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit (exploring the concept of democracy and consensus reality in deep space). SFF is not a poor cousin to literary fiction – it’s a genre in its own right, and has – and continues to have – works of breathtaking originality and quality.

Q. Tell us about the Delhi Sci-fi Reading Group and how can our readers in Delhi join it?

GB: We meet physically once a month, and discuss a novel that has been popularly voted on by our members. Food and goodies are provided! We alternate between “classics” and “contemporary” every month. For example, we’ve discussed Ursula Le Guin’s iconic The Dispossessed, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, and Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, among others.We have a Discord group online where we plan readings and meetings, and generally hang out. To join, just DM me on Twitter (@gautambhatia88), and I’ll add you.

Q. What would be your advice to aspiring writers and lawyers?

GB: I’m always a little chary of dispensing advice – there’s no one way of doing things – but if I had to, I’d say read widely and deeply, and read whatever takes your fancy – don’t read for instrumental purposes, read for joy. You’ll see how it will inform your approach to both law and writing, almost unconsciously. Oh, and also – take enough time off work to have fun – please don’t listen to people who tell you you have to spend your 20s and early 30s slogging day in and day out at some counsel’s chamber. You only get one shot at life!

In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast