In an interview on Indian Journeys

Raag Darbari, Sri Lal Sukla.

This is a book about a village in India in the 1960s and it’s about how everybody in that village is involved in the politics of that village, and it’s all to do with striving to become the dominant force, either in the agricultural co-operative or in the local college, and there are endless conflicts about who’s going to be elected and what’s going to happen. It’s all to do with influence in the village. When there is an impasse they all go and get stoned. They drink the cannabis actually, mixing it with yoghurt, which they call bhang lassi, and that seems to solve the problem. It would probably solve a lot of problems in politics in England too! It’s written as a satire but actually a lot of the things in this book, the violence and the criminals getting involved in politics have now overtaken these areas, particularly in Uttar Pradesh where this novel is set. So Sukla, who is still alive and was a government official himself, is now amazed by how real events have overtaken what he wrote as a satire.

Tell me about your latest book. You’ve written a lot about India.

Well, not a lot. But I wrote The Great Hedge of India which was about a hedge that the British grew across India to stop salt being moved across the country. Then I wrote a book on tea, A Brief History of Tea. I used to be a tea planter in Africa and this is about the British and tea and how they introduced it to India, Sri Lanka and Africa. Originally it was pioneered by the Chinese to keep awake during meditation. The British became very addicted to tea and ended up going to war against China to secure their supply.

My latest book, Outlaw: India’s Bandit Queen and Me, is about a woman called Phoolan Devi. I read a small thing about her in the newspaper in 1992. She had surrendered under a deal with the government where she would be released after eight years, and they hadn’t released her, so she was running for parliament from jail to draw attention to her plight and the condition in general of women and the poor in India. I wrote her a note to cheer her up and surprisingly I’d got a reply. She had never learnt to read or write but she’d got it translated and sent a reply. We had a long correspondence while she was in prison and I gave her advice and a bit of help, and then in 1994 she was released, and I happened to be in India so I went to visit. I thought I might not even like this woman but we got on very well and next day I moved into the house where she was staying, which was completely surrounded by armed police because her life was in danger.

What kind of bandit had she been?

She was a bandit by accident. She was married off at 11 to a much older man, who was supposed to wait for her puberty but didn’t and he raped her a lot of times, and she ran away. But when she ran back to her own village she was a fallen woman. Men propositioned her and she refused, so a group of them arranged for her to be kidnapped by bandits. So there she was with these bandits, ultimately led by a bit of a Robin Hood character. They would get a message from a village that the upper caste wasn’t allowing the villagers to get water, so they would descend on the village and shoot a few people and that kind of thing. They took money from the rich to give to the poor, though no doubt they kept some. She was captured and taken to an upper-caste village, her man was killed, and she was held there and raped by many men in the village. At some later stage her gang went back to the village and shot 22 of the men. So the government went mad and she went on the run and they couldn’t catch her. She realised she’d get caught in the end and so surrendered. After she came out of prison she became a member of parliament. She was assassinated in 2001. It’s an extraordinary story.

A terrible story.

In an interview on India

Your next choice, Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla, is also set around the time of independence but is more about rural India.

I must admit that the translation is by my partner, Gillian Wright. I love this book because it is a rather cynical, but wonderfully humorous, portrayal of life in an Indian village in Uttar Pradesh, around the time of independence and a bit later as well. I have been in many of these villages and written stories about villages myself, and I think that it is much the best book I have ever read about that sort of life in India. So many of the books that are highly praised about India are about the middle classes, or else they are about urban India and present a very bleak, black-with-no-white picture of it. This one has black, white and grey. It has enormous humour and is about rural, semi-rural and urbanising India. I find it absolutely fascinating and also a very good laugh.

You said that India has recently gained its confidence, but there is also the persistent idea that rural India is being left behind in the new “India Shining”.

This is something that you can’t see in black and white. There are changes occurring in rural India very rapidly. Communications are opening up. There is far greater aspiration amongst rural people than there used to be. They are making far more demands on the administration and the government. I think India’s standard of government is what stands in the way of cashing in, if you like, on these new ambitions that people have in rural areas.