Friday 13 July 2018

In Defense of a Writer


Here is my manifesto in defense of a writer’s need to invoke the imagination to recreate history. The lacunae in it are particularly fecund for a writer. 

Sikhs, like the Muslims, are overly sensitive about personifications and representations not only of God but also the Gurus and all the historical people associated with them – probably for the reasons stated in my previous blog. 

Yet they allow posters and portraits of the Gurus to adorn their temples and homes. 
The human need for representation goes hand in hand, paradoxically, with its attendant dangers.
Representation is also the very meat of art, and freedom its very breath. A writer must have freedom if she is going to create a narrative that coheres and evokes some sense of times past. 

I am less interested in recreating an age than in making the narrative relevant to our times. Although I have been reverent about the main facts and legends in the Sikh Saga, my books are not hagiographies but fictional recreations. I have not tampered with the stories that history has bequeathed me. I have used them as suspensions bridges from which to hang the airy web of my fictions. 

I take comfort from the fact that the word ‘history’ has ‘story’ in it.


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