It's with great pleasure that we welcome Kamila Shamsie to this to this second half hour of our conversation on writing and reading,
just a short introduction. Camilla is the author of six novels in the City by the Sea Cartography, Salt and Saffron, Broken versus Burnt Shadows.
And most recently, the book that some of us have been reading and we've been reading in the last hour
together a God in Every Stone Burnt Shadows was shortlisted for the Orange Prise for
fiction and a God in every stone was shortlisted for the Bailies Prise the Walter
Scott Prise for historical fiction and also the DSC Prise for South Asian Literature.
Three of her novels have been have received awards from Pakistan's Academy of Letters, and she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
And in 2013, very excited. She was named Granta, a Granta best of young British novelist.
She grew up in Karachi and she is now based in London and lives in London.
So you're very, very welcome and thank you.
You have kindly agreed to give some readings at one at the beginning, one at the end, and they will have discussion in in the middle.
And I think you all enjoy this.
One of the readings that Camilla had thought to give is from the second book, a scene that we were touching on earlier.
All right, so this is 25th April 1930, we have the Englishwomen Vivien Spencer in Bishar,
she's discovered something the night before that makes her really not want to be with the other.
Well, her compatriots really, and all the women and children,
English women and children have been ordered to leave Bashour because it's there's a lot of trouble in the city.
So here we are and there's a man called REMIC who appears he's a political agent,
rather unpleasant one that walking through the train station and across the railway bridge,
VIFF was able to consider the burqa as the invisibility cape.
She had longed for the child beneath the white, and she moved in an entirely private sphere,
unknown and seen the policeman standing near the station lavatory who had taken note of Miss Spencer as she entered,
paid no attention to the woman in the burqa who emerged.
The English women and children who waited on the platform for the train to evacuate them from Peshawar looked straight through her.
REMIC, who had personally accompanied her.
Her hair from Deane's was too busy sneezing loudly into the handkerchief to pay attention to a local woman who steps didn't falter.
As she walked past him, though, she ducked her head so that the shimmer of her blue eyes wouldn't be visible beneath the face mesh beyond the bridge.
At the end of the metal road, Kabuli gate was open a doorway into a world entirely unlike the one she was leaving behind.
Viv steadied herself against the railing of the bridge, looked over her shoulder towards a train station,
she might just have enough time to return before anyone noticed she disappeared.
Another few minutes, though, and someone would raise an alarm.
The woman in the white burqa would be mentioned, REMIC would understand that you'd set out to betray him, to betray the empire itself.
She tried to see if she could recognise REMIC amongst all the Englishmen gathered on the station with their wives.
But her latest vision made it impossible. She pulled the face.
Meshad was a few inches away from her eyes. Squinted, Gerstmann dropped her hand and continued onto Kabuli gate.
It was true all the troops had withdrawn from the world city, but the cry of the shower has fallen,
which had sent everyone at the club into such a panic the previous night seemed ridiculous
as she walked to the wide open gates and into the bustle of the street of storytellers,
the smells of cooking meat, the calls of traders, the variety of turbans.
It was all as before. But even so, something was off kilter.
It took a little while to decide that the difference was in her in making her just another local woman.
The burka took away her very English right to be a centrist. Now she couldn't stop and stare point to things that struck her as unusual.
Ask questions and to all male domains expect to be treated with a certain deference.
She'd never known she'd expected this simply by virtue of her race.
So it's me, she told herself. All that's different is me. But she knew this wasn't true.
She had left the Bashour club as soon as she was able to slip away from Remick the previous night,
returning to Deane's to sit on the ledge of her bedroom window,
smoking cigarettes and drinking gin from a bottle, listening to crickets and night birds.
If she closed her eyes, she saw corpses laid on corpses,
pale hands lifting the dead out of their own blood and throwing them like broken into the back of a lorry.
But what could she do about it? She was just a woman with no authority on either side of the city walls.
It was well after midnight when REMIC knocked on her door,
he'd come to remind her all women and children were being evacuated the next morning and she must be ready to leave first thing.
As he spoke,
he looked around her room in the manner of a man practised at finding anything out of place and noticing the burqa slung over the back of a chair,
walked up to it and stroked the whitecotton. Put this on, he said.
Why put it on and take your dress off. Get out.
I'll scream the roof down.
He left, shrugging, but when he had gone with the burka off the chair and the fabric between her fingers felt like an answer.
But now she approached the carpet seller's house in the Old City and the voice in her head grew louder.
Stay out of it. And then this thought, these people are not your people.
She looked down the longest and saw only batons despite the burqa.
She felt exposed and turned sharply into a street so narrow. The man walking in the other direction couldn't pass her without contact.
He flapped his hands at her as if she were a flock of pigeons,
and she found herself reversing in rapid but tiny steps so she wouldn't trip over the hem of a burqa.
It was only when a doorway opened and she saw the woman standing there garishly made up
that she realised what he feared was in the that wasn't the contamination of her Dutch,
but a witness to what the men of the city did here.
A street for everything in the world, city, no map, only desire to show you the street of storytellers,
the street of courtesan's beneath the burqa, she was sweating and it was impossible to wipe the perspiration from her forehead.
Back on the broad avenue, she saw a woman in the bright clothes of a nomad girl out to a man with a wide brimmed basket
on his head who squatted down and allowed her to pluck out the most appealing melons.
A man walked along the pavement with a large cone of cloth beneath his arm from the tapered base of the cone.
Green and blue iridescence emerged from the wide mouth.
Three beaked heads pulled out a hat or melons.
A bouquet of peacocks in another time should have viewed these sites with delight light of the Oriental colour.
But the melon seller was standing beneath the burnt, burnt remnants of a Union Jack.
The peacock area was walking towards Kabuli gate, through which the armoured cars and troops had rushed in.
This was the world she was now in. Or perhaps she'd been here all along unseen.
Thank you. Thank you. Um, I have a number of questions I could ask just about that passage, but but just to sort of as we're warming up and start.
Start us out. Could you tell us a little bit about the sort of for you the background to God in every stone?
Just I know I've heard you speak very interestingly about how you came to that, that lost history, that period history.
Just a little bit about that or what what sort of what inspired or motivated you in?
In the beginning, there were two different points.
One was was the much earlier point, which was I was reading a book called The Pattana Unarmed by Mollica Bannerjee,
which is about the sort of movement, the non-violent movement of resistance to colonial rule in Peshawar.
And it struck me as very odd that when I was growing up in Pakistan, it was not a history I knew.
And of course, because the that movement was not a pro Pakistan movement, they were anti British rule,
but they didn't support the state of Pakistan, so they didn't fit into to the Pakistani official narrative.
And of course, you weren't going to hear about them much in the British narrative of things either.
So it had sort of become that had become a sort of history that Pakistan had pushed aside and I didn't know much of.
And it struck me as particularly interesting because, you know,
when you hear of the Pashtuns are the Pashtuns, it's always how did this Marschall race?
And they'll never put down their guns and then move towards violence.
And it's still a narrative you hear, particularly around Afghanistan and the Taliban, that this is the Pashtun people and what they're like.
And to that, the fact that the most powerful political movement there through the 1930s and 40s was one of non-violent resistance,
very much rooted in the Pashtun good structure is very interesting. So that was one bit of it.
But that was sort of a, you know, abstract historical interest and not really a sort of novelistic one.
And then some years later, in 2009, I was in Pakistan and I was doing the rounds of TV studios and things,
promoting my previous novel called Burn Shadows, which starts with the bombing of Nagasaki and sort of moves on.
And in 2009, the Taliban in Pakistan had taken over quite a lot of territory and were very near the city of Peshawar.
And there was almost daily, certainly weekly bombs going off in Peshawar.
And I was on a sort of talk show and I was then the next was a sort of political
commentator who was going to talk about all these bombs going off everywhere. And there was a break in filming for a commercial break.
And the TV host had been talking me about my novel, said said, oh, look, you know,
you've written this book about bombs in Nagasaki and they're bombs going off in Peshawar and was just a throwaway remark.
But as he said it, I realised that because of all the research I had done for Burnt Shadows,
I actually knew a lot more about Nagasaki than I did about Bishar,
which is sort of an odd thing to explain to someone who hasn't grown up in Pakistan.
But there's a way in which Bashour sort of exists at the border of the imagination, even of most Pakistanis, you know,
sort of the city right before Afghanistan, where the history becomes very tangled up with Afghanistan's history.
And it's sort of almost seen. I'm the same kind of language that the British used to joke about it as a sort of frontier place.
This wild place is how the Pakistanis will still talk about in many parts.
So you grew up in Karachi or Lahore, and it's not really part of your imagination, even though it's one of the bigger cities there.
So as a matter of interest, I just thought, well, it sort of felt ethically wrong somehow to not know more about this place.
So I just started doing some research. And also I was thinking, you know. Partly about McClellan's book and how when I read that,
that was a bit of history of Bashour or the areas around it that I didn't know and as soon as I started researching,
what I came to, of course, was the deep historical archaeological past.
So this is a city that has been continually inhabited since at least the sixth century B.C., possibly much earlier,
and every sort of practically every empire that other than the Brits that have come into India have come through Bishar,
because it's at the foot of the Khyber Pass and it's how you're going to come in if you're heading in that direction.
And it has all these histories from the sort of Alexander Buddhist and the kingdoms and
the Muslims and everything and the bit of me that has always loved ancient history,
just sort of. Oh. Something's going to happen.
Yes, that was really, really interesting and and eye opening, actually,
I think for for someone who's who's read the novel, when you were when you were giving that response,
you were very much positioning yourself, if I may say so, as as a Pakistani writer, you were telling a story that was unknown.
You were also addressing yourself to a context that you felt was on the limits of what was the known world for for the Pakistani reader.
You also spoke, however, in a sort of in a very sort of familiar almost with a term of endearment,
the Brits when the Brits, apart from the Brits, you know, so there was a familiarity there with that history.
I wondered how you as a writer were positioning your readers when you were when
when you began to write this this fiction that with its historical embedding,
if you like, I think any novelist who positions the readers is fundamentally failing to understand the novel.
The novel does not work because it has a readership.
The novel works precisely because it can accommodate a multiplicity of readings so it can work from a position of familiarity.
It can work from a position of unfamiliarity. You know, in Pakistan in the 80s when Midnight's Children and Shame came out and I remember as a very,
very young people reading this and just sort of laughing and loving these books and saying,
but how on earth people in England reading them, they won't understand anything because,
of course, there was so much in there that was very, very familiar.
And I remember at one point some Pakistani I know talking to this wonderful Kashmiri political okasha Heatherly,
who'd been my teacher and saying, you're making this point that, you know, how do these people in in Britain understand these books?
And try to give me an example and suspense as well, for instance, in the novel Shame,
there's this he refers to this place called the Valley of Needles, which is where the sort of gas reserves come from.
He said, well, everyone in Pakistan knows that, that the gas reserves come from a place called SUI, which is literally translated as needles.
And she said, well, I wish I didn't know that because, you know, just said it's a place called Souley is not interesting.
But but the Valley, as soon as you say the Valley of Needles,
I sort of have an image of a valley full of these needles and gas coming off the eye of every needle.
And it's sort of really fantastic and brilliant. And so, in fact, it's a ritual reading if you don't know it's a direct translation.
So we're just one of those moments in which you can read it in these different ways.
Is it familiar or is it unfamiliar? I knew when I was writing this,
I certainly hoped when I was writing it that there would be people who knew Bashour
intimately as I didn't and knew the history intimately as I didn't and were part of it.
I knew there'd be people from Karachi like me who were Pakistanis but didn't know the history.
I knew there would be British folk who were coming at it from knowing the history of empire from a different way.
I didn't particularly think, you know, what the thing you know is as a writer, as, of course, you.
Need people to have a certain facility with language that they understand such things as irony being used.
I mean, that's the kind of thing you you are thinking about.
But if someone does not use it, you just say, well, some some readers you lose along the way.
But I was I suppose I put it this way, what I aim for.
Is for the book to be satisfying to someone who knows more than I do about everything I'm writing about.
That's a reader who I want to say, you're right, you did OK.
And so one of the greatest pleasures of writing this book is there's someone I know in Karachi who came up to me and said, I grew up in Peshawar.
How did you write that book?
Because she said she's the new I met your sister when I said I never knew your family spent time in Peshawar and that we didn't.
And she said, but it's all there. All my childhood memories of that tree we used to climb.
And I don't know what she's talking about, but she found some tree shoes to climb that I'd written about, apparently.
And she said everything is a puzzle that's now gone, but still was lingering when I was growing up.
So that makes me feel very lively, you know. So, yeah, it is always it's never, I think,
to start over with the assumption that I'm going to teach people or I have to
talk down or I have to assume that my readers know less about the subject.
I think there's a real failure in a novel when that happens,
because why would you ever want to write a novel with people who know the subject, feeling bored and talk down to me?
Can you say a little bit more about the remarkable story that you weave?
You can take this question in any way you like, because it's a story that is I mean, it's incredibly moving it towards the end.
It gathers pace so that, you know, what is a historical fiction becomes a page turner.
I, I couldn't put it down. And it's a cliche, but it's true.
Um, how can you just talk a little bit from your perspective as a as a craftsperson, as a maker of stories, how that worked for you?
It's a big question very badly for a long time. What is now the end of the book, which is the scenes around you, that particular instance,
the street, a storyteller, even the young girl was actually the first thing I wrote.
So that is going to be the beginning of the novel in the novel is going to move forward from it,
except as I was writing, that I thought, no, actually I'm really interested in.
So there was this figure of this older brother who was just, you know, he was sort of one sentence in there or three sentences.
And I thought, I am really interested in him because one of the sentences was here was this man.
He used to be in the British Indian army and was now in this sort of unarmed army.
I I'm interested in him.
So it became this weird thing where I thought I was going to start in nineteen thirty and move forward actually to the present day.
But I said stop 1930 and then I thought, no, no, I want to go back to how these characters got here.
So it was sort of very upside down, but I still had the idea that I would keep going forward.
So in fact, the first draught of it, I had this whole three chapter sections.
There was one three chapter section 1915, one in nineteen thirty one in 1947, one in nineteen sixty.
Six or so one in 1983, and I was writing my way through them and getting more and more stock and realising something had gone very,
very badly wrong, and then I realised that actually for me, the novel was in the 1950s, in the 1930s section.
And everything I'd done since then wasn't working. So I deleted 10 months of work and then went back to what was really at that point, about 60 pages.
And then the 60 pages became the novel. And what now happens, at least for this reader,
is that everything as a work converges on that point where once you've read the novel and think back over it,
it all sort of homes in to to that point.
What can you say about controlling those narrative threads once,
as were the 10 months had been taken away, controlling the narrative threads of the of the 19,
14, 15, which also in the light of the past, you know, that archaeological history and then and then that's that back and forth with with with 19.
The 1930s. Yeah. Well, I suppose it is that I knew there were these different strands in it.
One was the ancient history, the deep history of Bashar that I want to tell,
which is going to be done via this artefact that was going to come in search of.
And the other was the story of the non-violent path,
which starts actually in the First World War and sort of how in the way that war can make someone turn against violence and.
But actually, what in some odd way, what really was the centring thing was a story from the sixth century B.C. of a man called Skylarks,
which was sort of a story that is the very few details in history, lovers making up.
But what we do sort of know what is Herodotus tells, as we kind of know, actually, other people say this is what in the sixth century B.C.,
the Emperor Durai sends a man called Skylarks to chart the course of the Indus River, which is then at the border of the Persian Empire.
And he wants him to chart it so that the U.S. can then send his fleet and conquer much of India.
So that was the first thing. And I just like the idea of this man called Skylarks.
But the more I read into these little snippets you find here and there.
So, for instance, Skylarks was from a place called Korea and Korea was part of the Persian Empire, but it was sort of at the furthest point.
So it was you know, it was to the absolute west of the Persian Empire in the way that Bashar was to the absolute west of the British Indian Empire.
And the people of Korea at some point revolted against the Bush Persian overlords and
a man called Skylarks about 30 years after our explorer Skylarks made his journey.
And and we we're told he sort of greatly trusted by the king, by the emperor to rise, to be given this role.
He sort of honoured by the emperor Darius. And about 30 years later, there's a revolt in Korea against the Persians.
And a man called Skylarks writes a very sort of glorifying history of one of the princes who leads that revolt.
We don't know if it's the same skylarks, but we do know that First Skylarks the navigator was a writer.
He wrote great tales of his travels. And it just struck me.
Wouldn't that be really interesting if if the skylarks who was so honoured and trusted by the King and helped him conquer further parts of the empire,
that 30 or so years later, that man actually his loyalties are with the place of his birth and he sees his people as
essentially colonised and wants to be on the side of those who are fighting the king.
And that story, as it revealed itself that became a huge story.
So that became the story of the 1950 1930 soldier. And because Skylarks was the man who this woman, Lviv, was interested in, I belong to him.
So it also, even though he's he's not in there that much,
but his story sort of became the grounding and centring thing from which everything else in in the novel really radiated.
Yes. There's about convergence onto that point through the narrative and then a radiation out with the accent on radiation out.
I'd like to open out now to to the audience, to the other readers in the room.
And yeah, there are many people actually who've read who've read the novel and others who've just started dipping into it.
So everybody is very welcome, whatever, whichever way in you you want to go.
So is there anyone who'd like to. To start out, Ed.
There was an interesting comment at the start where you were saying sort of when you're
talking about different audiences and the kind of Pakistani view or views of empire,
and then almost as a throwaway comment and you said something like the Brits and their view of empire, I was wondering, you know, what is that?
And is there one or what's how do you think that and how does your novel kind of add to
push against is it interested in kind of shifting that or how do you think of that?
Well, obviously, I mean, it's there's no singular view of empire either in Pakistan and India or Britain.
But I suppose what I meant was the angle at which you approach it.
So if you're in Pakistan or India, the Anglet which you're approaching, it is from the position of the colonised.
You know, that's sort of the history. You're much more interested in the characters who were part of the anticolonial resistance.
Whereas over here, you know, even if.
It's often more critical viewpoint, it's still sort of the story of the British in India, so it's just where the the weight falls.
I do think there's been. You rather depressingly, in the last 10 or 15 years, I think 20 years ago,
you could have made the assumption that the whole sort of, you know, the empire was a force for good.
That whole narrative seemed to be sort of disappearing and there was some embarrassment around it.
But we seem to be coming back to it in a rather disquieting fashion.
I mean, of course, I'm pushing back against that and pushing back against that via video character who started the English woman in it,
who starts very much believing an empire.
And it's interesting to me to have a woman who, because she was a man of that character, was originally a man.
And one of the things that happened when I decided to make the woman was it just became this sort of really interesting thing that,
of course, in 19, 15 or so,
you have or just before that you have the suffragette movement and you have sort of a sort of stirrings of sort of even the US for independence,
but of anticolonial feeling. And Gandhi was one of the people to actually make a connexion, although he did in rather sexist language.
It was sort of like, look, even these women are standing up against the might of the British government and we should do that.
But then there's an interesting juxtaposition there that the Englishmen were running
the world and not allowing certain rights to either English women or the colonised.
And so it became sort of an interesting way to look at it for me was to start with the woman who's an anti suffragette and pro empire,
and then to sort of follow her as she begins to change her views, first on one and then on the other.
OK. Um, I just wanted to first say that this is my favourite of everything you've written, really, really enjoyed reading this.
I have a big question, little one. The big question is, you know, I really like the way in which you portrayed the sort of clashing imperatives,
you know, of identity, you know, where, you know, she is, of course, working for God and the country.
But she's also an outlier, you know. You know, she is she feels very estranged from the sort of circuits of power.
And she's happiest when she can actually sort of relate power to someone like Nageeb, you know?
So, I mean, I really liked the way in which that sort of Aldean sort of nexus of knowledge and power circulated
in the novel between beg and Beg and Vibs Father and Viv and Nageeb and your really unsettling,
sort of fixed sort of binaries about, you know, coloniser and coloniser.
You were kind of saying it's much more messy, you know, and it's there is sort of great sort of epistemological sort of, you know,
promiscuity in the way knowledge is produced, you know, and and I wondered if you could say a little more about how the novel is, too.
I mean, we've had the historian sort of version of this.
We've had sort of, you know, an anthropologist like Maglica challenges, you know, version of this.
I mean, how does a novelist look at, you know, all tangled histories?
You know, I mean, the tangled histories of, you know, India and Pakistan, the tangled history of the colony,
and and, you know, kind of, you know, what was India before the kind of partition?
That's kind of the big question. The little question is about, you know, the burqa, you know, the bit that you read about.
And one of the very powerful moments of the novel for me was the bit where cames
little sister feels suffocated in the burqa when she's put it the wrong way round,
you know? And so the sense that, you know, it's that the workers there for people to see it's emancipatory force is kind of a kind of a bogus one.
And you expose that. You know that. You know that.
You know that Muslim women have all kinds of responses to this thing that's imposed on them physically and, you know, metaphysically, you know.
And so these are my two little questions. What was the question?
The second one, the second question was, what do you what you know, what do you.
Is that a correct reading? That in a way, the burqa is not just you know, you're not simply saying that,
you know, you want Spenser's of the world to come and go incognito in a burka,
but that it is a very problematic, you know, sort of in a way a kind of instrument of identity.
Right. I think the second one first. It does there are points in the novel where it does give not only them, but also Tsarina gets you,
the anonymity becomes very crucial as a way of allowing them to do certain things.
So I'm not denying that part of it, that there are certain things they're are able to do because they do use it as it is then using it.
And it's Vivi's less interesting in that then than the women of Bashour,
who at times will will put on a burka and go and go in a place they're not supposed to be and go and do something they're not.
But of course, it is a confining patriarchal thing that so even when they're going out and you know.
Sort of being allowed a certain power because they're able to go in a certain place unseen,
that's still very much within the confines of patriarchy, which wouldn't otherwise it let them go there.
So, yes, of course, it's not anyone's great force for emancipation of the.
Question of how a novelist takes on these things?
Well, I think the novelist has a certain luxury that you can say, look,
I'm just telling these stories and you can choose which stories to tell and you might smash up five different stories into one sort of thing.
But it is, I suppose, you. You look at I mean, what you're trying to do is.
To bring up the human cost of things, I think is what a novelist does with history is to look at human cost and to do that in.
But it was dramatically more interesting than showing where stuff went wrong and stuff and, um, but it is to.
To say that actually, you know, when we do through the big categories, when you see the British, but within the British,
there was men and women and then there was class and then there was sexuality and then there was you.
There are all these other things within that which are going to complicate it in all kinds of ways.
And then there's just, you know, human desire and personality and what you're fighting against.
And so what the novelist can do, I think, is to say you were let's take some of these elements in and mix them together in a
character and place them next to another character and see what that interaction creates,
which is not to deny that there are certain overall structures of power, you know,
for all that interacts in a very human way with Nageeb, it's on her terms.
She gets to define the term because she is. And it's not just an because she's older.
So age is also part of it. But so, I mean, her Englishness is very much a part of it, that she can go to, places he can go and all that sort of thing.
So there are you know, it's not to deny the power structures that exist,
but to say that within that it it gets messy because there are so many other power structures within the big one of empire.
I also wanted to say that this is probably one of my favourite books of the past year,
and I was wondering if you could say a bit more about Kalume and his role.
I hope I pronounce his name correctly, but, um. Yeah.
And his role as a as someone who returns. Someone who goes on because you mentioned Empire.
So we have this what I was so struck by when I read the novel was we have this
young man and it's never said why he actually goes away and fights in the war.
And this is what I find so interesting that you come back to this question and write and leave the reader.
Was that in a way for us to to think about it and to imagine and he goes away and he identifies with this construct of empire and this.
The Britain that is so far away and he fights in a war in Europe against the Germans and against
some construct of races that are and then he and then he has to return because he is wounded.
He comes back and I'm interested in this character as an agent of change in a way.
So he goes somewhere and he comes back and he has changed and he changes the community he returns to and then gets involved in this.
This non-violent drug one before he was so proudly representing being a soldier and wearing a uniform
and and I find this so much entangled in this character and it's so brilliantly woven together.
And you can can you tell us a bit more about that and how you.
Because earlier you said it was only a three sentence person or character.
And, um, yeah. I'm just interested in how you how you created this character and what what was the background
of one of the interesting things to me in when I first read that that molecular biology book,
the paternal numbers on the cover, there's a man in what looks like a uniform.
He's wearing sort of a brownish red shalwar kameez and he has a red belt and he's holding a stick and he looks very masculine.
And one of the things that I think was really brilliant in the way that Abdul Khan,
who started this non-violent movement that he did was to was to create an unarmed army.
I mean, his the through non-violence, it was a non-violent struggle. But he said we will be we will be an army.
And there were battalions and there were leaders of the battalions.
And there was it was sort of taking that militaristic ethos and saying we will still be,
you know, stand by a sort of militaristic ethos, but it'll be a non-violent one.
And this was about the world, about British India, from which the British used to recruit for the army.
The British Indian army was the largest volunteer army of its time.
And there were, as many of you know, despite how large and is, there were very few regions from which the British used to recruit.
And one of them was this area, which then became the centre of non-violent struggle.
I just it just struck me visually when I was thinking about a novel that was going to have this unarmed army in it.
You know, this there was just this line in my head about how he'd sort of, you know, exchanged one army for another, one uniform for another.
Just now. He was an army without guns.
And I thought, oh, so in 1930, because, as I said, the original material was in nineteen thirty when there's a massacre.
So if in nineteen thirty he's, you know, already off this unarmed army.
But he'd been in the British army before the Indian army before or 15 years earlier was the First World War.
So what was the British Indian Army getting up to then. So I went and, and then was reading a lot of the letters that soldiers wrote home.
And to answer the question of why they signed up in a lot of cases,
because their families had done enough cases, because it was an income and you didn't expect it.
If you signed up, as he did in 1910, you never expected to be sent off.
You you were sort of keeping the peace in British India largely.
So it was a career move, really. And also a lot of boys like guns and military things, you know, I don't know.
And but if you read the letters that soldiers wrote, there's a real mix because there are those who,
you know, are sort of very impressed by the the empire that those who just say,
you know, clearly just horrified by the the kind of killing they've seen in the First World War, which they've never imagined before.
And the fact that this is how Europeans fight is a real eye opener to them and make some sort of really,
you know, all kinds of questions come up because of that.
And so it just struck me and that those who are just saying to writing back, saying whatever happens,
do not sign up for the army to write their brothers, don't sign up, don't sign up, don't sign up.
And, you know, you do also find a terrible disgust towards violence and warfare in some of those letters.
And I thought, of course, would make sense that someone who would come out of somewhere like EHP would say,
I don't want to touch a gun, I don't want to see war anymore.
And I did ask Merklinger because I spoke to about the book and I said, when you did your research,
did you find anyone who had been a soldier in the British Indian Army in the First World War and then joined up and she said she said,
look, I didn't, but but I'm sure it happened. It's inevitable, given the geography geographically where all this happened.
She's just by the time I went and did interviews, you know, hardly any of them were still alive.
But she said it's almost certain that there would have been people from the army who then became part of the unarmed army.
That's my guy that I can do the thing again. It's part of your question.
It's the historian can say, you know, I don't have evidence for it, but, of course, must have happened.
And I say, that's good enough for me. I'll make it happen. Thank you so much for coming here.
As someone who hasn't read your novel, and I certainly will after hearing all of this, I'm interested in part in how you came up with the title.
I think what struck me about it was that it sounds very similar to the God of Small Things, which is a novel that stuck with me a lot.
And I was wondering if there were any connexions or or what what the thought process was as you were creating that.
And then secondly is, as the author,
how much of your own experiences and personality in history were projected onto any of the characters in the book?
So how did I get involved with my editor said it's Friday.
I'm on Monday. I'm going into an editorial meeting. We need a title.
I'm terrible that I can never do them. So this went through a million different titles and then I had sort of a list of possible titles.
And one of them was there's a there's a line in the book when the character sort of
looks around this area of Bishar with the remnants of these ancient statues of both her.
And she thought things rather dismissively.
There was a time when the people of this area knew how to find the God in every stone, which is just a sentence I like.
So I had the God in every stone is one of sort of, you know, 20 titles, which I said to a friend of mine who said,
I quite like the gardener sitting on something not quite right about it.
And he said, Oh, rather than the. And I said, Oh yeah, OK.
I like the sound of that publishers. Here we go. So no, the God of small things wasn't in my head at all when I when I did.
And she was an act of desperation, which is usually the case with my titles.
As for projections of myself, their projections of the things I'm interested in, um,
but I'm going through my own life and not so the least interesting thing to me when I'm writing.
So it's it it's it is the things that I'm interested in is the historical periods and points of view.
And all of that obviously is going to come to nothing but.
I don't think I'm in the particularly and then you look at rexes.
I suppose Nageeb, the 11 year old boy, maybe the Klauss, just because, you know, he loves those things of history that I love when I was 11.
You've spoken about the relationship between the ending of the novel and and everything that comes before it.
What I wondered about was the there is at the end a very strong sense of dislocation or disorientation from everything that has come before.
In a sense, when everything starts speeding up and on that day and an almost.
I suppose I felt almost a sense that there was almost a deliberate attempt to
frustrate a kind of Eurocentric ending to the to the narrative in a sense,
because the veev kind of disappears and the and we get much more of the perspective of demand and so on and so forth.
And I wondered if you could say anything about that.
Um, it was I wouldn't say deliberate, but it because this novel was written so many different stages.
And so the end where we've hardly figures was one of the first things I wrote.
And because in some ways the hardest thing I had or the bit of it I had the most trouble with was getting her early story.
You know, I knew what he was doing. He was fighting off in the First World War.
So he was very easy to write. I had a much harder time working out quite what she was doing.
So in fact, she was the last her early story was the last thing I wrote.
But it's the beginning of the novel. So the novel really starts. And it was, again, a question of structuring.
Originally, there was going to be a little bit of her and a little bit of humility before you and instead.
Because of just looking and thinking of how I need to restructure it to make it work, so I didn't jump all over once I had finished,
I realised that what happened is that the first 70 pages or so up, just almost all of it.
And then at the end of which is pretty much disappeared. It wasn't.
A consciously done thing and partly was because, you know, to go back to Erika's first question,
because I didn't think of my I didn't think of the Eurocentric reader as being the one particularly.
But once I got to the end and saw that that's how it happened, I thought actually that makes sense,
that some kind of deep logic to the way in which that happens.
And I was what I certainly conscious of was that I wanted those two women of Bishar to be who you hardly see before to really and again,
in that original idea where the novel is going to move forward, they were both going to be well,
certainly Tsarina was going to be much more powerful force moving forward.
And it's the only sadness I have about the fact that I didn't do that was because
I'd written all these sections when she's older and when I reconstitutes the novel,
that had to go. So, yeah.
I just want to say that Nageeb is a really appealing character to me, and he's the person I liked most of the characters in the book,
but one of the sections that interested me was when his relationship with Viv and how she kind of introduces the idea of the museum to him.
And she's like, oh, have you ever been there? And he's like, oh, no, it's for British people.
And I just wondered if you could say a little bit more about that. Is that something you think people did feel at that time?
Do you think it's maybe still the case or anything like that?
We're not still the case just because there aren't very many British people in parks and museums.
But the museum actually, I went to the Bashour Museum and because of all the research I've done,
I knew the figures for what the attendance was at the Bashour Museum in the 1920s when Bashar was a city of,
I don't know, twenty thousand, thirty thousand, fifty thousand, maybe now it's a few million.
It had more visitors in 1928 than it does today.
Yeah, but it was and was an extraordinary thing that the museum and, you know, still is.
So they did have at a certain point, you know, they made an attempt to get people in.
But the archaeologists at the top level were English, although you did start to see more Indians getting involved in it.
But there was a sense that this was sort of an English project and the English very much made it an English
project that they were in the line of these great rulers who had come here and who they were excavating.
And that that was sort of part of this narrative that was being created, that all these great rulers came.
And we are the new new great rulers. And for someone like Nageeb, again, they would be in sort of a class element.
And but someone like Nageeb, his schooling wouldn't have included all of this.
So while it isn't true that only the English went there, there would certainly have been a lot of Bashary boys like Nageeb,
for whom the museum, which, you know, sort of was outside the world city.
I mean, that was part of the geography job, Bashar al-Assad that you had the world city and then you had the cantonment.
And in between you had the railway and then the museum very near it.
But the museum wasn't within the walled city.
And if you were a boy like Nageeb, you probably almost never left that because the Wall City was pretty much your domain.
So the geography of it was was also sort of fairly crucial.
Kenny. So my question is, why take Pakistan I mean, to what extent would you think the novel is informed by, you know, contemporary politics?
Because I think to me, the, um, the novel is a kind of you know, that's the kind of work by deconstructing a Pakistan, as you know,
in in global or contemporary imaginary like, you know, its affiliation with, you know, questions of terror or terrorism.
But then you go back to all these, as you said, deep history of Pakistan.
I mean, is that does that have anything to do with contemporary politics?
And the second question is your your identity as a writer writing about Pakistan from, you know, outside Pakistan, either in Pakistan or in Pakistan?
Well, no. No, that's not true. I was I wasn't I wasn't a British citizen when I wrote it, but I wrote it, most of it in Pakistan.
Right. OK, then it might not be a good question to ask because I was interested in how, you know, whether distance matters,
like whether it matters, you know, when writing about Pakistan, the geographical distance or geographical proximity.
Yeah. When definitely bought that line. I know lots of writers use it. I've never had any validity, actually,
this question of whether your father or your your first of your Rightmove fish are you sitting in Karachi or London, doesn't matter very much.
And if you recall, in 1930 and 1915 really doesn't matter where you are.
But also it seems that it seems almost odd when people say, oh, you know, writers have to be away from Pliska distance, I think really, really.
Does a writer not always have distance? I don't know a writer who would sit in London but not write about London with distance.
I think part of being a writer means you have that bird's eye view regardless of location.
So, I mean, again, I'm not saying it isn't true for other writers, just that it's never for me made sense.
And partly because I write, you know, I I spend my winters in Karachi and I write very well,
you know, because I'm sort of I mean, it's not for any deep psychic reason.
It's I'm living in my parents house and someone else is doing the stuff of buying the milk and making lunch and all that kind of thing.
But because my books are sort of a lot written, a lot the mayor of London, all of them are written in a writing retreat in Tuscany,
I go to and I could look at it and say, well, this chapter was written here.
You know, it just it doesn't I just move around. So that doesn't particularly make a difference.
What was the first part of your question? Whether the novel was informed by. Oh, yeah.
I mean, my interest is very much in contemporary politics.
And I do think a lot of you know, I mean, this is not a book that would have been written in 1930, even if it's about events of 1915 and 1930.
It's not a book that had been written in 1947, which, you know, I mean, I hope that I'm that is historical fidelity in there.
But the things I'm interested in,
the stories I want to tell and my entire way in which I became interested in the subject was very much grounded in the contemporary.
And I think that, as is there in the book, as a result, well, time is running on.
Did I see a hand just inching up there? Shall we take that as the last question?
And then I'm going to invite you to close with a reading, please.
Thank you so much for being here, for talking to us.
Um, I'm actually an anthropologist, so I'm really interested that the basis of this is an anthropological book, which I haven't read, unfortunately.
Um, but so in anthropology a long time, um, an accusation has been.
I'm just. I'm just just. It's a it's a justifiable accusation that anthropologist's whites,
right about the words they write about it is omnipresent and omniscient kind of you.
And, um, I'm just interested in many of your books.
You have this, um, quite omniscient view of crisscrossing time and places and distance,
whether in this particular one, it was actually a kind of an intervention almost against us.
Um. And anthropological. View, does that make sense?
I think that is something that that actually could be in a better position to say it wasn't.
Again, so the honest truth about writing is that when you're writing, you're not asking the questions, why am I writing this?
What am I responding to? Which doesn't mean you aren't responding to and against all kinds of things.
It just means the writing comes out of a different place. And it's only if I sit in a room like this and someone asks a question, I think.
Well, sure, of course, in some ways I must be responding against a certain kind of answer,
but that's sort of anthropological way of looking at things.
Was it the forefront of my mind? No. And I don't know enough about anthropology, actually, to be able to comment on that,
because I'm sure there are lots of different ways and schools of of doing it.
So but I don't think of the I don't think of my novels actually as being that much what the omniscient view,
because even though they they go from one place to the other.
It's usually through the eyes of particular characters, and I make it very clear that this is the world as experienced by this person.
You know, I suppose the line that for so many writers is sort of a sort of Montereau that which comes up.
You hear writers from Geoff Dyer to Michael darted around writing the Muslim say it all the time.
It's John Bourges. Never again will a story be told as if it were the only one.
And that's, I think, what's at the centre of it. Of everything I do is the idea of the single story, the UBA narrative.
This is the version of history is I think what the novels want to do is to constantly push back against that over and over.
And then if you don't mind my saying,
then those lovely George details like the words of the peacocks in the basket to the Skane coming in with you right there in inside the detail,
almost so. So there's at those points, no omniscient view at all that, um.
But on that note, could we ask you to close with a reading and then we'll simply sort of break for some more refreshment.
And you are very welcome, I'm sure, to come and ask questions, individual questions of Kamila Shamsie.
Um. So this is I almost never get to read this because it's near the end of the book, but it was, as I said, one of the first things I wrote.
So this is the young man, Nageeb girl. He's it's a day of protests against the British, his brother.
Consumers deeply involved these protests. He's not interested.
He wants to go outside the world city and meet with Andrew Spencer, who's arrived back in Peshawar after years, his old teacher.
But as he's going, he realises the trouble has broken out and that his brother is at the centre of it.
So he goes up to the roof of what really is called the street of storytellers or suffer.
And he was out.
So he goes up to the roof to try and look down and see his brother and see what's happening, because, you know, it's sort of the street.
And at one end you've got the British and the other and you've got these men of Peshawar protesting and there are houses on either side lining it.
So he's managed to get this house and go up the roof to look down at what's happening.
And everyone else on the roof is a woman. So it's all the women and children because the men have gone out to join this.
So he is where he should not be as a young man of Shah, which is up there amongst the women.
But there's so much going on, no one is really paying much attention because they're all looking down at what's happening on the street below.
They ask, are you near the front of the action, of course, a soldier with a bayonet rushes him.
Najib takes his own heart. Gayoom holds up a plank of wood.
The bayonet catches in it, Kalume tugs and the bayonet leaps off the soldier's grip.
It's dipped firmly embedded in the plank. Kalume strong arms can rip the bayonet from would turn it round to Pierce.
The soldier's back in a second, but he merely tosses it at the soldier's feet, wood and bayonet,
and moves back into the unarmed platoon which closes around him and cut him off from Nageeb site.
Nageeb understand that in his brother's mind, he has just made defeat impossible.
He doesn't care about victory or defeat. He wants Kalume alive. One of the girls on the roof throws a stone down onto the street.
The concentration on her face is tremendous, but the stone makes it no further than the shop awning beneath.
One of the women battered with pride, but points out that she's more likely to hit a Pashtoon than an Englishman at this distance,
taking another stone, the older woman slings it low and fast towards the troops on the street in front of the soldiers is now littered with stones.
The nageeb sees only one English soldier being kept away, blood pouring from the side of his face.
The beautiful young girl with the long braid leaves the cluster of spectators and walks past the clothesline up on the roof,
there's a clothesline on the roof as she walks past the clothesline.
Her hand trailing along the hanging clothes as though they are entirely in an entirely different moment,
one which allows for a woman to run her fingers along a man's trousers without either disturbing her modesty or hiding her intentions.
She answered a khamees which tumbles off the line, and then she is walking towards him, her gaze distant.
As she passes by him, she slings the Khamees over his shoulder.
She's trying to shame him into joining the men who face down benitz, of course, in the in their red brown Kamisese.
But he's just grateful to be able to read himself of the heavy black frock coat which has trapped the late morning sun.
The Khamees is much too large for him, which is useful for pulling pulling it over his neck without disturbing his turban,
it's cool dampness pleasing to his skin.
He knows exactly the area of fabric near the shoulder which was bunched in her fist, stepping away from the discarded frock coat ball at his feet.
He knows it will give him a reason to return. Knows also that while everyone else was looking down the street of storytellers,
the woman whose handprint is on his shoulder watched him unbutton and shrug off the couch.
What did she make of him picking up the razor to cut the undershirt away from his slim body?
He allows himself to imagine the banter early married life.
I did it because I didn't want to disturb my turban. He'd [INAUDIBLE] see and she'll reply.
Oh yes. O'Reilly Then why arch your back and rotate your shoulder blades in that way, which made every muscle surge here and here and here.
All this is a few seconds of diversion, a few seconds to imagine a future in which today is remembered for the start of love.
And then gunfire again. Thank you very much.
Let's join in thanking Camilla.