Hari Kunzru is a columnist, blogger, short story writer, and novelist. He is also the recipient of several coveted literary prizes, including the 2003 Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Impressionist, which was also short listed for the William Saroyan first novel award and in the best new novel categories of the Whitbread, and WH Smith literary awards.
But receiving awards isn’t everything to Hari Kunzru. He stirred up controversy when he refused to accept the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys prize because ‘Sometimes questions of literary value are inseparable from politics.’ According to Kunzru, The Mail on Sunday, along with its with its sister paper The Daily Mail, pursued ‘an editorial policy of vilifying and demonizing refugees and asylum-seekers’, thereby contributing to ‘a pervasive atmosphere of hostility towards black and Asian British people’. It would have been hypocritical, the writer argued, to accept a prize sponsored by ‘a publication that has over many years shown itself to be extremely xenophobic’, for a novel that sets out to dispute the accuracy of racial definitions.
‘As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail’s editorial line … the atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it.’ He suggested that instead the money should be given to the United Kingdom’s Refugee Council.
Politics and literature intertwine in all of Kunzru’s writings, which explore the complicated and contentious legacy of colonialism as well as the influences of contemporary globalization on the construction of individual identities. In his view, globalization is a new form of imperialism that allows multinational conglomerates to control and consolidate power through capital. His concerns are for the people who never benefit from this wealth and power, and who are marginalized and unseen with little or no rights in society.
Kunzru describes The Impressionist as an attempt to turn Kipling on his head: ‘Kim is the fantasy of the white subject who can see the hidden easternness of things. I wanted to change that round, to make western whiteness the exotic thing. I have worried in the past that I’ve not felt anchored to things, not felt committed. Part of it is being mixed-race, but part of it is temperamental. I’ve always been very scared of people who are certain. Nothing terrifies me more than a religious fundamentalist who really knows what right is and is prepared to do violence to what they consider is wrong. Claiming that degree of moral certainty is more or less a form of mental illness. I wanted to write in praise of the unformed and fluid.’
His second novel, Transmission, tells the story of Arjun Metha, an Indian ‘cyber-coolie’ who pursues the American dream to Silicon Valley where he discovers he is just an updated version of cheap labor. He retaliates when the anti-virus corporation he works for fires him by creating and transmitting computer viruses that threaten world stability. The novel deals with public and personal boundaries and shows how efforts to keep out refugees seeking asylum with national borders backfire when cyber space viruses coyly named after Arjun’s favorite Bollywood film star, Leela Zahir, breach firewalls. Transmission personalizes the fears and the delights of a globalized world and examines loneliness and unconnectedness in a world where the local and the particular are fast disappearing. If information is power then the disruption of information is another kind of power, a down trodden and dispensable man’s retribution for being shut out of the glittering candy shop of the American dream. Following the publication of a collection of short stories, Noise, in 2005, Kunzru set out to reassert ownership of his own imagination by actively rejecting the publishing industry’s apparent requirement that any writer with Indian heritage has to write about migration, marriage and family ties.
My Revolutions (2007), while dealing with similar themes to his previous works neatly accomplishes this endeavour. It deals with a failed 1960s radical and his attempts to reconcile the abhorrence of violence with the inevitable pull toward it that fueled the political protests of radicals in the sixties. The urge to make a difference, to be affective, pushed underground warriors to extremes they never expected when faced with state violence, government policies during the war in Vietnam, and the creeping conservatism of the 1970s. Although the terrorism Kunzru describes was arguably of a different variety, one preceded by a telephoned warning, the questions he raises here and in his earlier work could hardly be more pertinent: how to live ethically, how to merge the personal with the political, how to reconcile the past without rejecting it, how to move forward together.
Hari Kunzru will be a guest of the 2009 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, 7 – 11 October.
ubudwritersfestival.com
