Sam Miller, from London, came to India first as a wedding guest. Soon enough he became an Indian groom. Since 1990, he has been in and out of Delhi, working for the BBC, and has remained in the country since 2002. In A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin) he traces how India has been seen by others and how he has made India home.
Drizzled with Miller’s signature humour, the book proves to be a delightful romp through history and memoir. Excerpts from an interview.
The structure in a strange way is a reflection of my mind and how I think. It is a similar structure that I used for my book on Delhi (
And I wanted to find a mechanism for doing both things, so that the reader knows when I am talking about myself and when I am not, and when I am talking about a historical story.
I am talking about a 2,500-year interaction of how foreigners have seen India and set against that is my own 25 year experience. So there is a conceit if you like at the heart of the structure. I wanted to show how I unlearned India. There are so many stereotypes that I came here with that I developed in my early time here, which are not altogether gone, but that are softened or seen differently, now that I have seen more of the country.
In the 2,500 year interaction, have any tropes or stereotypes been consistent?
It is wonderfully inconsistent, to the point of extremes. This book is filled with people who think India is the richest place in the world and others who think it is the poorest. I suppose what I have learned — India is probably big enough to be all those things and everything in the middle, ultimately it is the vastness of India and variety of India that makes every possible range.
You are very conscious of how people see you and your biggest fear is being seen as a “latter day colonial”.
People who know me know my differences and eccentricities. But in Agra and for someone who wants to make some money, we are all the same. But then I speak my ropy Hindi, and then equation begins to change. But I wanted to talk openly about that issue. I feel we still don’t deal with colonialism openly. And I am slightly critical of those who dismiss Edward Said as irrelevant to India. I don’t think he is. We need to look at these issue. Especially those of us who could be seen as complicit. And you are right, I refer to my complex reaction when someone asked me if I were part of the colonial endeavour or something like that. And I am like ‘No... I am not’.
But when I look at it and try to see it from other people’s point of view, of course, there is a connection. And I would be misleading myself and others if I pretended there wasn’t. And I think it is possible to have both those feelings at once, no I am not (a colonist), but if other people feel I am, then in certain ways, I am.
And I have to deal with that. And be aware of it. And it affects my behaviour. I can’t go around behaving like some old colonial shouting at people.
An interesting thing in the book is that you never take yourself, or anything else for that matter, too seriously.
But I hope there is something serious in the book about how we make up these stereotypes. Whether it is Indian stereotypes of me or more critically foreign stereotypes of India.
But we shouldn’t get too upset about these things. We should challenge them and subvert them and laugh at them. And laughter and humour are the best way are the best way of subverting them.
You write how India has been seen through old Orientalist and Eurocentric agendas and dangers of that. Do you think there is a danger now of India being seen through “pan Indian” eyes?
There is. It is not just Hindu. It is Nehruvian. Nehru for very good reasons, wanted to project certain ideas of India to the rest of the world. And in some ways, you could say that was part of a post Independence nation building experiment and that continues. I think sometimes it betrays a lack of confidence in the variety that India displays, where people seek validation from abroad, but when anyone is slightly critical, there is a very strong defensiveness, which for me is born from one’s own lack of confidence in one’s own country.
Defensiveness is not a virtue. It worries me. I think we will grow out of it. But it is used as a political tool at certain times and it cuts across political parties. I wouldn’t just single out one group. Yes, from the friends of the Sangh Parivar. But I want to make it clear it is much broader than that. A lack of confidence in India effects lots of prominent politicians in how they deal with often quite muted criticism or questioning from abroad.
You have numerous footnotes in the book, they remind me of hyperlinks in online articles that take you to another world. What was your thinking behind it?
You have got it. That is a large part of that. I think we read in that way. Some people want to go off follow things up, others don’t want to. I think it is a very much replicating how we read online. This idea it is still a linear story, but you can jump out of the linear story at times. And I like that. I feel that has become a more and more normal way for people to read. For instance, I get very upset with books that do not have indexes, that kills the book once you’ve read it. It is very hard to find anything. And, of course, anything online, you can immediately find it.
Penguin thinks I am a bit strange for spending a lot of time on the index, to make sure it has right categories. That is very much part of trying to make the book work for people who may not be interested.