Roberto Calasso’s love story with India continues

JAIPUR - India continues to enthrall Italian novelist and publisher Roberto Calasso, the celebrated author of the best-selling novel on Hindu spirituality “Ka: The Story of Garuda”.

“My new novel is about India. I am trying to explore the ancient ritualistic and pagan faiths of India and Greece. While rituals play an important part in Indian spirituality, ritual texts in Greece are much less important. I have filed the first manuscript before coming to India. It will take me a year to complete it,” Calasso told IANS here.

According to him, “Indians share a very complex relationship with god.”

“Gods, once they become so, conceal themselves and make life difficult for the common man. Gods in India are a sort of modern invention if one goes by the Vedic texts,” Calasso said.

The publisher-writer is looking forward to the release of the Malayalam translation of ‘Ka’ which will be unveiled in Kochi later this week.

“It is being published by DC Books. I will be going to Kerala end of this month to launch my book and collate more material on ancient and complex Vedic rituals - some of which are still prevalent in Kerala,” he said.

‘Ka’, originally published in 1998, has been translated into Hindi by Rajkamal Prakasan, he said.

The writer, who is an Indophile, has been visiting the country since the mid 1990s.

“It is a cultural melting pot. I have been studying Indian philosophy since 17, when I first read the Upanishad. Since then, the attraction lasted. Many things about Indian spirituality are unpalatable - atrocious- but India is the only country where you find a phenomenon of this kind,” Calasso said.

The writer has been learning Sanskrit for the past 20 years.

“One of the biggest paradoxes that exists in Indian spirituality is that while the texts like the Brahmanas - the ritualistic manuals of each Vedic shakha - are very important for scholars who want to work on them, very few people have access to these texts because no one has ever translated the full corpus of works.

“They are completely unknown and not available in book shops. The country does not even have a complete and reliable English translation of the ‘Rig Veda’ except one by Wendy Doniger. It makes the Vedic people seem very remote and Indians are not getting any nearer to these people, who are very precious,” Calasso said.

Calasso, born in 1941 in Florence into a family of academics, came into the limelight with his work “The Ruin of Kasch” in 1983.

“It was followed by one of my most successful books - “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”, based on Greek mythology - in 1988. “I wrote it in a hurry,” the author said.

In 2001, Calasso wrote “The Forty-Nine Steps” and six years later, became a cult figure in the niche literary circuit with “Ka” - an investigation into the evolution of the Vedic gods and the Hindu social order.

“‘Ka’ was mostly an archival work done everywhere but in India. It took me eight years to put the book together,” Calasso said.

In 2001, his anthology of essays based on the Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford, “Literature and The Gods” sought to bring out the re-shaping of literature with spiritual influences and a year later, he published ‘K’, a tribute and enquiry into the persona of Franz Kafka.

In 2009, his book “Tiepolo Pink”, on Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo, was published in the US and Europe.

Comparing myths from diverse faiths - a subject that the author likes to explore - Calasso said: “Certain myths in Greece and India overlap. For example, Indian mythology and the epic Mahabharata talks of Ashwin - the twin gods - while the Greek legend speaks of the twin Spartan brothers, the Dioscuri, who rescued their sister Helen.

“Greek myths are no less violent than Indian myths. Both are characterised by the same need to make something disappear by an act of destruction to invoke god.”