Shantaram
in context of an Artwork
by Mushtaq Bhat
Shantaram - Episode Central Prison
To avoid any misunderstanding concerning the subject of our discourse related to our artwork: Shantaram, it is necessary to emphasize the fact that our elucidation of the Theme is not a critic of the book as such. It is moreover not aimed at appraising the author of the book, a daunting task since the boundaries here between the author and the narrator (the main character of the book) are the most complex and quite warped and very extraordinary if not unique in the international history of fiction.* Check Wikipedia.org for more details. Nor is it an endorsement or condemnation of the author, the books content or the way of life popularized and eulogized by media and the film and the film festival juries in the last decades, ever since John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Walter Mathieu, Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin, Olivier-Hardy and Chaplin were replaced by most of the time gun totting and in high-tech, from Dolby Laboratories reproduced bullets banging Di Nero, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Toshiro Mifune and other predominantly in urban underground pulp fiction setting operating million dollar stars at national and international Box-Office. It deals only with that part of the narrative in which Shantaram is imprisoned in Bombay. A literary rendering of the authors confinement at Mumbai’s Central (Arthur Road) prison mixed with flashbacks from the experiences he had in prisons back home in Australia. The author Gregory David Roberts, one must admit is himself more amazing than his creations, more than his urban, rural and tribal characters, facts about him even stranger than fiction.
Not all of the deeds of Shantaram are heroic in the traditional sense of the term and often contradictory. Like Robin Hood he fights for the week and those who are exploited, going as far or even further than Vincent van Gogh in giving away his last one warm coat to those in need. He is the only non qualified and extremely efficient one-man medical first-aid station in super power India’s slum of 25, 000 fully disenfranchised souls. At times unlike Robin Hood and more like a colossal Gilgamesh, Theseus or Hercules he acts completely alone with extraordinary faithfulness to his inner voice. Almost like a superman and batman fighting petty gangsters and egomaniacs in the traditional pulp fiction way, he is also trying to find a personal and social leverage within the colossal chaos and the demons of rampaging almost pathological cancerous corruption evident at all levels of society in the urban jungle of the Metropolis Mumbai.
Yet again he also smuggles drugs and weapons across nations. Weapon smuggling across countries with idealistic intentions may be acceptable in normal bourgeoisie school education, if consistent within the expressed framework of a chosen and chivalrously defended ideology but a hero smuggling drugs makes unfortunately Shantaram a profoundly controversial literary figure, and should make anyone pause, before recommending this book for public school education. We know from history that the King did forgive Robin Hood for his trespasses, which however never made us flinch nor loose our faith in our hero and which we as fans fully endorsed. But unfortunately Shantaram does make you flinch on occasions. However we do know that a drug smuggler is not a pusher. The pusher is probably more often directly confronted with the consequences of his acts. And since Shantaram himself was a drug addict, it somehow does in a way mitigate to some extent this extremely significant trespass, since it is apparently no cold blooded financial calculation that motivated such behavior. In fact the lack of empathy manifested in such act or the callousness displayed here toward a potential victim of such crimes indeed does reflect to a discerning mind the fact, that it is the same kind of disregard and from my explicitly here declared point of view, morally condemnable indifference, that Shantaram exhibits toward his own self at specific moments in his life. Gregory David Roberts is more than aware of this himself and attributes his great enlightening transformation in this case to the accounts that he read about Phoolan Devi. Nevertheless his stuff is not for the faint hearted nor for our youngsters. That said we can proceed with my appraisal of my artwork and one of its main source of inspiration: Shantaram in a Mumbai Prison _ an account of the social structure and behavioral psychology and sociology of a prison rendered in hard-chore visceral literature that ever was!
* Being an Indian by birth and having myself lived three years intermittently in Bombay and the fact that I as a Kashmiri once did amidst others also share the cultural values prevalent in this geo-socio-political region, stretching from the valley of Kashmir to Afghanistan, that are a inherently tribal and basically kinship oriented intermixed with a through predominantly conquest superimposed pan-Islamic universalism. I have to admit that the narrative exhibits through out a sub-cuticle authenticity. In fact I have hardly read any western author who has penetrated so deeply into shared cultural recesses of the social and psychological realm of the sub-continent India _ into the Indian Psyche as one would say in plain english. This participatory awareness coupled with a viscerally felt sensitiveness pulsates throughout the narrative, no less also in the depiction of the journey through the frontier provinces of Pakistan and Afghanistan. One feels, that the author must not only have suffered and gone through the ordeals but experienced the events almost as an insider would, with the same recognizable resonating chords of feeling and even perception as a native would! Something most of the ethnologists, let alone journalists, may dream about. A perplexing authenticity that makes the borders between fiction and fact even more fuzzy!