Mumbai: Two foreign women hover in animated excitement at the entrance to the busy restaurant and hurry over to the table with looks that say, “How did he get here before us?” They are Turkish, and have just spotted the best-known, certainly the most widely read writer Turkey has produced, the country’s first and only Nobel prize winner. Orhan Pamuk is charmed but not surprised; India has long been on his radar, a fascination he shares with many of his compatriots.
It is his second visit, and he has lingered awhile in Goa, soaking up the landscape, looking at old churches, and reconsidering the development of the miniaturists’ art in the 16th and 17th centuries—the subject of his most famous novel, My Name Is Red (2000). “It is from the Portuguese in Goa that Indian miniature painters learnt perspective. And when the demand for miniatures dried up in Turkey it is to Akbar’s court, where it flourished, that Turkish artists migrated.”
My Name Is Red is much more than a disquisition on the meanings of art—a reflection on orthodoxy versus innovation, authenticity versus falsification—and it aptly sums up the life of a writer who originally wanted to be a painter but fulfilled his quest in words and actions. Pamuk, who is 57 this year, is an easily approachable man, expansive, quick-witted, allusive and argumentative. Asked in Mumbai if his thinly-veiled, and often plainly candid, portraits of his family ever got him into trouble, he cheerfully replied, “And talking about them at press conferences gets me into more trouble.”
Orhan Pamuk, the quintessential liberal, born into the educated cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of Istanbul, a city at the cusp of Europe and Asia, beset by the ghosts of the Ottoman empire and the reforms of Atatürk, is a man engaged in the battle between modernity and tradition, between pro-Europe secularists and diehard nationalists. For his frank, free-thinking opinion he has been targeted by both sides, not to speak of Islamic fundamentalists who loathe him the most.
Three years ago, in an interview to a Swiss newspaper, Pamuk brought up the injustices of the past and present—a million Armenians killed in the closing decade of the Ottoman empire and 30,000 Kurds by modern Turkish forces—and all hell broke loose.
Also Read
Criminal charges were brought against him under a clause of the penal code that orders imprisonment for insulting and denigrating the Turkish republic. In the outcry that erupted at home and abroad, Pamuk stood his ground: “I repeat, I said loud and clear that one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey.” Support from intellectuals worldwide, in defence of freedom of speech, prevented Pamuk from going to jail. But his friend, journalist Hrant Dink, of Armenian descent, was imprisoned and later shot dead.
Pamuk realises that his fame as a writer is a buffer against direct attack (“They don’t use that law against authors, they use it against political activists and fundamentalists”) but he is gripped by the ambiguities of history, identity and memory. It is painfully clear in the brutal conflicts of the most overtly political of his novels, Snow (2004). But the quest to evoke the past, in the melancholy-drenched Arabic word huzun, is as painfully prevalent in his non-fiction homage to his city Istanbul, perhaps the most widely read of his books. What starts as a memoir of family life, becomes by stages, a study of Istanbul’s buildings, its seasons and history, brought to life through the characters who inhabit it as much as through the eyes of foreign visitors.
But Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, The Museum of Innocence, a runaway success in his own country and out in an English translation later this year, sounds like none of his other works. It is a love story, he says, about a love between two people as obsessive as a person’s love for beautiful objects in a museum. Like the multiple narrators of My Name Is Red, who are animate and inanimate, Pamuk’s art is an ongoing reflection of life viewed through a succession of mirrors.