Gabriel García Márquez, the genius of the imagination who died in April 2014 at the age of 87, may not have written on India, but he had a multifaceted connection with the country that can be boiled down to three people: A Gandhi, a gypsy, and a Rushdie. Gandhi first, and for that we must wind back to a magical morning in October, 1982, when the news broke that the Latin American writer who had enchanted the world with One Hundred Years of Solitude had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
In that joyous moment, Gabo became to Colombia what Pele is to Brazil. For this beautiful Caribbean country battered by poverty, drug violence and civil war, the fact that one of its countrymen had won the Nobel was akin to it winning the World Cup. And because Gabo had grown up dirt poor and could be as coarse as a sailor and as chivalrous as Don Quixote, celebrations erupted not just in Bogota’s linen-clad salons but in the country’s barrios and villages as well. Taxi drivers in Barranquilla, where Gabo had spent his early years as a journalist, heard the news on their radios and began to toot their horns in unison. One excited reporter asked a prostitute if she had heard, and she replied, yes, a client had told her in bed. This nugget would have delighted the new laureate, for not only are prostitutes—especially the trembling child prostitute—portrayed with extraordinary sympathy in his stories (his depiction reminds one of Manto’s Bombay prostitutes), he himself had lived above a brothel in his youth when he was unable to afford more respectable quarters. Publicly Gabo maintained that winning the Nobel would be “an absolute catastrophe”, but secretly he longed for it. And so, when the Swedish minister called his home in Mexico City with the news, he put down the phone, turned to his beloved wife Mercedes, and said: “I’m f@#$&”.
That day, his telephone was so jammed with calls that his old friend Fidel Castro was forced to send a telegram: “Justice has been done at last… Impossible to get through by phone.” Far away in New Delhi, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi thrilled to the news, not least because she happened to be in the middle of One Hundred Years of Solitude. In a lucky turn of events, Gandhi got a chance to meet Castro the very next month in Moscow, where they’d both gone to attend Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral. Why don’t you bring your friend to India for the Non Aligned Movement summit next year, she suggested. Why not, said Castro.
Solitude was no doubt much discussed in the Gandhi home, which explains why Priyanka Gandhi recently chose to quote a “South American writer” who had just died, only to end up attributing a fabricated quote from the internet to the master. Priyanka might have known that “We must say what is in our heart” is vintage Hallmarkian, not Garciamárquian. How well he knew that some secrets of the heart bloom only in shadow and we are richer for them. As he told his biographer Gerald Martin, “Everyone has three lives. A public life, a private life, and a secret life.”
“When I first read García Márquez I had never been to any Central or South American country,” Rushdie wrote in The Telegraph. “Yet in his pages I found a reality I knew well from my own experience in India and Pakistan. In both places there was and is a conflict between the city and the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, the great and the small. Both are places with a strong colonial history, and in both places religion is of great importance, and God is alive, and so, unfortunately, are the godly. I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it.”
(This story appears in the July-Aug 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Dear Nina, Your piece is beautifully written and very insightful. Congratulations! It is unfortunate that I did not see it earlier until now when a JNU professor of Latin American literature forwarded it to me, asking for my reactions as I had the good fortune of knowing the man from close quarters. Gabo /Gabito (\"little Gabo\")/Nuestro Gabo (Our Gabo), as we called him, happened to be the founder and teacher of the film school where I studied from 1988-1992 while the socialist world crumbled all around us. Above all things, he instilled in us a deep love for Latin America with all its idiosyncrasies. In certain ways, the man epitomised an entire continent. Fernando Birri, whom Gabo used to call the \"Pope\"of the New Latin American cinema, would welcome Gabo into the auditorium with a flamboyant intimation: Arriba America Latina!! We would join in with equal fervour, ARRIBA! [GO! Latin America! Go!]. The fact that I was sitting behind Gabo during a film screening was an experience whose every moment had to be relished and savoured, more important than the film I was supposed to watch. Screenings and discussions such as those would soon be followed with salsa concerts with Gabo joining the fiesta and dancing with us. Since Gabo died, I felt a desire to write about him and all the things that happened around us. Every time I had a one-to-one session with him, he would bring up India and told me \"stories\" that I doubt ever happened. He is a man who was constantly fictionalising. His elder son, Rodrigo Garcia, a brilliant filmmaker now, agreed when I mentioned that to him. He would often ask the class to ponder and engage him with his favourite theme: \"Is Aureliano Buendia my grandfather or my grandfather, Aureliano Buendia?\" It opened up so many questions and debates that the whole class of 15 students would argue that point and he would listen silently. His other major Indian connection was the Bengali filmmaker, Mrinal Sen, who has delightful stories with Gabo when they were co-jurors at the Moscow Film Festival in 1986. There is a lovely photograph on the internet of the two together at our film school, EICTV. Over the years, I have been inundated with memories of him & Mercedes and his enchanting secretary, Alquimia from whom I would try and scoop out little details about Gabo\'s life whenever we went on long drives in Havana through endless orange fields. Once - believe me, I am not bragging - Gabo and I fell in love with the same woman and she told me, many years later in Barcelona, the heartbreaking story of how she was disenchanted with the man whom she had adored. I have a joyous picture of my entire class lovingly hugging him (from which I am significantly missing)! I have also heard fascinating anecdotes from filmmakers who became close to him at the time of doing adaptations based on his works, specially the Chilean Miguel Littin and my classmate, the Costa Rican Hilda Hidalgo. Gabo had put a condition to her - that she had to go back to his hometown, Barranquia, and live with his family for a month to get the feel of \"Love & Other Demons\". One day I have to just sit and write down all of it. Your write-up has inspired me to do so. However, I have one little disagreement. Gabo, was actually a BIG IDEAS guy, more than Rushdie, though his politics was more grounded and radical than Rushdie\'s while the latter is more of an armchair intellectual. Gabo totally disliked the company of academics, he detested overt intellectualisation. More of it, later. Btw, he LOVED tandoori chicken. That is his deepest India connection. Once, he told me, he was walking through a street in India and felt the delicious smell of tandoori chicken floating through the air. He asked someone what place was it and was told they were very close to a burning ghat where Hindus were burning dead bodies!
on Jan 11, 2016It is remarkable that the author draws attention to the Indian world view that is glimpsed through the last part of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The cyclical conception of time and one of the main characters\' attempt to decipher the Sanskrit sources in his quest for the meaning of life are not to be made short shrift of in a novel that addresses not only the issues concerning the restricted Colombian community but also those concerning the whole of humanity at large.
on Aug 9, 2014