{"id":154259,"date":"2021-08-26T13:07:07","date_gmt":"2021-08-26T17:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=154259"},"modified":"2021-08-26T13:07:07","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T17:07:07","slug":"freedom-from-sugarcane-hell-an-interview-with-vinod-busjeet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/08\/26\/freedom-from-sugarcane-hell-an-interview-with-vinod-busjeet\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom from Sugarcane Hell: An Interview with Vinod Busjeet"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Sushant Sehgal.<\/p><\/div>\n

I met Vinod Busjeet a few summers ago in Denver, where several of us writers of Indian origin found ourselves together in a workshop at the Lighthouse Lit Fest. I remember thinking his elegance and erudition were impressive. But what lingered in my mind was a detail from the work he had submitted to the class, the closing chapter of a bildungsroman, now published as <\/em>Silent Winds, Dry Seas<\/a>. The protagonist, Vishnu Bhushan, takes enormous pride in his delicate hands. A scholarship student from the island of Mauritius, off the coast of East Africa, he refuses a work-study job washing dishes in a Yale dining hall. Manual labor is abhorrent to him. At first, I found his fastidiousness comical. Then I realized that Vishnu dreads working with his hands because he fears it will bind him metaphorically to the servitude of his Indian ancestors on Mauritian sugar estates. \u201cSugarcane hell\u201d is how one of Vishnu\u2019s cousins, still tied to the land, describes the backbreaking labor of cutting woody stalks of cane.<\/em><\/p>\n

Busjeet\u2019s literary debut at the age of seventy-one is surprising. After leaving Mauritius to study in the U.S., he settled in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., and worked for the private-sector arm of the World Bank, where he focused on developing economies. Far from the corridors of power, his fictional alter ego, Vishnu, grows up in the conflicted world of midcentury Mauritius, part of a rambunctious, feuding clan rising out of poverty into small jobs. Descended from indentured laborers, they live in scruffy neighborhoods among the Creole descendants of enslaved people, escape into drink and the comfort of Hindu rituals, pinning their hopes on their children winning scholarships to study abroad.<\/em><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, little fiction has been produced in English about Indian communities rooted in indenture, though V.\u2009S. Naipaul\u2019s brilliant early novels of Trinidad stand out. The British devised this shadow form of slavery immediately after abolishing the African slave trade in 1833, in order to continue reaping profits from their plantations all over the world. More than a million dispossessed Indian villagers were shipped out to far-flung sugar colonies. Overwork and physical abuse crippled the lives of these men and women. Nearly half a million indentured workers landed in Mauritius, laboring for French Mauritian and British planters whose greed transformed the island into the world\u2019s biggest sugar factory for a time. Busjeet\u2019s novel offers a rare view of the society that evolved from this brutish system.<\/em><\/p>\n

In May and June, Busjeet and I spoke by phone and exchanged emails about what it takes to reconstruct a faraway childhood, laugh off old pain, and reckon with the dark legacy of colonialism.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You turned to writing after a long career in development banking. Did you ever think about becoming a writer early on?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

In Mauritius, writing was the last thing you\u2019d think of doing. I went to what is considered the best high school there, Royal College, but I don\u2019t recall anyone talking about embracing writing as a career. My father was literate\u2014he knew Shakespeare\u2014but my mother was basically illiterate. She had only two years of primary school. Then, in her old age, she started learning to read and write Hindi. The orientation was making a living, you know? If you were Franco-Mauritian, the world of business was yours. The Hindus, Muslims, and Creoles went into the liberal professions\u2014doctor, engineer, lawyer. Writing was a kind of luxury. Most people I knew didn\u2019t read for pleasure. They read for exams, and once exams were over, they didn\u2019t read. The top writer in Mauritius at the time was a guy called Malcolm de Chazal. He was regarded as a madman. <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So once you began writing, you decided on an autobiographical novel?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

Silent Winds, Dry Seas <\/em>started as a memoir. Then I realized fiction would allow for compression. I could cover a lot of events in one chapter. I could turn four cousins into one. And I could use my imagination to develop my characters. The story begins in 1949, the year of my birth, and ends with Mauritius\u2019s independence, in 1968\u2014and then there\u2019s a last chapter in America. It\u2019s a novel about family conflict\u2014honor, khandan<\/em>\u2014and political conflict.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What lay behind the impulse to write a memoir? What did you hope to memorialize about your life?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

I started looking at myself and trying to make sense of my life. That led me to think about Mauritian society and the relationships among the various groups in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. I go to Mauritius every eighteen months, and I realized there were parts of Mauritian history, namely the events leading to independence, that the younger generation is not familiar with. I would even say there is a desire to avoid confronting the ethnic riots that took place in 1965 and 1968. I can understand that because Mauritius is a multiracial country. There\u2019s a fear of reopening old wounds. Sometimes you don\u2019t want to confront the past, because what if it leads to people pointing fingers?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Does that have to do with the historical relationship between indentured laborers and formerly enslaved people? After emancipation, the Franco-Mauritians and others who owned the plantations replaced enslaved people with indentured laborers from India. Was indenture slavery by another name?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

Indenture was a form of slavery, but there was a major difference. Enslaved people were deprived of their identity. They were not free to practice their religion, which was called superstition or sorcery by slave owners and the Catholic Church. They could not keep their languages or names. Their owners sometimes gave them horrible names to humiliate them. Mauritian slave owners appear to have been vicious in this regard. The enslaved people lost knowledge of their origins, their cultural memories. Indian indentured laborers were allowed to keep their names and traditions. They had the option of returning to India at the end of their five-year contract. Most stayed on in Mauritius, which suggests conditions there were probably better than back in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.<\/p>\n

In the fifties, when I was growing up, most of the Creoles identified with French culture rather than African culture. They shared a common Catholic identity with Franco-Mauritians. During the independence movement, the Creoles did not support independence, while the descendants of Indian indentured laborers did. The anti-independence party, financed by Franco-Mauritian sugar barons, raised the fear of Hindu hegemony among the Creole and Muslim minorities. They would say, \u201cIf Mauritius gets independence, you Creole guys will be forced to wear the dhoti.\u201d The dhoti became the symbol of Hindu domination. That was the propaganda of the opposition.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a chapter in the book called \u201cTamasha\u201d that explores the conflict between Creoles and Hindus. They both feel their ethnic and religious identity threatened. Then the orator Harold Walter says to them, \u201cYou should unite, you Creoles and Hindus, because you are brothers in suffering.\u201d<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When you were growing up, what did you know about your ancestors who were brought over from India to work in the cane fields?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

My parents would talk about them in very general terms. They could never describe specific things except about their own parents. But the British kept good archives. You can google them now. On my father\u2019s side, I have my great-great-grandfather\u2019s immigration number. I know that he had a mark on the back of his right shoulder. I know the name of his father. I know he came in March 1853 at the age of seventeen. I know the name of his village, the zillah, the pargana, the port of origin, the ship he was on, the ship number, the date of arrival. I can give all that to you now. I can do the same on my mother\u2019s side.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

They probably didn\u2019t know what they were getting into.<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

They were people who were escaping something\u2014punishment or oppression. But probably this guy at seventeen wanted some adventure. That\u2019s possible, too. People were told various stories. Some say the ancestors were told, If you go to Mauritius and clear the stones from the field, you\u2019ll find gold underneath.<\/p>\n

Most Mauritians don\u2019t know what led their ancestors to leave India, but they believe some kind of deception was involved. I know the dates when mine came, but no one knows what their motivations were. I know this guy arrived in Mauritius on March 29, 1853. He was sent to work in a sugar factory three days later.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t know which sugar factory? Or what happened to him after that?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

No.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In the novel, Vishnu occasionally interacts with his Creole neighbors, but we see almost nothing of white Franco-Mauritians. Why is that?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

They live in the mansions. I refer to the white community as \u201chermetically closed.\u201d There are two groups, the \u201cti blanc\u201d and the \u201cgrand blanc.\u201d \u201cTi\u201d is a diminutive for \u201cpetit.\u201d The \u201cti blanc\u201d is the less well-to-do white guy. He works overseeing a sugarcane factory. He is not considered blue-blooded enough to enter the Dodo Club. The others\u2014we don\u2019t know anything about their lives. Well, we know they have yachts. They can go overseas every year. They have a lavish lifestyle\u2014let\u2019s put it that way. The fact that they control the economy creates some resentment and problems. But they are the community that has been there the longest. There were no indigenous people in Mauritius.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Although England ruled Mauritius for more than a hundred fifty years, a strong French influence seems to prevail. It\u2019s not like Naipaul\u2019s Trinidad, which bears the imprint of British colonial culture.<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

The British fought the French over Mauritius, because whoever controlled the island controlled the strategic trade route to India. When Britain took over, in 1810, they agreed to respect the Code Napol\u00e9on and the French language. The education system is bilingual, English and French. Our language at home is Kreol, which is French mixed with Indian and Arabic words. The culture is French and Indian, rather than British and Indian. I still listen to French radio, read Le Monde <\/em>and Le Figaro<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are world-class Mauritian writers in the French-speaking world, like Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Humbert, Nathacha Appanah, and Ananda Devi, a novelist whose books are taught in French universities. And then there\u2019s Jean-Marie Gustave Le Cl\u00e9zio, a Mauritian of French origin, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You apprenticed for a number of years with Edward P. Jones in his undergraduate writing classes. What was that like?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

I live in D.C. and he teaches creative writing at George Washington University. If you\u2019re a neighbor of GW and over sixty, you can audit courses for sixty-five dollars a semester. Initially, he was not keen on me attending the class. \u201cI\u2019ve had very bad experiences with auditors,\u201d he told me. But then he saw that I was writing about people descended from indentured laborers who were not so different from the characters he\u2019s written about. He could see I\u2019m not the son of a maharaja. He had some empathy for me.<\/p>\n

Over time, I workshopped the whole novel in his classes. It was an opportunity to work with a master. And being with undergraduates gave me a feel for what young people read and how they think.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did you find your way back imaginatively to your childhood? What was involved in resurrecting that past? You were writing from a distance of ten thousand miles and half a century.<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

Over the years, whenever I had some free time, I would write down incidents I remembered. My memory isn\u2019t perfect, but it\u2019s pretty good. Also, whenever I went back to Mauritius, I would talk to my classmates and members of my family, and memories would come back. My classmates tend to reminisce about the same things over and over again\u2014the experiences we shared. Maybe that\u2019s part of getting older.<\/p>\n

I brought back all my high school copybooks and reread all my literature essays. I was trying to see what life was like in those days. In fact, I\u2019m in my office now, and I\u2019m looking at those copybooks in a corner. That\u2019s a kind of record.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What did writing from this vantage point reveal to you about your beginnings?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

We tend to romanticize our childhoods. In fact, mine wasn\u2019t that romantic. It was tough living in Mauritius in those days. When I was growing up, I didn\u2019t think about how socially repressive Mauritian society is. You are subject to a lot of pressure in terms of how you behave, who you talk to, who you associate with. In the Hindu community there\u2019s a strict moral code, and if you break that code, there are consequences. There are families where, if the woman commits adultery, she will become an outcast, even to her own parents. A bit like Puritan society in the U.S. The Creole community is different. But Hindus tend to associate with Hindus, and Creoles with Creoles. Although where I lived was primarily a Creole town, because my father was a schoolteacher there. In the past, the towns and cities were more Creole and the countryside Hindu and Muslim.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I was wondering about the titles you\u2019ve given the chapters in your novel. They\u2019re mostly fun and lighthearted, like \u201cA Haircut on the Beach\u201d or \u201cThe Incident at Madame Lolo,\u201d and yet painful, brutal conflicts occur in these pages. Was it your intention to soften the harshness of your characters\u2019 experiences with a sense of whimsy?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

Maybe it enables you to deal with such darkness. You need to have the ability to laugh at it and laugh at yourself as well. Otherwise it\u2019s too hard to cope. You could say it\u2019s a kind of defense mechanism.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve also done something playful and inventive by inserting a poem between each of the chapters, which I haven\u2019t seen before in a novel. Why did you decide to do that?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

A poem\u2019s a very compressed way of saying a lot of things. If you take my poem \u201cThe Man with the Glass Eye,\u201d you could write it out as a story. But a poem allows you to cover as much ground in a single page. I inserted the poems partly to provide continuity. I wrote them parallel to the story, but I didn\u2019t have an outline of which poem I\u2019d put where. Later, I thought about how they would fit in.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a poem, \u201cReincarnation,\u201d where Vishnu\u2019s father and mother pass by a coffin shop and his mother asks his father if he wants to be buried in a dhoti. He says, \u201cNo, in my suit and tie.\u201d And she says, \u201cBut you got married in a dhoti.\u201d And he says, \u201cOkay, bury me in a dhoti but lay my suit next to me. If I wake up, I\u2019ll put it on.\u201d<\/p>\n

This comes right after an incident where a Creole guy puts on a dhoti on Independence Day. This actually happened, by the way, in front of my house. He wore a dhoti in a Creole neighborhood, which was essentially anti-independence, and he came to our place and said, \u201cNamaste.\u201d He was a strong guy and people respected him. The poem gave me a way to contrast the two men and say what a great attitude they both had. The Creole man, whom you would not expect to wear a dhoti, wears a dhoti. And the Hindu man likes to wear a suit. I wanted to reaffirm that Hindus in Mauritius are quite Westernized\u2014while keeping their religion, they have not clung to all traditions.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

A lot of the drama in the novel is generated by family disputes Vishnu witnesses as a child and, later, as an adolescent, takes sides in. What did you intend to express about the family through these various conflicts?<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

I wanted to explore gender roles, for one thing. Mauritius is a patriarchal society, and it\u2019s very clear that in most Mauritian Hindu families, women do not have power. Women suffer. They\u2019re expected to be like Sita, the shadow of their husbands.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One of the more disturbing family conflicts involves Vishnu\u2019s cousin Shankar, whose relationship with his father is that of a servant to a master. The father coerces Shankar into cultivating sugarcane on his plot of land despite Shankar\u2019s hatred of the work and his ambition to go to England to study nursing. But Shankar remains trapped working in his father\u2019s fields, which he calls \u201csugarcane hell.\u201d The dream of escape is shared by many characters in this story.<\/p>\n

BUSJEET<\/p>\n

Because of the conditions on sugarcane plantations, the goal of a lot of Mauritians was to get a white-collar job in an office. You wanted to become an accountant, a civil servant. If you were on the lower rungs of the ladder, you wanted economic opportunity. In the sixties, opportunities in Mauritius were very limited. Shankar\u2019s father says, \u201cAll those people who\u2019ve gone to do nursing, have they come back?\u201d Nobody has come back. My wife, for instance, went to England to study nursing because that was an opportunity to go abroad. It was an opportunity to make a life for yourself. Emigration. What are the forces that push a person to emigrate? The story of Vishnu is a story of emigration.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Parul Kapur Hinzen is a fiction writer and journalist whose critical writing has appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker, the <\/em>Wall Street Journal Europe, <\/em>Slate, <\/em>Guernica, <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Atlanta and is working on a novel about love and corruption in the aftermath of India\u2019s devastating 1947 Partition.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vinod Busjeet on the history of indenture and slavery on Mauritius, his long path to writing, and his debut novel, \u2018Silent Winds, Dry Seas.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2174,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-154259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFreedom from Sugarcane Hell: An Interview with Vinod Busjeet by Parul Kapur Hinzen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 26, 2021 \u2013 Vinod Busjeet on the history of indenture and slavery on Mauritius, his long path to writing, and his debut novel, \u2018Silent Winds, Dry Seas.\u2019\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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