When Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o met Tagore

Indian Express

a day ago

The first thing that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o — who passed away on May 28 in the United States — asked for when he met us in Kolkata in February 2018 was to visit the ancestral home of Rabindranath Tagore. Not an unusual request from a writer — but for him, it was deeply personal. I had worked as an editor on a collection of his essays which Seagull Books had published a few years earlier, so the honour of accompanying him to north Kolkata's Jorasanko Thakurbari fell to me. As we stepped into the compound of the house — a veritable 18th-century palace — Ngũgĩ's jaw dropped, quite literally. 'This is Tagore's house? So massive?' I still remember the blend of shock and amusement on the 80-year-old writer's face.
During the car ride to north Kolkata, Ngũgĩ told me how he'd grown up outside a small Kenyan town under British colonial rule, in a hut made of mud, wood and straw. His early educational tools consisted of a single slate and some chalk, shared with his many siblings — a sharp contrast to Tagore's privileged upbringing. But Ngũgĩ's father believed in 'good' education, which, then as now, meant an English one. While some of his siblings got mired in Kenya's violent struggle for independence, Ngũgĩ enrolled in the British-run high school designed to shape Africans in the image of their colonisers. As East Africa threw off British rule in the early 1960s, Ngũgĩ began writing. His first novels, written in English, used the coloniser's language to tell the stories of the colonised — which seemed like a rebellion in itself. Novel after novel drew widespread acclaim and established Ngũgĩ as a leading African writer. But by the 1970s, a profound shift was taking root in him.
As we wandered through the grand corridors of Jorasanko, moving slowly from one vast room to the next, Ngũgĩ explained why he had wanted to visit Tagore's house. Kenya had overthrown colonial rule only to fall under a homegrown dictatorship. In 1977, Ngũgĩ co-wrote a play whose bold critique of the regime angered the authorities, who responded by locking him up in a maximum-security prison. It was there, Ngũgĩ told me, that he stumbled upon a newspaper article that summed up a key idea of Tagore's: 'You may learn a lot of languages, but unless you speak and write in your mother tongue, nothing is of value'. That idea was a lightning bolt. It forged Ngũgĩ's commitment to uphold indigenous African languages. He began writing in his mother tongue Gikuyu, starting with a novel composed on prison-issued toilet paper, which he managed to smuggle out. He understood the reach of English, though, so he translated his own Gikuyu works, beginning with the prison novel later published as Devil on the Cross (1980) — a practice he continued for the rest of his life.
Ngũgĩ became a language warrior, tirelessly championing indigenous African languages, advocating not only for their literatures but also for translations — not just into English or French so the wider world could listen, but also between African languages, too. Translation, he believed, allowed languages to speak to one another, breaking down the colonial hierarchy of tongues. In his book The Language of Languages (2023), Ngũgĩ writes: 'There are two ways by which different languages and cultures can relate to one another: As hierarchies of unequal power relationships (the imperial way), or as a network of equal give-and-take (the democratic way).' Unlike most of his contemporaries, Ngũgĩ rejected the idea that English could be considered an indigenous language by its non-native speakers: 'The colonised trying to claim the coloniser's language is the sign of the success of enslavement,' he said in a recent interview to The Guardian.
But his critique of colonial systems was not limited to language. At an event at Seagull Books in Kolkata, when a delegation of Adivasi activists from Jharkhand came to meet him, his first question was: 'Scheduled Tribes they call you — what do you think of this word tribe?' In his book Secure the Base (2016), he notes: 'A group of 3,00,000 Icelanders constitutes a nation while 30 million Ibos make up a tribe. And yet… a tribe fulfils all the criteria of shared history, geography, economic life, language and culture that are used to define a nation.' That day, the Adivasi activists and Ngũgĩ reached a shared conclusion: India's indigenous people are nothing less than 'a non-sovereign nation'.
Working in the English-language publishing world in India, I've had the honour of meeting countless authors. Too often, the conversations revolve around comparisons — who's published in London or New York, whose advance is bigger, who's invited to which festival, what kind of hotel rooms they're given — an eternal picnic of vanities. In this world so steeped in hierarchies, it is both comforting and reassuring to meet writers like Ngũgĩ, whose sole allegiance was to telling the good story, and the right story. Greatness and humility are uneasy companions. Will there be great writers in the future? Certainly. Will they be as humble as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o? That's a harder question.
Samaddar is an editor at Seagull Books, Kolkata