What Günter Grass learnt from Subhas Chandra Bose and India

One wonders whether Günter Grass understood what he was up against, on that fateful day in 2006, when he admitted to being a part of the Waffen-SS during World War II. Here was one of the most acid tongues in the world, caught in a moment of vulnerability. More importantly, here was someone who had opened up the festering wounds of history time and again, caught obfuscating his own past. Some of the more salacious (not to mention misogynistic) among his critics even went as far as to compare Grass to the criminal who used a woman’s voluminous, endlessly layered skirts as a hiding place, in that unforgettable scene from The Tin Drum, the 1959 novel that built the author’s reputation.

This is a cruel paradox of the internet era: even as the sell-by date for stories gets shorter and shorter, and our memories begin to lose relevance, we yearn for a sense of historicity in literature. 

It was not enough, for instance, that Grass described Kristallnacht and other Nazi atrocities in his wondrous, inimitable style. In a historiographic sense, we wanted him to retain the upper hand: the "righteous outrage" account and so on. A foreshadowing of this line of criticism ("Of course, you will write X about us. You are Y, for God’s sake!") was to be found during Grass’ Calcutta stay (for six months in 1986-87), which yielded a book called Show Your Tongue, a "graphic diary": essentially a long essay buttressed by dozens of sketches made by the author himself, and also a 12-stanza poem at the end. The book gained more than its fair share of infamy because of one passage in particular, where the author describes the city as "a large slum".

"Calcutta is a pile of shit that God dropped (...) How it swarms, stinks, lives and gets bigger and bigger... Delete Calcutta from all guide books."

The first and the most representative criticism that Grass faced was also the most banal: "Yet another white European author has come to lecture us about our poverty.” Excuse me? We are poor, last time I noticed. Moreover, Grass had said quite a few times that his views on Manila, Hong Kong or Jakarta were similar. Also pertinent is the fact that Grass was fond of the odd scatological metaphor every now and then; he had described his own country thus: “Germany’s history is like a jammed toilet. You keep flushing but the shit keeps coming back." In an interview with The Paris Review, Grass explained how Calcutta inspired the style and structure of Show Your Tongue.

"For me, there is a very clear give-and-take relationship between art and writing. (…) In the last few years it has been very strong. Show Your Tongue, which takes place in Calcutta, is an example of this. I could never have brought that book into existence without drawing. The incredible poverty in Calcutta constantly draws the visitor into situations where language is stifled — you cannot find words. Drawing helped me to find words again while I was there."

For Grass, Calcutta’s history and its religious fervour towards Kali weren’t islands: they were potent forces feeding off each other, sometimes to the people’s detriment, sometimes bringing them together in agitation. In Subhas Chandra Bose, he identified the basics of the all-Bengali superhero: intellectual acuity, who does not let moral grey areas come in the way of imminent revolution; also, ultimately, a tragic hero, denied his rightful place in the pantheon.

In that way, Bose also tied in with the titular pun of the book: Kali, whose signature tongue-out appearance also happens to be a mark of embarrassment or humiliation in Bengali society. Remember, it is Durga, and not the wild and vengeful Kali, who is the more worshipped goddess; Grass astutely notes the ubiquitous-yet-absent status of Kali in Calcutta. Through a woman named Kali, who sold coconut water on the street, Grass shows us the constant back-and-forth between classes in Kolkata. It is an incandescent little passage, typical Grass.

"With a few strokes she opens the fruit as it hops between blows. Practice makes perfect. (She wields the machete in twelve-armed style only in legends and gaudy illustrations.) Suddenly she shows her tongue: a head, a male. Another head, bald, hidden under fruit sucked empty, spooned empty."

Grass was acutely aware of the limitations of his own book: he did not want India to be merely "an occasion for publishing handsome picture books in colour or black and white". He was trying to incorporate some of this guilt and shame into the book. A lot of people – whether Indian or otherwise – did not always get this. Some of them only saw him as an over-the-top moralist and a hypocrite for hiding his past. Now that Grass is no longer around to defend himself, history may prove to be unkinder still. One hopes that we prove to be better than that.