The write setting

I’m in a café overlooking a pine forest.

Back in Delhi, it’s 40°C and rising, and I’ve fled. Well, at least for the weekend. I’m in Landour, a small cantonment town an hour from Dehradun, just above Missourie. Landour is well known as a “literary” village. Long-time resident Ruskin Bond lives here, as do writers Stephen Alter, Bill Aitken, and a cluster of other people connected to the arts. I don’t expect to bump into anyone I know, but in walks Prajwal Parajuly, who, after we’re done expressing our surprise at seeing each other, says he’s here for a month to write. There have been others who have done the same. Aravind Adiga, I’m told, wrote The White Tiger in Landour.

What is it about certain towns that are conducive to the literary? I’m not speaking of places where the connections are obvious — urban centres like New York or London or Delhi, which, evocative, gritty and inspiring as they are, serve also as office locations for big publishing houses and literary agents. I’m also not referring to designated “book towns” — small rural towns or villages in which second-hand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated. Urueña, Spain’s Villa del Libro, Bécherel in France, Wales’s Hay-on-Wye, Saint-Pierre-de-Clages in Switzerland, Norway’s Mundal, Redu in Belgium, among hearteningly many others. In India, Bhilar in Maharashtra became the country’s first (self-declared) book town in 2017, where the entire village, according to State education minister Vinod Tawde in an interview with India Today , “has been turned into a giant bookstore.” Oddly, book towns, where bibliophile tourists flock to annually, during festivals and fairs, are not places where writers choose to live.

So, where do writers choose to live? And does it matter?

In a LitReactor column by Rob Hart, tellingly titled ‘As A Writer, Does It Matter Where You Live?’, he says, years ago, an author he admired and asked for writing advice from, had sent back an itemised list which included this piece of advice: “You can write no matter where you live. [Anyone who] tells you they need to move to New York or San Francisco or Seattle or Tokyo or London to pursue writing is going to fail, because no place ever makes you a writer. Live where you wish because of the amenities and culture that draw you there, but know that it has nothing to do with your writing. People fall in love, have children, fall out of love, have loved ones die, lose jobs and have all manner of victories in suburban middle America. Learn to see that.”

Hart disputes this, saying that New York, his home city, fuels his writing in a way he cannot imagine any other place can, but I’m intrigued by his mentor’s words. If this is so, why do certain places turn into writer’s hubs? Is it because of deeply embedded past literary connections? Are these the places from where many writers have made a name for themselves? What about geographical favourability — a particularly salubrious climate, awe-inspiring landscape? Or is it pure chance?

The simplest answer seems to be that a peripatetic writer first set up home in the area, word spread, and others followed. Like with any other trade, I suppose, except in this case it wasn’t to cater to the needs of a growing market. Perhaps writers also tend to ghettoise, to cluster around an area for literary company. In some cases, there are clear historical reasons. Take the case of Allahabad. Under the reign of Emperor Shah Alam in the 18th century, Urdu literature was nurtured. In the 1930s, enlivened by the Progressive Writer’s Movement, the city served as a vibrant cultural centre for writers both in Hindi and Urdu. In Allahabad lived and wrote Munshi Premchand, Mahadevi Varma, Sumitranandan Pant, Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, and Harivansh Rai Bachchan. For the trendy, that place is now Goa, with its sun, sea, colonial history, cheap beer, and more pertinently, relatively cheap rental housing. And while there’s talk that Goa’s glow has faded — too many people you wished to escape from are the ones you now run into — it is still seeing an influx of a certain type of resident: usually city-weary, creative folk. Amongst writers, Amitav Ghosh lives there with his wife Deborah Baker, an essayist and biographer, as does Margaret Mascarenhas, Deepti Kapoor, and Amrita Narayanan.

Landour’s literariness seems to spring from a number of melding reasons. It is undeniably pretty, with its cobblestone pathways, quaint cottages, and churches in the wilderness. It is blessed with quietness and clean mountain air. It is detached yet still “modern” with its openness to transactions by cards at well-stocked grocery shops. Its literariness might also be linked to the presence of a language school that teaches Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, and Sanskrit.

Literariness is, to a certain extent, also consciously cultivated. In several ways. There’s Tawde’s blatant attempt in Bhilar, and, in this part of the world, quieter projects such as the Mussoorie Writers Association, which organise the annual “Mountain Festival”, bringing together authors, artists, mountaineers, and conservationists. After all, a place does not adopt the literary label, its inhabitants do. And they keep it alive and well both for our benefit, and for theirs.

Janice Pariat

Janice Pariat is the author of The Nine-Chambered Heart; @janicepariat

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