It troubles me to write about living people: Deborah Baker

“As biographers some of us don’t just look into the door, we open it..get into wardrobes..look into papers..get under the bed..under the linen and then tell the person look this is who you are.
Whoever you might be this is what we think you are and you are good enough for the world.” said Journalist and Author Sankarshan Thakur on the final day of Times LitFeston Monday as he began his conversation with biographers Deborah Baker and Ajoy Bose on what it takes write biographies, to make and unmake heroes.
While Deborah Baker is noted for penning down the lives of authors, Ajoy Bose and Sankarshan Thakur have chronicled political leaders. The three discussed the problems that come in the way of writing an account of people.
For Baker chronicling the dead is easier than looking into the lives of the living.
“It troubles me to write about living people. My first book was about Laura Riding who died by the end of it. She was very much against me writing a book and that was deeply troubling. I had nightmares about her confronting me.” said Deborah Baker.
According to Bose it is difficult to write biographies and hagiographies of those alive and even more difficult if they are political figures because their lives and careers keep changing. He referred to the difficulties he faced while writing on Mayawati’s life. “She didn’t know I was writing a biography. One thing I knew if I had gone to her and told her that I was writing her bigraphy she would certainly say no or she would have said yes ofcourse and made it look like a publicity manifesto. She would have told people not to talk.“
For Bose writing about political leaders also has a great problem because one doesn’t know how much to reveal. “Political assessment is one thing but when you start looking into their personal lives these can be freaky matters. Like I knew her relationship with Kanshi Ram was very intimate and was something that could not be left out but at the same time I knew that their political relationship was far more important, So I wrote about it in a very sensitive manner with the words were chosen very carefully to avoid being offensive.” he said.
Talking about the difference between the biographies of the west and those in India the authors agreed that there is a huge problem in India in terms of archiving materials that can be potential sources for writing biographies.
“All you have here in India to help you write a political biography is a merry go round of whispers. Archival is a big issue. Most of the people have stopped writing letters and Memoirs. The last political leader to write letters was Nehru” said Thakur who has written biographies of Nitish kumar and Laloo Prasad Yadav.
While archival is one issue both Ajoy Bose and Sankarshan Thakur are of the opinion that in India political biographies and hagiographies fail to give an insight into the actual lives of the politicians because as Bose puts it they “keep it guarded zealously”.
“I would want to know how Laloo Prasad Yadav is in his private domain. I would want to know whether Mayawati had a boyfriend in her college days. But there is so little they reveal about their personal lives.” said Bose.