Output details

The Cloud Messenger

Research content/process:

The Cloud Messenger is an unconventional variation on the kunstlerroman. Its protagonist Murad moves from country to country and relationship to unsuccessful relationship in search of a place in the world. Disappointed in the romantic aspects of literature and its failure as a guidebook, Murad turns to its metaphysical aspects - nature poetry, sacred verse - as a field of study, becoming a teacher and critic in the process. Much of the material in the book conventionally belongs to the genre of literary memoir. In a sense it would have been easier to produce a work of autobiographical reflections on the books that made me (the title of a talk I gave at the British Museum while I was writing this novel), but I was keen to experiment with a fictional mode that would allow me to place texts at strategic points of the narrator's life without concern for the chronological sequence of my own biography.

Unconventional aspects of this story include (a) Mehran's producing a first literary work at the very end of the narrative, in his fifties; (b) the fact that the classics that shape (and betray) him are in non-western languages. His reverse journey is in contrast to the customary post-colonial trajectory of novels (eg Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics) and memoirs (eg Azar Nafis's works) that deal with the 'civilising' influence of the western canon. My work is in many ways a critical response to this tradition. The book involved multiple processes of translation and editing, as it uses excerpts of traditional and modern Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu and Hindi poetry as an oblique commentary on the main story. No other fiction deals with the effects of orientalism (both in the classical and the Saidian sense) on students and scholars in the academy.