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Contents

Foreword by Janet Wilson

Introduction

The Act of Inter-viewing: A Network of Creative Lives in the South Asian Diaspora

Genres, Languages, Voices: Rukhsana Ahmad in Conversation with Maryam Mirza

The Aesthetics of Fragmentation: Michelle Cahill in Conversation with Chris Ringrose

Writing One Reality, Returning to Another: Shankari Chandran in Conversation with Birte Heidemann

In a State of Indifference: Amit Chaudhuri in Conversation with Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Poetry as Radical Resistance: R. Cheran in Conversation with Aparna Halpé

An Infinity of Traces: Suneeta Peres da Costa in Conversation with Reshmi Lahiri-Roy

The Delicious Indulgences of Writing: Sulari Gentill in Conversation with Angela Savage

“An Island is a World”: Romesh Gunesekera in Conversation with Susheila Nasta

A Highbrow “Hijra”: Kaiser Haq in Conversation with Mohammad A. Quayum

Nomadic Thinking: Tabish Khair in Conversation with Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Reading, Writing and the Contours of Power: Mridula Koshy in Conversation with Maryam Mirza

“To want to know the world, to look outward”: Neel Mukherjee in Conversation with Anjali Joseph

Before the Battle: Karthika Naïr in Conversation with Laetitia Zecchini

Remapping Canada: Mariam Pirbhai in Conversation with Maryam Mirza

“I Ground Myself in Multiple Spaces”: Sehba Sarwar in Conversation with Maryam Mirza

The Processes of Fiction, Theatre and Life: Rajith Savanadasa in Conversation with Alexandra Watkins

Where Politics and Climate Meet: Sungchuk Kyi in Conversation with Ruth Gamble

Places and Proximities: Samrat Upadhyay in Conversation with Prakash Subedi

About the Editors

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Foreword

Janet Wilson

The pleasure of reading these fascinating interviews with writers and artists cannot be underestimated. The interview is a way to hear their voices in dialogue with empathetic, discerning readers and interpreters of their work. It offers a snapshot of the writers’ world view as it has determined their writing and life moves, and the particular choices they have made. Such motivations towards developing a hybrid narrative voice on the part of the 18 South Asian diasporic writers who appear in this volume hinge on their decision to migrate from their homelands. Since they are exiles and migrants, their journeys are constitutive of the multidirectional trajectories comprising the many South Asian diasporas that extend across the globe: collectively the world’s largest diaspora today.

This collection represents a shop-front for the work of the South Asian Diaspora Researchers’ Network (SADIRN) established at Monash University, Australia in 2016. It stems from an ongoing project that involved network members and affiliates in discussion with transnational, global writers, both in Australia and beyond, and reflects the oversight and commitment of its Director Chandani Lokuge, and her co-editor of this volume, Chris Ringrose. Its range of interviews reflects SADIRN’s international relations with European research groups such as that run by Frank Schulze-Engler at the University of Frankfurt and the European Association for Australian Studies (EASA). There is also its fruitful liaison with the journal Wasafiri, through its founding-editor Susheila Nasta, which over the last 35 years has pioneered landmark interviews with writers from “other” cultures.

Creative Lives is an illustrious extension of Wasafiri’s tradition of fostering these literatures: it features writers who have relocated in diverse European, Australian and US centres yet retain ties with their homelands in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Tibet. Alongside interviews with writers shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize are conversations with writers who are national and international prize-winners, or have been shortlisted for prestigious grants and awards.

In their excellent, wide-ranging introduction, Lokuge and Ringrose, who like many of the interviewees are creative writers as well as essayists, critics and scholars, draw attention to the liminality implicit in the act of interviewing. The interviews themselves demonstrate the contrapuntal diasporic subjectivity that arises from living in two or more cultures, which is refracted in narrative practices of hybrid, transcultural, transnational writing, and the shaping discourses of movement and resettlement. The dual focus on movement to new countries like Australia, Canada, France, the UK and USA, alongside the ongoing pull of homeland issues and cultures, suggests their work may be read according to some mix of postcolonial and world literature writing categories, as proposed by Stephan Helgesson (2014), insofar as they are concerned with “local conflictual histories” and their transcultural production belongs to a “circulational phenomenon that moves across languages and literary fields” (484).

The challenges faced by these writers converge on the crux for all migrants, whether voluntary, exiled, refugee or asylum seeker: national borders, visas, entry permits, and policies of exclusion, as well as the related question of whether cultures’ “others” are perceived as located within the nation or as aliens threatening from outside. As a liminal act each one of these 18 interviews is constructed from the writer’s re-experience and recreation in words of a material reality—the vicissitudes of migration and dislocation due to political and cultural pressures, and the struggle between familial, national ties and affiliative urges—and each depends for its animation and direction on the synchronicities and affinities between interviewer and interviewee.

Creative Lives reinforces the special value of the interview at a time of devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and by political upheavals across the globe. In this era of fake news, shrinking borders, and global uncertainty, our minds are being rewired, our antennae of curiosity and enquiry activated differently. Such reconfiguring processes and increased connectivity between people due to mobile technology— video teleconferencing services like Zoom, TV and video streaming services, and social media networking—have been reinforced by social isolation and national lockdowns. The interview format contributes to this greatly enhanced access to information that enables us, as readers, consumers, and co-producers of knowledge, to choose how to think more critically.

Bibliography

Helgesson, Stephan. 2014. “Postcolonialism and World Literature: Rethinking the Boundaries.” Interventions 16 (4): 483–500.

Introduction
The Act of Inter-viewing: A Network of Creative Lives in the South Asian Diaspora

Chandani Lokuge and Chris Ringrose

What is more important in a network than the interstitial relations? What Hannah Arendt called human “inter-est”, that which is between people and brings them together. (Bhabha 2015)

An “interview” is a pragmatic way into new knowledge but is also suggestive of subtle undertones and interpretations of what is already known and familiar. On the one hand, it is an interrogation or conversation that brings together one individual, the interviewee, and an other, the interviewer, who shares their world. In the act of the interview, the individual sees themselves in relation to and separate from the other—who represents the public beyond their own world. When split with a hyphen, as we have chosen to do here, “inter-view” suggests something more introspective and liminal: looking inward or in-between. The effect then could be of something unpredicted, a frisson, perhaps, created between what is said and not said, what is felt and not thought—an inward reaction that resists articulation but is important to our notions of who we are in our continual negotiations with the world.

Through the fascinating and provocative medium of the inter-view, Creative Lives brings together a cross-section of South Asian diasporic1 Anglophone novelists, poets, playwrights and translators. Their travel lines originate from South Asia—Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Tibet. They are interwoven by their geographical positioning, as well as by aspects of pre- and postcolonial histories, cultures, religions, languages and literatures. The majority of our interviewees share the legacies of British colonization; consequently, inherited local and acquired British cultures blend in them. However, they are also distinguished and differentiated by disparate features that are unique to each home culture. Their voyages out, meanwhile, extend across the globe to many different destinations in the west, ranging from Australia and Canada to France, Denmark, the UK and US. In this Introduction, we seek to situate their reflections on their creative work in the light of: the relationship between “homeland” and “hostland”; the idea of “world literature”; the resources and problematics of “Anglophone writing”; and the meaning and politics of “diaspora” itself in relation to writing.

In a classic study of diaspora, James Clifford (1994) describes diaspora as “jostling and conversing [with] terms such as border, travel, creolization, transculturation, hybridity”. All of Clifford’s terms are significant for diasporic writers and artists, since diaspora opens up new impulses and topics as they imagine their journey and dis-location. In the interviews gathered in this volume, such “jostling and conversation” is evident in the interviewees’ reaction to, and reformulation of, the terms that might define their place “in the world” as they consider, adopt or decline concepts such as transnationalism, globalization and the postcolonial.

Some commentators have expressed misgivings about diasporic writing’s capacity to deal adequately with “homelands”; usually they invoke the idea of a lack of authentic belonging. One notorious example occurred in 1996, when the Australian writer Germaine Greer attacked Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance on British TV. “I hate this book”, she said. “It’s a Canadian book about India. What could be worse? What could be more terrible?” Mistry’s response was to call her comments “asinine” and “brainless”. This was five years after Salman Rushdie’s (1991) classic essay “Imaginary Homelands”, and two years after Homi Bhabha’s (1994) The Location of Culture had explored the active, dynamic process of interaction between cultural and national identities. Greer seemed to offer instead an ideal of uncontaminated purity in literary responses to a nation, which diaspora theory dissociates from as it suggests xenophobia and exclusiveness.

Today one hardly needs recourse to Homi Bhabha’s reflections on “hybridity” to celebrate the brilliant possibilities for literary production offered by intersecting realms of experience, idiom and cultural hybridity offered by migration. And of course, those literary intersections can be set in the homeland, as in Amit Chaudhuri’s recent Friend of My Youth, or in the hostland, as in his earlier Odysseus Abroad, whose very title plays with the idea of antecedents, travel and being “abroad”. Nevertheless, Chaudhuri himself is one of those most impatient with the terminology of homelands, hostlands and diaspora. Prompted by Pavan Kumar Malreddy during his interview in this volume to reflect directly on such concepts, he responds that terms like diaspora, exile, nation and identity make his mind “fog over”.

Sehba Sarwar, born and brought up in Pakistan, and a US resident for more than three decades, is equally uncomfortable with certain kinds of familiar terminology, and relates her misgivings to the content of her work and her fascination with cross-cultural encounters. “Relationships”, she says here, “don’t need to be limited by national borders that are, in the end, temporary”. She goes on to say that the word “diaspora” itself feels remote to her: “Most people I meet and work with have a history of displacement. Ultimately, I prefer the term ‘transnational’—because I ground myself in multiple spaces, and I don’t feel the need to select only one as my ‘home’”. Michelle Cahill, an Australian-based writer who engages with a dazzling variety of locales, genres and literary affinities, takes a similar view. While acknowledging her affiliation with “those of us who have been colonized and have suffered the loss of family, of language, of community, of culture”, she is prepared to entertain the idea of having “a global voice”, having spent her formative years living in three countries and valuing a family environment that was aware of the world, through its communities, “through coloniality, through trade, through art, through different cultures and languages”. Interviewee Mridula Koshy, now residing in New Delhi after a 20-year sojourn in the US, is committed to representing the resilience of her subaltern characters: “I am interested in literature as one space in which power difference and corruption can be addressed. Good literature has always been committed to examining how we structure our lives and the ideas to which we subscribe”.

As Yoon Sun Lee (2015) emphasizes, “the diasporic imaginary rests on space: space travelled, experienced and registered as distance” (133). This spatial geography gains depth from the distinctive and idiosyncratic perceptions of the writers as they reflect on their creative worlds—their way of life, artistic concerns, core beliefs, cultural practices and importantly, their literatures—within the context of their diasporic, “returned diasporic” or “nomadic” experiences. As Turkish US diaspora cultural theorist Azade Seyhan (2000) argues, originating at border crossings, and driven by mobile subjects, diaspora narratives cannot be bound by “national borders, language, and literary and critical traditions” (4). Rather, their creativity is inspired by the interrogation of home and belonging, transcultural connectivity, hybridity and diversity, settlement and location (xviii).

Klaus Stierstorfer and Janet Wilson (2018) note that the word “diaspora” has its “etymological origins in the Greek verb diaspeirein, comprising the elements dia-, ‘through, across’, and -speirein, ‘to sow or scatter seeds’” (xix). It was originally used to refer to the dispersion of the Jews after the Babylonian exile; for this reason, it carried overtones of punishment. In broader and later usage, it refers to human dissemination and scattering, and to communities dislocated from their place of origin through migration or exile, and relocated elsewhere. Creative Lives shines a light on the earliest and most familiar of diasporas—the forced diaspora—which, commencing from the Jewish exodus from their homelands and inability to return to them, continues to grow within the more recent, entirely new historical period of our times: in the global mass migration of people from all over the world, persecuted in their homelands, who seek asylum in new lands. In his exclusive inter-view for this book, Tamil Canadian poet Cheran gives a searing insight into his exilic suffering consciousness haunted by both his motherland being lost to him through race-persecution and his precarious position in his new home in the diaspora, where racism is rife. With his severed past informing his uncertain present, Cheran’s powerful poem “On This Street Anytime – 4” with which he ends his inter-view, is inspired by today’s “Black Lives Matter” uprising, in which he sees the image of his son transfer to that of black youths shot by armed police. With this poem, Cheran continues the inter-cultural dialogue of the forced diaspora into our time, exploring losses that can never be repaired, that instead swell mutinously in new soil:

Both of them looked exactly

like my son

Height. Beauty. Black. Brave.

Alongside the forced diaspora and the desperation implicit in much South–North movement, a massive voluntary diaspora has expanded in myriad directions in the new millennium. With intensified globalization, in which transnational and transglobal mobility has been facilitated by affordable air travel and advanced information technologies and the vast international social networks spawned by them,2 the voluntary diaspora has branched out in diversity over the last 30 to 40 years. This is generally a feature of corporate neoliberalism and the import / export of labour, often for low wages. However, some beneficiaries of these new developments now have the freedom not only to return frequently to the homeland but seek third and fourth new homes outside of it. Taking these new developments in migration into account, Avtar Brah (1996) notes that today, the diasporic dream is built on “a homing desire”, the wish to construct home in the hostland, in contrast to the “desire for a homeland” left behind, a model of exile associated with the Jewish diaspora (192–93). Alongside these changes, upheavals of our time such as terrorist attacks and the Coronavirus global pandemic, and also political and socio-cultural phenomena such as “Black Lives Matter” (to which we have referred above), women’s rights, “Me Too”, and the post-truth Trump fiasco in the US, dubbed the end of democracy as we know it (Fisher 2020), have led to the proliferation of new challenges and frontiers that are already inspiring the contemporary diasporic literary consciousness into new and diverse reflections and articulations. These affiliations can be a complex matter. Shankari Chandran speaks in her inter-view of how

writing the novel [Song of the Sun God, set in Sri Lanka] was developmental and cathartic for me in that it helped me understand and accept so much: where I have come from (ancestrally); what I cannot have, reclaim or be; and who I am now. All of that is evolving, dynamic and imperfect but it’s mine.

Part of the complexity here comes from the fact that Chandran was born in the UK, grew up in Australia and set her first novel in Sri Lanka. Of her return to Australia after ten years’ residence in Britain (“London made me feel like my South Asian-ness was normal”), she says: “When I returned home, I felt homeless”.

Most, but not all, of the authors in Creative Lives write in English. The global reach and status of Anglophone writing has recently come under attack, notably by Aamir Mufti (2016) in his Forget English! manifesto for vernacular languages as he surveys the theorization of “world literature” and scrutinizes the continuing dominance of English as both a literary language and the undisputed cultural system of global capitalism. But perhaps the choice between the two is not so stark. Several writers interviewed here have been searching for ways in which to introduce other languages that may co-exist and engage with English. In her interview, the Pakistani Canadian writer Mariam Pirbhai recognizes that “multilingualism is a natural aspect of our multicultural cities, our hybrid cultures—our world. Monolingualism seems like the enforced and unnatural condition”. Her 2017 short story collection Outside People not only involves a diverse cast of characters (Caribbean, Maghrebi, South Asian, South-East Asian and others), but draws upon a range of languages whose interconnections and interactions are important to the fiction. In this way she hopes “to break with the implied hegemony of English as our default lingua franca, and focus on inter-ethnic encounters that bring to view other levels of interlingualism and multilingualism”. The celebrated translator and poet Kaiser Haq speaks from a lifetime’s experience of writing and translation at the interface of English and Bengali in Bangladesh, noting the paradox that English has gained popularity as a literary medium at the same time that “there is no officially recognized place for English in the country”.

A scrutiny of the 18 interviews included in this book shows the continued affiliation of the writers to their homelands and desire to re-engage with them from diaspora. Neel Mukherjee gives powerful expression to this impulse in his conversation with Anjali Joseph:

The only thing I can say about my continuing interest in India is that I find the country intellectually fascinating. […] India is so plural, so shifting, so one thing and its opposite simultaneously. […] To be an Indian [writer] is to be [supplied with] material all your life.

Samrat Upadhyay notes that despite being employed for over 20 years as an academic in the US, he continues to set all his creative work in his original homeland, Nepal. Conversely, Amit Chaudhuri, a self-proclaimed roamer and “nomad”, currently simultaneously employed in universities in India and Britain, discusses here how he returns to his homeland India from his travels, intellectually and imaginatively provoked into new ways of seeing both home and the world, writing in a mode similar to what Marcel Duchamp (1999) characterized as “infrathin”.

Thus, the original homeland thrives within the diasporic creative world and is the source of much of its energy. As one might expect, current and past military and political conflicts feature in many of the inter-views and the associated texts. Romesh Gunesekera describes how he is drawn to write about “the beautiful but fragile world” of mid-to-late 20th-century Sri Lanka while

thinking about issues we all still talk about: moving places, dislocation, migration, racism—all pressing in the 1970s and 1980s and now. But then, in 1983, Sri Lanka erupted into a violent maelstrom while I was writing a story—this changed my priorities.

Gunesekera also discusses the way his 1980 short story “The Storm Petrel” plays off nostalgic and romantic yearnings for Sri Lanka against brutality and violence. Such unease is characteristic of much Sri Lankan diasporic fiction, and informs the depiction of a “mixed” Sinhala-Tamil marriage in Rajith Savanadasa’s Ruins. It was, says Savanadasa, “a way for me to explore the fault lines, the divides in class, generation, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual orientation, and the tensions caused by those divides”.

Political and revolutionary undertones also characterize the most recent work of Suneeta Peres da Costa, who was born in Sydney to parents of Goan origin. She reaches back imaginatively to the sense of melancholy, or saudade, in the final years of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, and the experiences of the Goan diaspora there, as one of the country’s various groups: native Angolan, Goan, Portuguese and European. She explains here that by making the protagonist’s family, who are Catholic Brahmin, “complicit in the native indentured labour economy in Angola, which itself evolved out of the Portuguese slave trade”, she was able to reveal networks of power and exploitation.

Potent, too, is the yearning of diasporic authors to immerse themselves actively in their home culture and disseminate it within the hostland and beyond. Pioneering ventures in this respect include Pakistani British novelist Rukshana Ahmed’s founding of the South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive (SADAA) and the Kali Theatre Company in London, and Sri Lankan Australian novelist Rajith Savanadasa’s introduction of the beloved ancient Sri Lankan (Sinhala) Kolam theatre tradition to Australia through his latest writing.

Of particular interest here is the impressive revisioning of the Indian classic epic Mahabharata entitled Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, by Indian French poet, dance producer and librettist, Karthika Naïr. Predicated by the changing socio-political environment of South Asia and Europe in the new millennium, Naïr contemporizes the Mahabharata by re-visioning its context, themes and characters. Published and performed internationally to great global acclaim, Until the Lions makes relevant to the here and now an ancient South Asian literary tradition that is revered by Asians. In another project of east-west connection, Naïr’s collaborative work Over and Underground in Paris & Mumbai connects the French and Indian cities through vivid streetscapes and subterranean travel on their respective metros. Naïr, like Sehba Sarwar, embraces her sense of double (or even multiple) locatedness. In her interview in this volume, she says:

You know I relate to both of my countries, France and India, in the same way. I am fiercely critical of them, and of the directions they are taking, but also really grateful for the person they’ve made me, because both have, and also very defensive of the founding principles of both countries, principles that are laudable and vital, and were, for long, successful against all odds.

What could be the germ of inspiration behind this diasporic yearning to give such prominence to the dissemination of the homeland culture, its history, and literature? A creative work is often inspired by conflictual scenarios that the writer / creator develops in a rising narrative arc. As Samrat Upadhyay points out, his starting point for a novel is “a character in a pickle”! We could hypothesize from this that their diaporic creators are also inspired by the uneasy space or frisson that may open up through an inner awareness of (un)belonging to the majority culture, and the tensions caused by such dissonance. Can we detect this claim in the in-between spaces of the inter-views? And how does it feature in the context of contemporary multi-cultures in which the minority diasporic culture might be struggling, possibly burdened with an idealized past, to adapt to the majority culture? In a relatively recent interview, Homi Bhabha (2015) provides a theoretical lens through which to interrogate this view and enhance our understanding of a complex sensibility that lies unidentified in the voluntary diasporic who seems overtly adaptable and accommodating. Bhabha contests the idea that a contemporary culture anywhere is a “seamless whole”, arguing instead that it is a “misfitting apparatus” in which minority cultures with their multiple differences piece into the majority culture. Using the metaphor of the broken vessel introduced by Walter Benjamin ([1923] 2000) in his essay “The Task of the Translator”, Bhabha argues this point with particular reference to the minoritized (diasporic) Parsi community in India that he sees as a vessel patched up of “misfitted” fragments:

[T]he pieces of a broken vessel fit together not because they are the same as each other but they fit into each other in all their differences. […] So culture is a translational reality, and to that extent it depends upon its moving parts, its often contradictory, asymmetrical moving parts, its tensile strength. […] the question ‘What is your cultural identity?’ is unanswerable. (2015, n.p.)

However, as our group of writers demonstrates, the result is not a “paralysing condition” for a minority diasporic community but one that offers a deeply cosmopolitan space open to “varied contingencies and interventions”. Stierstorfer and Wilson’s observation that hope is an essential element of the original meaning of the word “diaspora” as “the scattering of seeds” (2018, xix), applies to Bhabha’s stance that contemporary multi-cultures open up interstitial spaces from which diasporic creativity may be born and within which it may grow and bear fruit. In moments of inter-viewing his “nomadic” transnational roaming and its effect on his creative production, Tabish Khair offers insights into the complex and non-linear effects of travelling. Khair admits to inhabiting a kind of “intellectual exile” which can be a creative “impetus”:

[a] paradoxical state of being in the world and not in the world at the same time. I think intellectual exile enables this necessary (dis)junction of being more or less visible, and one uses it creatively in a form that can be seen as being rooted in a degree of dissatisfaction about what exists in the world.

Khair also acknowledges the ways in which a creative tradition may gain by contrapuntally borrowing from other cultures and writing across national borders.

Diasporic voices share common ground in issues relating to connectedness to the homeland. However, they also draw inspiration from world literature, which, as David Damrosch (2003) theorizes, stems from “widely disparate societies, with very different histories, frames of cultural reference and poetics” (4). It is not surprising, then, that the writers interviewed here are reinventing, appropriating, recycling and translating stories and languages as new points of contact generate cross-cultural fertilisation and result in surprising transformations. A notable example of this is Sulari Gentill (“I’m Australian. I was born in Sri Lanka, learned to speak English in Zambia and grew up in Brisbane”), who adapts the detective fiction genre to produce a highly successful series of nine politically and historically acute crime novels set in the 1930s in Sydney, Shanghai and elsewhere. Anyone interested in the circulation, reading and rewriting of texts as part of “world literature” will find acknowledgement in these interviews of a rich and complex network of writers and material that undergirds South Asian diasporic writing. Here, forms such as the bhakti poetry of Mira Bai are cited by Suneeta Peres da Costa alongside an inspiring series of later writers from Marguerite Yourcenar to Shashi Deshpande and Perumal Murugan, as well as Ingeborg Bachmann, William H. Gass, W.G. Sebald and Eunice de Souza. Lydia Davis is discussed here, as are Roberto Bolaño, and Antonio Tabucchi. Michelle Cahill talks about her inventive “Letter to [Fernando] Pessoa”. Unexpected and creative collisions occur, such as Kaiser Haq’s homage to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Walt Whitman—just one of the fruits of his residence in the US. Or Amit Chaudhuri’s recollections of the profound effect of his first reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. One comes away from these conversations wondering if Franco Moretti’s (2000) notion of world literature as “one and unequal” (56), where he highlights the engagements between “cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system” and the European (and Eurocentric) literary canon (58) really takes account of South Asian creativity and eclecticism, and its challenge to western canons.

The writers’ nuanced observations deepen our understanding of the interstitial diasporic creative space as being neither linear nor simple. In the interview referenced above, Bhabha reflects that diaspora is about “misfits”, and that in political terms, the “misfit” is often the minority, leading a peripheral existence, subject to the processes and practices of minoritization. Bearing testimony to this, while clichéd slogans of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism celebrate equality, overt or subtle forms of racism continue unabated in our time. The diasporic literary culture of today is charged with such realities and we each deal with them in our own way.

For instance, the British-born Indian essayist and novelist Pico Iyer (2019), one of the most celebrated citizens of the world, tells in Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells how he is nicknamed “Isoro” or “Parasite” by the “neighborhood kids” of the village of Shikanodai in Osaka, which is currently his home (27). We may assume, that in all probability, the nickname originated in careless adult gossip. If so, one can think of no positive synonym that could even remotely excuse this label that smacks of all things abject, such as bloodsuckers and killers of trees. In relation to the diasporic, it could only describe someone obsessively sucking up nourishment from the nurturing source and destroying it in the process. Iyer, however, laughs it off with gentle irony, and seeks to soothe reader-response by arguing that the nickname may have arisen from his difference from the Japanese cultural norm: his lack of “suit and tie employment” and the role reversal in his marital relationship, by which he assumed the more domesticated role. And yet, that Iyer considered it important enough to register the nickname so early in a book that is replete with observations of and engagement with cross-cultural pollinations, seems to suggest a deliberate if subtle form of literary activism that encourages tolerance and bridge-building—the suturing of diasporic minority-majority collisions; a form of “radical resistance”, to use Cheran’s words here. For Amit Chaudhuri, literary activism is a significant creative impetus. Chaudhuri’s inspiring idea is that however difficult, the creative process must be a “state of argument […] a dialogue not just internal, but with existing cultures […] with your past” which then carries the potential of new perspectives that will lead us forward.

In such a dialogue, the work of South Asian diasporic writers is read in at least three contexts. As well as being part of world literature and the literature of their homelands, they are rightly seen as contributing to (as well creatively unsettling) “national” literatures in the US, UK, Canada, France and Australia.

In conclusion, Creative Lives projects multiple conversations between the writers, facilitating productive collaborations, augmenting communal, national and inter-national tensions and debates, but also fomenting wellbeing and harmony. They are part of a larger dialogue, too, representing minorities in conversation with the centre. It is for us as readers to pursue the somewhat under-researched form of diaspora interviews, in which writers in dialogue with critics and academics enrich our reading with brilliant new insights.

Finally, a sincere thank you to Professor Susheila Nasta for inspiring the Creative Lives interviews project at a memorable meeting of the core partners of the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2017 that also included Professors Frank Schultz-Engler, Avtar Brah, Klaus Stierstorfer, Janet Wilson and Annalisa Oboe. We are grateful to Alexandra Watkins, the first Project Manager of the Creative Lives initiative, and one of its first interviewers. Thank you also to Susheila Nasta for assisting with the permission process to include her interview with Romesh Gunesekera in this book. Last but not least, we are very grateful to all our interviewees and interviewers for accepting our invitation to contribute.

A note on the introductions

The introductions to each of the interviews have been written by the editors in collaboration with the interviewers. Two exceptions are the interviews with Romesh Gunesekera and Neel Mukherjee, which were originally published in the journal Wasafiri. Here, the editors’ introductions precede the original prefatory notes by the respective interviewers, Susheila Nasta and Anjali Joseph. The third is the interview with Sungchuk Kyi, for which the interviewer, Ruth Gamble, has written the introduction.

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Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (Jan./Feb.): 54–68.

Mufti, Aamir. 2016. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nguyen, Anh. 2019. “Refugees, Museums and the Digital Diaspora.” University of Melbourne Forum, Sept. 16. https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/shaps-research/2019/09/16/refugees-museums-and-the-digital-diaspora/.

Rushdie, Salman. 1991. “Imaginary Homelands.” In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991, by Salman Rushdie, 9–21. London: Granta.

Seyhan, Azade. 2000. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stierstorfer, Klaus, and Janet Wilson, eds. 2018. The Diaspora Studies Reader. Abingdon: Routledge.

1 In the Creative Lives project, the term “diasporic” includes those who are settled outside their homeland as well those who have returned to the homeland after spending a substantial period abroad.

2 Vietnamese Australian scholar Anh Nguyen (2019) has shown how diasporic communication has been transformed by social media, which have “brought new possibilities for creating and sharing histories, memories, identities, and diasporic communities, both on and offline”.

Genres, Languages, Voices:
Rukhsana Ahmad in Conversation with Maryam Mirza

Photograph of Rukhsana Ahmad copyright 2021 by Anna Morrison

Born and raised in Karachi, the highly regarded playwright, fiction writer and translator Rukhsana Ahmad moved to London in the early 1970s. In 1991, with Rita Wolf, she co-founded Kali Theatre Company which specializes in presenting plays by women of South Asian descent. She was also a founding chair and trustee of the South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive (SADAA). A collection of short stories, The Gatekeeper’s Wife and Other Stories (2014), features the experiences of the British Pakistani community as well as those of characters living in Pakistan; the range of backgrounds is diverse—the title story, for example focuses on Annette, the British wife of a Pakistani man in Lahore. A somewhat similar pattern had characterized the novel The Hope Chest (Ahmad 1996), with its interactions between upper middle-class Rani, Ruth who meets and supports Rani in a London hospital, and Reshma, the daughter of Rani’s family’s gardener—instances of Rukhsana Ahmad’s interest in those bridges that “transcend family, class and faith”, which she discusses in her interview.

Rukhsana Ahmad has written numerous plays, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominee Song for a Sanctuary (1990), the Susan Smith Blackburn International Prize finalist River on Fire (2000–01) and Mistaken …: Annie Besant in India (2007–08), which toured the UK and India. She has also adapted several novels and short stories into plays, such as Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero and Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s “Kali Shalwar”. Her original screenplays include Cassandra and the Viaduct (1996) and The Errant Gene (2002). We Sinful Women, Rukhsana Ahmad’s ground-breaking translation of Urdu poetry by Pakistani women, was published in 1991; she has also translated Dastak Naa Do, an Urdu novel by Fatima Altaf (1927–2018), published under the title The One Who Did Not Ask (1993), thus making available in English this fine novel about the way the protagonist Gaythi, from an extensive, wealthy, Muslim upper-class family in pre-partition India, has to come to terms with change.

Here she discusses her prolific and multifaceted creative life with Maryam Mirza, in an interview conducted by email in January–March 2018.

The interviewer Maryam Mirza is Assistant Professor in World Literatures in English at Durham University, UK. She received her PhD from Aix-Marseille University, and her first monograph Intimate Class Acts (2016) was published by Oxford University Press. She is currently working on her second monograph, provisionally entitled Resistance and Its Discontents in South Asian Women’s Fiction (under contract with Manchester University Press).

Maryam Mirza (MM): Ms. Ahmad, who / what would you say are your main literary influences?

Rukhsana Ahmad (RA): I’m afraid it’s difficult to be precise about what these might be. I started reading fiction at a very young age in both English and Urdu without much supervision and have loved innumerable books at different stages of my development. Some were great, some mediocre and some forgettable. I read more fiction than non-fiction until I became a full-time student of English literature at Karachi University. At that point, my reading in Urdu began to slip but I had, by then, learnt to love Manto, Krishen Chander and Ismat Chughtai’s work; I discovered Intizar Hussain, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Altaf Fatima and Ghulam Abbas; I was charmed by Flaubert and Maupassant and totally in awe of Dostoyevsky. Favourites amongst English authors were George Eliot, Jane Austen, Henry James, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf. I still love George Eliot and Henry James though, in recent years, contemporaries have held me in thrall. One fears imitation, but I’d like to think I’ve learnt a little from all the disparate but accomplished writers whose work I’ve admired and loved over the years: Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, J.M. Coetzee and the inimitable Gabriel García Márquez.

MM: Your extensive body of work is a testament to the ease with which you move from one genre to another: you have written numerous short stories, a novel as well as plays (both original and adaptations) for the stage and radio. How would you describe your experience of working in multiple genres? Do you have a preference?

RA: It has been a privilege to be able to move between various genres and I’ve loved the shape-shifting that it enables. Each has its own particular challenges and rewards. I love the immediacy of theatre and its collaborative nature, the total freedom of working on a piece of fiction and the generous canvas a film script or a radio production offers. The constraints of each discipline require a different kind of creative energy and I do enjoy the tension induced by the effort to observe its formal strictures and maximize its strengths. I suspect I am happiest working on fiction but most confident with theatre writing. I also find film scripts an exciting area of work at the moment as they demand a stronger visual awareness and a careful commitment to movement/action alongside the reliance on sound and the use of words. As a writer you are always learning and growing with your work, which keeps it all fresh and exciting.

MM: I was wondering about your relationship with Urdu literature as a diasporic writer and translator based in the UK.

RA: I always loved Urdu literature and read a number of books at a precocious age since I hung out with older cousins and siblings. Bait-baazi was a favourite pastime (this parlour game requires you to quote a couplet starting with the last letter of the last line recited by your preceding competitor). It drew us into poetry reading and a devotion to rhyme and rhythm long before we understood much of the verse itself. It was all traditional poetry. Without TVs, mobiles and social media to distract us, we read extensively … literally, whatever we could find. However, I never understood the importance of one’s first language and of translations until I came to live in England and realized that our second and future generations would have very little access to our literature without them. There was hardly any provision for mother-tongue teaching and no space for our literature within what was then (and probably remains?) a deeply Eurocentric curriculum. I felt it was important to do what I could to rectify that, so I organized Urdu classes for Pakistani children (including my own) at our local state school, got my children to watch Hindi films and set about working on translations. I love translating and regret the fact that I now have too little time to expend on that, or even on attending Urdu mushairas [social gatherings where Urdu poetry is read] and literary events, which I seldom missed when I first came to the UK.

MM: In the introduction to We Sinful Women, your collection of translated Urdu poems by Pakistani women (Ahmad 1991), you argued that “the most innovative, the most radical and the most interesting Urdu poetry of our time is being produced by women and not by male poets”. To what extent do you still believe this to be true?

RA: When you’re younger you do make bold generalisations more blithely than you would in your “wiser” middle years. I suspect this claim was gravely unpopular with the Pakistani literary establishment of the day, but when I reconsider it, even today, I feel there is some justification for it. The poets I chose, barring one or two, were almost all political at a visceral level. A bold strand of radicalism informs the DNA of the poems that were written to protest against General Zia’s Islamization programme; a couple of them were written at the behest of the Women’s Action Forum.1 The poets addressed the burning issues of the day, speaking out bravely when several of their male counterparts had maintained a stony silence. Choosing to resist meant they had to be innovative both in terms of content and form. The work speaks for itself and the impact of the collection was remarkable.

MM: You have adapted several novels into radio plays, including Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. What did you find to be the main challenge when adapting a novel such as Midnight’s Children into a play?

RA: Adapting any novel into a dramatic form is a challenge. Novels have a sprawling overpopulated world that throbs with energy, emotions and ideas, often expressed with considerable nuance and subtlety. Swathes of it are lost when you’re confined to a fraction of the original number of words and are expected to reshape the most coherent dramatic aspects of the story in a manner likely to draw the listener into that world instantly. Ideally, what you hope to do is distil the essence of the novel’s meaning through its most powerful moments / scenes and to preserve the tone of the original. My producer and I felt we realized both of those goals but we had to make some tough choices and brutal cuts along the way. The first half of the novel is more vivid and has the immediacy of a family saga, whilst the second morphs into a war fantasy and political melodrama that chugs along a different plane as Saleem is hurled overseas and loses his natal moorings. To connect those two halves of the novel in a meaningful way was perhaps the hardest trick.

MM: In several of your works of fiction, including The Hope Chest, and short stories such as “The Gatekeeper’s Wife” and “Through the Rose-Tinted Window”, you present the reader with fascinating and unexpected examples of cross-cultural, interracial encounters between women. Could you talk about your interest in meetings and interactions between women belonging to different cultures?

RA: I find those encounters absolutely fascinating. Subconsciously perhaps, they are at the core of my experience as a woman who came to live in London as an adult and understood, for the first time, in a very direct and personal sense the meaning of the term “the Other”. That sense of exposure as the Other has not changed. Though I am reasonably integrated into mainstream culture here, I am sensitive to the grating reality of a growing deep-seated hostility to Muslims or people of Muslim heritage settled here, which has supplanted the racism of the Enoch Powell days. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir [(1949) 2015] argues that women are so divided by class, nation, faith and race that it is hard for them to find common cause with each other. Her insight, perhaps inaccurately recalled here, seeped into my awareness early on and has lingered, I must admit. Sadly, it holds true even today. It probably explains this recurring trope in my work. The encounters work as a vehicle for exploring the contrasts in women’s lives but also delineate their inability to identify the commonalties in their experience and their often ineffectual support for each other. Occasionally, as in real life, a bridge is built and crossed and women succeed in creating bonds that transcend family, class and faith. Those rare moments bring hope and light into the stories.

MM: In your writings you often also explore the tenuousness and fragility of women’s relationships with each other. I’m thinking of your play Song for a Sanctuary, which is set in a shelter for battered women, but also of your portrayal of Reshma and Shehzadi’s cross-class friendship in the novel The Hope Chest. How do you conceive of female solidarity?

RA: Female solidarity is possible, but it does require a degree of self-awareness and political understanding of what divides us as women. It comes often too late. Cultural conflict is at the heart of the breach that erupts in violence in Song for a Sanctuary, where the residents in the refuge clash with the refuge workers, who are more powerful than them; one of them is definitely hostile to any perceived weakness in the victims. In River on Fire, both sisters, raised in different faith cultures by their liberal atheist mother, fight over the death ritual appropriate for her. Here again, the relatively powerful position of the older sister becomes an underlying trap that prevents the possibility of a dialogue, until it is too late.

MM: In the Author’s Note accompanying your play Mistaken …: Annie Besant in India (Ahmad 2008), you mention that you are not “a documentarist by nature” and “have, at times, grated against the constraints that a ‘true’ historical play requires”. Would you like to expand upon this?

RA: This is a tricky question to answer. It’s easier to explain if I begin with the fact that I did try my hand at journalism when I started writing but found reporting quite hard. It requires meticulous research and a dogged adherence to facts that often lead to a tedious and ultimately inconclusive story. With fiction and drama, you tell stories that excite you, that create an illusion of pattern or a meaning that makes sense of our time on earth. You can invent a character; even one based on a historical personage gives you the space to explore all its potentialities through invented moments of doubt and irresolution, of regrets and joy, passion and hesitation that constitute the fundamentals of his or her journey/lived experience. When I am researching a story or a play, I need simple nuggets of information; the bare facts that will help me build a credible framework for the situation I am recreating and will spark off the trajectory of that character in my imagination. Just to be able to exercise that freedom, I would rather work on a play or a novel that is “based on a historical incident”: a mixture of facts and fiction, rather than one that claims all the weightiness of a “purely” historical document.

MM: The narrator of your short story “Confessions and Lullabies” is an inanimate object, a lace doily. Why did you decide to use this technique?

RA: It was an experiment in the creation of a narrative voice that appears to have the objectivity of an omniscient narrator without all the knowledge you would associate with a true omniscient narrator. It only knows the world it inhabits. Both my characters in the story were too unselfconscious to function well as first person narrators. The lace doily served them both well, I think … as the link between the hard-pressed creator and the fragile consumer. Adi’s character and her story were inspired by a book entitled The Lace Makers of Narsapur by Maria Mies (2012), which I was invited to review a few months earlier. The statistics on labour and wages had left me utterly enraged.

MM: You have spoken about how, when writing radio plays, it is important for you to read the dialogue aloud to yourself. Is there any difference in your approach to writing dialogue when working on a novel or a short story?

RA: In fact, I do read my work aloud to myself quite often, whatever the genre. It helps me focus on the material itself, to hear the voices of my characters more clearly and to catch any superfluous words and repetition. One of the dangers of hovering over a text is that you can write the same thought in more ways than one. (A habit in which Urdu literature often indulges.) Hearing the dialogue is, of course, doubly important as you do not want all your characters to have the same vocabulary, inflections and patterns of speech. It does need to express who they are.

MM: Please tell us about your current project(s).

RA: At the moment, I am working on a play commissioned by Kali Theatre Company, entitled From Kabul to Kunduz, and am developing a screenplay treatment of the same story for myself, with the help of a lovely mentor. Fiction is very much on the back burner at present as I am also reading scores of novels for the HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown 2018.2

MM: Ms. Ahmad, thank you very much.

Acknowledgements

This publication is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Bibliography

Ahmad, Rukhsana, ed. and trans. 1991. We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry. London: Women’s Press.

---. 1996. The Hope Chest. London: Virago.

---. 2008. Mistaken …: Annie Besant in India. London and New York: Aurora Metro Books.

---. 2014. The Gatekeeper’s Wife and Other Stories. Lahore: ILQA Publications.

Altaf, Fatima. 1993. The One Who Did Not Ask [Dastak Naa Do]. Translated by Rukhsana Ahmad. Oxford and Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

De Beauvoir, Simone. [1949] 2015. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovaney-Chevallier. London and New York: Vintage Classics.

Mies, Maria. 2012. The Lace Makers of Narsapur. Melbourne and Geelong: Spinifex Press.

1 The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) was formed by a group of 15 women in Karachi in September 1981. It was initially established to respond to the Hudood Ordinances (part of military ruler Zia-ul-Haq’s “Islamization” process), and to promote women’s interests in Pakistan.

2 The Historical Writers’ Association’s (HWA) Gold Crown for best historical novel was won in 2018 by Ralf Rothmann for To Die in Spring, translated by Shaun Whiteside, and published by Picador.

The Aesthetics of Fragmentation:
Michelle Cahill in Conversation with Chris Ringrose

Photograph of Michelle Cahill by Nicola Bailey

Michelle Cahill has lived in the UK and Australia. Her collection of short stories, Letter to Pessoa (Cahill 2016b), won the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her interest in the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1885–1935) derives in part from his use of a series of masks, or “heteronyms”, to write via other selves with different lives. He is one of a number of “companion” writers, including Coetzee, Woolf and Borges, who are woven into her own work. Her novel Woolf is soon to be published with Hachette.

Michelle Cahill has received prizes and fellowships in poetry and fiction, notably the Red Room Poetry Fellowship, the Val Vallis Award, the Kingston Writing School (KWS) Hilary Mantel Short Story Prize and the Australian Book Review (ABR) Elizabeth Jolley shortlist for the story “Borges and I”. Vishvarupa (Cahill 2011) was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets and Vagabond’s deciBels3 series of poets and is the founding editor of Mascara Literary Review. She is also a stimulating critic and theorist, whose essay “The Poetics of Subalternity” appeared in Mascara (Cahill 2012). In it, she undertakes a critique of contemporary Australian literature, which she sees “in its orientation and its networks of power and interest […] a subject [that ignores] the divisions of cultural capital and labour”.

Her poetry collection, The Herring Lass (Cahill 2016a), takes an original approach to the topic of migration, reflecting on the way animals and birds are able to survive extreme climates and resist assailants, using this to consider human global engagements and the exodus of refugees. As elsewhere in her work, women’s experience of fragmentation, exile, divorce and motherhood provides an undercurrent of meaning. In his review, the Australian poet John Kinsella saw it as “a superb and complex book, deeply intelligent, pluralistic, linguistically rich, political with a sophisticated way of seeing place and space, intense in its convictions”.

Michelle Cahill and Chris Ringrose talked in August 2018; at the time she was writing a novel as part of her Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. A few responses have been revised in 2021, to reflect on her developing craft as a writer.

The Interviewer, Chris Ringrose, is a poet and fiction writer from Melbourne, Australia, who has lectured in literature at universities in Canada, the US and UK. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University. With Chandani Lokuge, he is the co-editor of this volume; his biographical notes can be found in “About the Editors” on page 275.

Chris Ringrose (CR): Michelle, I’m struck by the global “reach” and settings of your poetry and fiction, as well as your travel and research. A number of reviewers have remarked on this as a strength of your poetry collection The Herring Lass. How significant is the notion of “South Asian Diaspora” for you and your writing?

Michelle Cahill (MC): I don’t know if it is for me to say. Perhaps that is a question best left for critics. I don’t think of myself in terms of an identity when I am writing creatively because writing is a process of becoming, a postponement of my “self” in the material and functional sense. In many ways it is depletion, really, of those parts of myself, and who the author is, or who she becomes in that process, feels remote from me. Perhaps that is why I enjoy it; because it is liberating to be free of oneself. However, when I write an essay about race and literature, that involves performing arguments about, or against, notions such as “authenticity” and “identity”.

I can say that at least two of my published books explore the South Asian Diaspora: I’m thinking of Vishvarupa and the novel that I am currently writing, but there are also several stories in Letter to Pessoa that explore the world of the South Asian diaspora and its travel narratives through the lens of Sarita, Hemani, and Nabina. And in The Herring Lass, a book about migrations from the Global North, there are poems conversing with the South Asian diaspora, “Youth, by Josephine Jayshree Conrady” and “Mumbai by Night”. My sense of home is located in language and is contingent. I am cautious of committing myself intellectually to defined categories. Whether this is symptomatic of Buddhist conditioning or whether my thinking is sympathetic to post-structuralism, or an inherent scepticism, who knows? Does it matter? If you read “Letter to Derrida” you may find a trace of Derrida there, and perhaps a trace of his translator, Spivak. She was a young French-speaking Bengali scholar forging a singular career in the United States on a regimen of European philosophy and social theory. So, there you have another iteration of the South Asian diaspora. Actually, Spivak has inspired me quite a lot; from an early essay I wrote on “The Poetics of Subalternity” to what she describes as the “irretrievably heterogeneous” in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and my theorization of interceptionality. I don’t think of myself as a scholar but conceptual language can be useful in one’s praxis. I don’t want to have to answer to categories. My evidence has been in language and what it can do.

CR: You’re also diverse in that you write successfully in so many genres and modes—short fiction, essays, poetry, a blog and (I think) a novel. Do you see this versatility and variety as essential to your creativity? Is any one genre the most congenial to you?

MC: That’s an interesting question. Supposing that the whole notion of genre is imposed on the text; suppose it is a contrivance? Our relationship to language certainly tethers us to the world and to each other; partly it’s through language that we begin to know the real and the abstract. Of course, there are different genres: the novel can be thought of as quite distinct from a collection of short stories, or from a collection of poems. My process relies on concentration, being attentive to what each piece of work requires: whether a poem, a short story, a novel, or whether it is an essay. I like to enter the process fluidly, without excessive preparation; I like to improvise. But with a novel, it helps to have a sure sense of what you want to do. There was a time when I believed that anything is possible in language. Writing enables possibility and the more one writes, the more skilful one becomes. I think of writing in a technical way; when I write I am like a gymnast; over time my language develops strength, flexibility, balance, so that it can perform with grace, with speed and precision so that it can fly, dance and jump. Poetry is a powerful form but the reception afforded to some poetry is problematic; deeply so; there are distortions. This matters because we draw from the world of poetry to write new poems. Fiction is the most technically demanding genre and, I think, also the most satisfying because of its craft and scope. I’ve always loved prose writing but that is different to a novel. I think a novel can be transformative in a way that a book of poems can’t be; even though poetry can be very striking, and necessary.

CR: In your essay “The Colour of the Dream”, you are severely critical of aspects of Australian literary culture and its stultifying “whiteness”. Do you see yourself as an Australian writer? or as a global one, or as something else that won’t be reduced to that kind of labelling?

MC: Thank you for reading the essay. I think there is insufficient analysis of trauma, and what that does to our writing; how it morphs for better or worse. Some degree of trauma deepens our understanding, but too much can mutilate our work or silence us. That’s why self-care matters. That essay was written during a stage of my career, having spent ten years waiting for and working towards a break through with my fiction. It was only after that break though that I realized the extent to which writers of colour are being filtered, curated and mediated. Very few of us can even find a good literary publisher or agent. We have to achieve something extraordinary. The late Candy Royalle wrote in one of her performance poems: “We search for truth but we’re forced to jump through mainstream hoops and loops, daily”. I think the process of fighting those systems can have adverse effects.

Critics please themselves and sometimes exploit the hermeneutic privilege. Some have no qualms about overwriting me, but when you look at the history of how the western canon sustains its authority you understand that it is not simply individual critics who are positioning us, it is the “his-story” of erasures, reductions, that goes back centuries, how those marginalized by hybridity or class are written over by those with more agency. This can happen at the administrative level of the industry or the editorial level. How minority narratives are framed by the canon-makers mediates those stories and becomes equally, sometimes more powerful than the stories themselves. So, agency is very much located in theoretical and industry frames.

Ultimately, however, this is not my problem. I usually work on more than one project and I have found that writing criticism, for the present, is a necessary part of my work. Fiction is demanding and also immensely pleasurable. I try to just focus on my work, on my writing. It’s very demanding to give oneself to writing and to develop a manuscript. I am not receiving much of an income these days so that is also a challenge.

CR: I wondered whether, in that essay “The Colour of the Dream”, you are a bit hard on a review of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s collection of stories Foreign Soil? You say that “Wright’s verdict [on the book] hinges on a single word. She pegs Foreign Soil as ‘flawed’”. It’s just that I remember thinking that was a perceptive and enthusiastic review, even though it expressed certain reservations.

MC: “Flawed” is a conspicuous description for Foreign Soil given the anti-immigration rhetoric and the White Australia Policy. Also, to be fair to the context of my essay, “The Colour of the Dream” is about gatekeeping and policing Australia’s cultural borders, the stereotyping of the refugee narrative contrasted with a personal experience of travelling to Indonesia in 2012 and visiting the Belawan Detention Centre. I had spent several days visiting refugees from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka who were being housed outside detention.

Underpinning all racism is the notion that others are “flawed”. Structural racism is not simply an abstract jargon. It is about restricted rates of inclusion in immigration, in industry, within the literary workplace, and in academia. At a micro level it is transacted through seemingly neutral discourse: conversations, reviews, articles, reports. There is an accumulation of archival and administrational subtexts, paratexts, errata and erasures that accrue to devalue the narrative legitimacy of those who are marginalized and to delimit how they can move across narrative subjects and genres. What is difficult to appreciate is that filters are not always intentional; the filters are an inherent part of mainstream frames.

How do we recognize the voice of structural racism? We have to record these things: the reductions, the erasures, the absences, which are often minor and anecdotal but which are sufficient to position us hierarchically and to disqualify us. Colonialism did not simply end with independence or with equal rights to citizenship. These spaces are being negotiated through a range of discourses, formal and informal, macro and micro. They are deeply rooted in our legal frameworks which are inherently racist and do not acknowledge the sovereignty of First Nations people in Australia. Our immigration laws enforced racial aspects until 1973. Now we are witnessing a revival of racist rhetoric concerning immigration and Islamophobia with Malcolm Turnbull’s paranoia about African gangs, with Fraser Anning’s “Final Solution” Senate speech, with the treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, and with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.

Analysing literary criticism may require us to adjust our focus to consider historical and legal frameworks, but master narratives and mainstream frames are less flexible.

CR: “Mumbai by Night” is an interesting example of your treatment of South Asia, because the title suggests a tourist trip, and there is that sense of the exotic in the “miasma of smog over the Dharavi slums, the marsh / redevelopment, the Indiabulls and Oberoi towers”. You even say you “catch [your] flight all the way back to oblivion until the next stop-over” and that your friend Sharlene to whom the poem is dedicated might just see you as a “foreigner [she’s] obliged to entertain”. Yet you’re not really (or quite) a “foreigner” in that environment …

MC: It’s a poem that expresses the disconnection that happens with diaspora. The poem is dedicated to my cousin, Sharlene, and it mourns the loss of family and time. The meeting of poet and cousin; or as you have read it, poet and friend, is so transitional and fragmented that it can be misread, and must be contained in the economy of verse, something the speaker regrets and resists by the telling of an ordinary experience: sharing a meal, going out to a club and dancing, having fun, packing, unpacking, falling short on what she can offer and how little she can take away. These are the conditions of diaspora; it doesn’t explore the reasons for leaving, but it tries to embody a way of not forgetting.

CR: I like the way in which you refrain from being “authoritative” about the city, while still giving a vivid impression of it that is more than that of a tourist. As with some of the stories in Letter to Pessoa, it conjures the experience of visiting, belonging, and not belonging … you are drawn to the way Pessoa used a series of masks, or “heteronyms”, to write via other selves with different lives. You write as Sarita (who also appears elsewhere), Jo, Nabina and Luke, as well as a number of others. Can you reflect on that writing process?

MC: Well, my heteronyms are not typical, but writing is an act of masking. The diaspora life splices narrative time and place, bumping my personas one into the other. Unlike Ricardo Reiss or Alvaro de Campo they do not have accompanying biographies or signatures and they are often narrated in the third person. And some of the authors whom I address become another aspect of themselves: Pessoa, Coetzee, Woolf, Nabokov, Borges, with resonances with the real persona. Do they become heteronyms (or homonyms) of themselves? I like the expansiveness of fiction and its suppleness, but no two writing processes are the same. It is organic for me: contradictory, fluid and broken, as time is. It is only structure that creates the appearance of being whole. That kind of architecturally stable narrative can be beautiful to read, particularly when done masterfully, and I deeply enjoy reading those stories; but is that my story? Is that my task?

I think that the diaspora narrative is interrupted and the minority narrative is fragmented. How can it be represented as a whole, without losing its contingencies, without being absorbed into larger stories that flatten its vulnerability, its gaps? Why are we so focussed on positive representations? Why are we afraid of the erasures in history, in coloniality, the silences? How can we find a language and a structure for the experiences that we, those of us who have been colonized and have suffered the loss of family, of language, of community, of culture, know best?

CR: Can we talk about your latest poetry collection, The Herring Lass? Tell us about the striking Winslow Homer painting of the same title that features on the cover—and provides the subject for one of the 48 poems.

MC: I didn’t want to use the Scottish images, as they are stereotyped. I admire Homer’s conjuring of the weather, the woman’s stubby hands and muscular arms in the painting, the way the net is draped over her shoulder. She is wearing ordinary working shoes, yet she is gazing outwards.

CR: “The Herring Lass” poem itself refers to “shoals of migrant herring” that provide the woman’s tough livelihood. Would it be fair to say that the collection as a whole is a meditation on the important and worldwide phenomenon of migration—forced as in “Harbour”, or occupational as in the title poem? Did you always have that overall design in mind, or is it the cumulative outcome of your artistic and political interests?

MC: I had the idea to write from the experience of northern migrations as I spent ten years living in the northern hemisphere. I thought this might be something of interest also for Australian readers, since as a nation, European invasion and settlement began with these migrations. I wanted to explore the brutality of territory and frontiers.

It seems to me that exploitation of labour and environmental impacts of migration are disturbing contemporary problems that remain unresolved. So, the fishing and sealing industry poems in “The Herring Lass”, “Bear”, “Day of a Seal”, “Pirogue”, and the refugee experience in “Interlude” cast historical shadows on situations like extinctions, corporate piracy, and the warehousing of refugees.

CR: I admire the way you blend different animal voices into the collection: the seal and the thylacine, for example. There is also the example of the journeying cat in the story “Biscuit” from Letter to Pessoa. Do those personae allow you to try out new things?

MC: In many of the animal poems, I wanted to write about violence. I was going through divorce at the time and I went through an intense, almost hallucinatory period of writing during which memories came harrowingly back to me, of male violence, sexual violence, domestic violence and the human exploitation of animals and their homelands; how it has endangered them.

To experiment with form in fiction is enjoyable and it can extend my skills. When I wrote “Biscuit” it was thrilling; I couldn’t wait to get back to the story when I was interrupted by housework or having coffee with a friend. It was also exhausting. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work; at other times the result seems to exceed what I expect of myself. I don’t like to address subjectivity directly. I am not confessional as a poet. In fiction, I suppose I integrate figurative elements with plot structure and I am interested in prose writing that does this. I like to texture the writing; but it’s not really intentional.

CR: That’s interesting. I did feel, as I read “Biscuit”, that the story had a special significance for you. Do you want to say a little more about it?

MC: Well, it is partly autofictional, using elements of magic realism, and poetic tropes. The cat’s fantastical journey from Africa to England, with its coincidences and exigencies, is a way of telling a complex history of migration, without having to over-explain, digress or politicize the storytelling act of a minority experience. I use a simple, open-ended and sometimes ironic style for the story, allowing the reader to consider and to feel a range of possibilities and outcomes from the migration experience. It extends the limited migrant narrative we hear of through media reports or public talks. Hopefully, the reader can reflect through the cat’s perspective more freely about subjects such as home, coloniality, belonging and citizenship. But if I were to write in a realist mode about my early life journeys, the truth might be compromised by memory, the need to protect others, by the demands that conventional storytelling places on gaps, disruptions and conflicted emotions which result from a traumatized landscape. So, for me, it was a process of reinventing that landscape as playful, energetic and imaginatively reconstituted. I do trust fiction to reveal the truth about our lives without restricting it to definitions.

CR: Can we talk about the stories in Letter to Pessoa? In their concerns, settings and the way they play against a range of other writers, they could find an enthusiastic audience anywhere in the world. I know you might be wary of categories like “world literature”, but do you find that notion inspiring at all? Or are you happy to leave that kind of assessment to others?

MC: I probably do have a global voice. I spent my formative years living in three countries which is not very typical. But like many Australians my family background was aware of the world, through our communities, through coloniality, through trade, art, different cultures and languages. The mobility of people across borders, religions and caste was not foreign though it posed difficulties that we didn’t anticipate. Now, when I travel overseas, it’s primarily for my writing, and somehow, place, travel and writing are connected for me.

I’m glad that Letter to Pessoa can be read as “world lit.” or “global lit”, even though its publication has been limited to Australia. I hope in time it will be published overseas. I am very fond of the opening story because an early draft was written whilst I was traveling in Spain; at that time, it seemed like a failure, a fragment, a futile exercise. But the act of imagining and believing in our fragments holds much promise. The uncertain proximity to meaning is where rich stories can have humble beginnings. When I read the opening story “Letter to Pessoa” I’m reminded of how I wrote it in a hotel, alone, during transitions and how a writer often needs to be stripped of a great deal of routine and security to embark on fictional journeys. That multiplicity matters to me. I did take risks engaging poetic tropes but I was pleased the language was able to cross gaps in migrant time and colonial history, providing structural cohesion and literary complexity for the book as a collection of stories. I was inventing and developing my own structural devices. The book also feels like a progression from my previous work, which is validating for me as a writer. Alexis Wright, in conversation with Melissa Lucashenko and Kim Scott at the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) symposium last week, spoke, inspiringly, about always learning and challenging oneself as writer. So yes, I am pleased on a personal level with the book, because it was the product of self-learning and thinking about themes like exile, belonging, difference and the writing process.

CR: I love the way that in Letter to Pessoa you take the work of other writers—sometimes particular works, like Lolita in “Chasing Nabokov” or “Aubade” in “Aubade for Larkin”, and at other times the spirit of a whole oeuvre—and use them to create stories which can both stand alone and be read at an angle to the originals. (I’d say they riff on the originals, but I’m not sure that’s the right word—though I see you use it in the notes to the collection, in terms of particular phrases and sentences.) How do those stories grow in your imagination?

MC: The epistolary stories started with an early draft in third person prose which appeared on my blog. It was titled “Derrida’s Reinscriptions”. This was a few years before “Letter to Derrida” was developed and appeared in the journal, TEXT. I had also written a theoretical paper on Derrida’s deconstructionism and Buddhism and I am interested in the idea of the fragmentation of the self; and how writing is postponement. (When the book manuscript was edited, I was asked to revise the Derrida story further, which led to allusions to Derrida’s life and his work being included.) But the blog post is proof that strong stories can have humble beginnings. Letter to Pessoa is a book of stories, but also a book about reading and writing, the writing process.

I began to write more letters to authors which was rather enjoyable. It required me to read their work and to think about my writing as a departure, a variation and a conversation. One of the challenges of poetic language is to make different things seem similar so that we apprehend the world in a new way; we see things with fresh eyes. My technique was to texture the language as a medium, using it like paint or fabric, and to manipulate the layers. I enjoy that aspect of language and how it carries meaning; so that was how the letters in the book were crafted. Another aspect was being able and willing to go deeply into my story so that it wasn’t simply a variation. Each has to have its own existential validity, its characters and tensions.

I enjoy reading these stories to an audience because they work best when read with an inner voice trusting of the music, or to an audience. There is a performatory aspect to them because of how they use voice.

CR: Virginia Woolf clearly has a special place in that set of creative talents. I’m thinking of the story “Letter to Virginia Woolf”, which strikes one as deeply personal as well as a poignant tribute to her, as in “maybe I cannot live without words. Each one maddening as a stone thrown into the river, heavy as death …”. Elsewhere you cite Woolf’s words: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say”. Do you see her (and Larkin, Pessoa, Coetzee and others) as allies and companions in your creative journey? Or sometimes as adversaries or counterpoint?

MC: I see them as companions. Some of the stories are homage pieces. I read Tadeusz Rózewicz (2013) at a time in my life when my mother was very ill. His book, Mother Departs, helped me understand and cope with the alienation a writer feels and the sacrifices, the losses; also, the indifference of history towards minorities. Who is going to teach us the way forward with compassion and understanding? Not society. Society, after all, does not really value our work as writers. Writing is rewarded in our world based on whether it can be consumed and traded. So, these writers have helped me enormously to model a pathway; I don’t mean a career pathway. I mean I’ve learned how to live as a fragment, and how to decolonize. The Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, made me think radically about authorship, about the canon and history; about how we are innovators as much as we are imitators. What Coetzee does with Robinson Crusoe in Foe can be traced back to what Jean Rhys did with Jane Eyre in Wild Sargasso Sea; and in Waiting for the Barbarians there is a trace of Cavafy. We share in a repository of dreams; we receive the language and the visions of these writers, as other writers in time will receive ours; that’s what I mean. That is very real for me.

But you’re right. I do feel in a special sense connected to Woolf, no less than many women writers have done, I expect. My novel, Woolf, engages more deeply with her work. But also, with her life and her essays. She was extremely privileged and charmingly sociable; an English woman with aristocratic Anglo-Indian forebears. Certainly, she lived in a different world, but she suffered childhood trauma, she was poetic and inventive in her language and she worked as an editor and independent publisher with Hogarth Press. She was somewhat to the side of the canon as a modernist and a feminist; she was an essayist in her own right with strong opinions and a formidable critic; a photographer, a Londoner; she was openly bisexual. As a couple Leonard and Virginia Woolf were anti-imperialists, Leonard having served for seven years in Ceylon. So, there are several aspects of her life which I can relate to. I find her exploration of class distinctions fascinating and almost callously observed. I think what I relate to most, however, is her intensity; the overwhelming way that language absorbed her and was inseparable from her life, determining her destiny. I understand that gravity; it can be harrowing and exhausting but also exhilarating.

CR: “A Year of Smoking Menthol” from Letter to Pessoa is a brief story suffused with tenderness and friendship. Plus some great metaphors (such as “you were my litmus strip”). You end it with powerful abstractions: “decency, morals and society”. In its quiet way, does that story throw down a kind of challenge to the reader?

MC: It’s the story of a friendship between two young women who aren’t content to use their minds in the way society expects because they see the hypocrisy and fakeness and misogyny of the world and they long for something more; Lulu is becoming unhinged, suffering insomnia, delusions, sharing suicide fantasies, while her friend, the narrator, cannot save or protect her, and things are spiralling out of control, but there is a sense that Lulu’s illness is part of what’s wrong in society. There is a sense of repressed sexual tension and a betrayal is implied. Sometimes the most ethical people in our lives are considered dysfunctional and pathologized because they subvert or fail to conform to an insensitive system of values.

A gap between the upbeat, vernacular tone and the seriously disturbing themes makes it provoking and poignant. I’m glad that it works because it was risky to write in second person, and in such a brief, poetic form. It could have been a standard-length short story of 4,000–5,000 words, but the brevity and intimate second person address make it an affecting and unique narrative.

CR: In an article “Interceptionality, or The Ambiguity of the Albatross” (Cahill 2018) published in the Provocations series of the Sydney Review of Books (SRB), you develop the concept of “interceptionality” and its special usefulness today—for example in relation to other concepts like “intersectionality”, which was broached in a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Crenshaw and has been much used since then. Is it possible to briefly outline the importance of “interceptionality” for you?

MC: Interceptionality is a communications tool using social media, email, written correspondence also phone conversations. It’s about speaking as an equal and reclaiming one’s subjectivity as a minority individual or it could equally apply to a minority argument in contentious issues, for example arguments about cultural privilege or even issues on climate. Minority positions and arguments get flattened and homogenized or reduced by mainstream frames and paratexts within the publishing industry, the media and education. Interceptionality ruptures through the frame repeatedly to change the status of the speaker. It is also a decolonizing strategy because when used to question the assessment of merit, the distribution of cultural capital or structural racism it resists the silencing of voices that are already positioned with less agency within discourse. Inspired by narrative theory, it uses narrative to mediate oppression; and it has a spatial appreciation of representation: an understanding that there are master narratives that hierarchically position and validate all the stories we are permitted to tell. Interceptionality enters the methodological gaps of intersectional discussions, which have been powerfully descriptive, but which have failed to address arts policy. An example of interceptionality is the work of the Kurdish author, Behrouz Boochani, detained on Manus Island since 2013. He has used the technology of a smart phone to write stories, articles, interviews in international media to send messages to the world on the atrocities happening there daily, to write a book, No Friend But the Mountains and to send videos via Whatsapp to produce a documentary film, Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time. Because they are remote it is easy to lose sight of what is happening in the detention camps on the islands; his work intercepts that framing to expose the cruelty of the state, to show from the centre of his subjectivity how fragile and humane the refugee’s experience is in detention. This is not without personal risk; but it is more powerful than journalists or refugee advocates speaking on his behalf.

CR: In that essay you move from a fascinating account of the possible meanings of the albatross in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, through conceptual bearings and contemporary social commentary, to a powerful statement of your own personal experience in relation to these things. That seems to me one of the strengths of your writing—that you bring together other writers, ideas, creative fictions and personal experience. Is that a fair comment? Or are you thinking “that’s just what writers do”?

MC: I don’t have an overarching plan for my work. I work from within my creativity outwards. My strength is from within; focussing on my creative task and working outwards. I don’t want to lose that deep connection with my work, and I don’t think I possibly can, entirely. Interceptionality teaches us to believe performatively in what is vital: our truth, reclaiming our subjectivity. Even when we are displaced within the master narrative, if we are centred within our own process, it becomes deeply meaningful and it can survive. My preference is to write fiction, but I have learned that discourse is a powerful moderator of fiction and I have used language and theory to intercept the cultural frame that colonizes and reduces myself and others. Understanding more about the canons and master narratives has really questioned my understanding of what history is and what authorship means.

CR: In the poem “The Sound of Our Brown Bodies” you address (among other things) Australian border policies and bullying, saying “how hard on the body / being brown is in this white country”. In terms of your own writing, you write in the SRB essay of the experience of being “marginalized as a literary writer of colour in a culture that seeks to limit its migrant authors to the closed narratives of immigration, assimilation and consumption”. This is obviously something you feel strongly about and want to explore …

MC: Yes, as a migrant, I came to Australia, studied a profession and was treated as an equal in that industry. Citizenship enables me to become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a dentist, an accountant. But if I enter the arts, if I enter literature, I am immediately disadvantaged by the canon; my voice is not recognized by the literary representations that our culture knows and endorses. I must work several times harder; the measures of appraisal are rarely on a par. This is strenuous physically and psychologically. It is becoming increasingly harder to deny class privilege and Eurocentric privilege; and to this I would add canonical privilege. There is a policing and punitive dynamic if you are critical in a public space. I felt it was my responsibility to share these dynamics. To be able to map our history of erasures, oppressions, to talk about entitlements, and how they work in the arts industry, this will serve our communities as we go forward towards a more inclusive, participatory arts culture.

Bibliography

Cahill, Michelle. 2011. Vishvarupa. Perth, WA: UWA Publishing.

---. 2012. “The Poetics of Subalternity.” Mascara Literary Review, May 23.

---. 2014. “The Colour of the Dream: Unmasking Whiteness.” Southerly 74 (2): 196–211.

---. 2016a. The Herring Lass. Todmorden: Arc Publications.

---. 2016b. Letter to Pessoa. Sydney: Giramondo.

---. 2018. “Interceptionality, or The Ambiguity of the Albatross.” Sydney Review of Books, August 7. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/interceptionality-or-the-ambiguity-of-the-albatross/

Clarke, Maxine Beneba. 2014. Foreign Soil. Sydney: Hachette Australia.

Rózewicz, Tadeusz. 2013. Mother Departs. London: Stork Press.

Wright, Fiona. 2014. “Listen: Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke.” Sydney Review of Books, June 25. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/foreign-soil-maxine-beneba-clarke/

Writing One Reality, Returning to Another:
Shankari Chandran in Conversation with Birte Heidemann

Photograph of Shankari Chandran by Clare Lewis Photography

Shankari Chandran is a novelist and a lawyer whose experience in the field of social justice informs much of her creative writing. Born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, her life and work have been shaped by the cultures of three countries in three continents. After growing up in Australia, she spent ten years in London working as a lawyer before returning to Sydney in 2010 where she started her writing career. Her debut novel Song of the Sun God (Chandran 2017a)—a family saga chronicling Sri Lanka’s war through the history of a Sri Lankan Tamil family—was recently commissioned for television. It was short-listed for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award in 2017 and long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award in 2019. The story begins in 1932 and its protagonists, Nala and Rajan, are married in 1946, just before Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain. With the country’s descent into civil war, they are forced to make profound decisions that will affect them, their children and grandchildren, and take their diasporic story across three continents until the narrative ends in Sydney in 2010. The book drew enthusiastic responses from readers and literary critics for its intelligent and well-informed treatment of race, language, migration and Sri Lankan history. Chandran’s richly textured writing moves at the outset from the young Rajan’s witnessing of the shocking self-immolation of a monk to the homogeneous, warm world of his first home, conveyed through details of cooking and reading:

Every day, Rajan read until it was dark and then he read by candlelight. He meticulously scraped wax from the bottom of the dish with his footruler. He would reuse it with a new wick tomorrow. Years ago, Lali had shown him how; she was very careful. For his birthdays he never asked for books because they were so expensive—he could borrow books—instead he asked for candles.

As Shankari Chandran reveals in her interview, much of her own family history, life on three continents, historical research, social and legal awareness are explored in her first novel, as well as her own reflections on home and homeliness: “Song of the Sun God was a way for me to explore, find or even create, a connection to Sri Lanka—the actual Sri Lanka, the historic one and the Sri Lanka that I had received through my family’s memories”.

Moving from a historical novel to a dystopian thriller set in the future, her second book The Barrier (Chandran 2017b) creates a world devastated by religious war and the Ebola epidemic. Short-listed for the Norma K. Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018), it uses “action-packed, tech-savvy speculative fiction to examine intractable problems of today’s world” enthused the reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald. Within three years it was to prove remarkably prophetic in the light of the onset of COVID-19. The book is abuzz with ideas and, with its “faith-inhibiting” side-effects of a vaccine, rogue virologists and debates about faith, freedom and justice, is in some ways closer to the concerns of Song of the Sun God than one might initially think.

Shankari Chandran has completed a third novel, which combines the generic elements of her previous two works: a political thriller set in post-war Sri Lanka. A fourth novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, is forthcoming with Ultimo Press.

The interviewer, Birte Heidemann, is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Dresden University of Technology, Germany. Her most recent publications include Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature (Palgrave, 2016) and the co-edited collection Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Her work has appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Wasafiri, and Postcolonial Text, among others.

Birte Heidemann (BH): Shankari, you grew up in Australia and began working as a lawyer in London. Only in 2010, after moving back home and giving birth to your fourth child, did you decide to commit to creative writing. Could you tell me a bit more about what prompted you to switch careers and become a full-time writer?

Shankari Chandran (SC): We moved back to Australia because I wanted to bring our children back to my home, to the home of my childhood. But when I returned, I felt disillusioned and disappointed, and I felt that home was not home. And through that sense of disappointment, I felt lost, and I turned to writing in order to work through my feelings. I began by just blogging for myself, and it actually attracted a following. After the following grew, the blog was picked up by a lifestyle website that introduced my writing to a much broader audience in Australia. This gave me the confidence to attempt a novel—something that I had always wanted to do but for which I previously lacked the time or confidence. And so, I wanted to give that one great novel a go, a novel I think so many of us feel within us. In 2012, after a year of blogging, I attempted what eventually became Song of the Sun God. It was the first time in my life since I was young that I was not working for money, because I had chosen to be the stay-at-home carer for our family. We were having our fourth baby, and it seemed like an opportunity to pursue that ambition.

BH: You mentioned that when you returned from London to Australia (where you were born and grew up) you were terribly disillusioned and disappointed by the experience. Could you elaborate on why that was? Especially from the point of view of a traveller / diasporic? What in the return to Sydney brought you to this mood? Had London changed you? Had Sydney changed in your absence?

SC: I lived in London for ten years where I was considered (and where I quickly considered myself) a British Asian. I felt like I had a valued place in Britain, where the distinct impact of my culture on British culture was recognized, and where I felt a part of the society, entitled to claim a more equitable place in the country. Perhaps this has changed in Britain as it is changing elsewhere in the world.

When I went home to Australia in 2010, it was a shock for me. I did not understand the country I was raised in. I did not understand the hatred towards asylum seekers, the public fear-mongering about boat people and the attribution of many of our societal problems to migrants. There was a xenophobic undercurrent hidden in the rhetoric of border security, Australian-ness and patriotism.

When I turned on the TV, I wondered where all the brown people were. All multicultural representations were siloed in the ethnic public broadcaster SBS. It was as though we’d done our bit for multicultural Australia, by funding SBS; TICK. But everything else in the public space was as it has always been, monocultural and essentially white. This was also true of the bookstores—the “Australian fiction” that was making it past the gatekeepers was distinctly white.

The public spaces (the media, TV, the arts and national dialogues) were not reflecting or representing what I was seeing on the streets. They were not accepting of the Australia that I was living in and the Australia that I had brought my children back to. The disconnect was upsetting. And it was more than that—the disconnect felt like a manifestation of a deeper refusal to fully acknowledge the presence, position and value of non-white Australians. This was really troubling for me because I had actually felt at home in London, a place I had only lived in for ten years. On my return to the “home” of my childhood, I felt like Australian society did not want to accept me on my terms.

London made me feel like my South Asian-ness was normal. I had forgotten in those ten years that Australia often made me feel like an outsider, generously allowed in but only if my voice did not challenge its own.

I think my kind of normal should be recognized within the multiplicities and complexities of a rapidly evolving, dynamic and spacious Australian identity. I want my children’s kind of normal to be recognized not because they are the quiet, grateful, hardworking grandchildren of quiet, grateful, hardworking immigrants, but because they are who they are. When I returned home, I felt homeless. Writing was a way of trying to understand myself, and then write myself back into the “Australian narrative” by creating my own.

BH: For how long had you been contemplating the idea of writing?

SC: I think it was only in 2012 when Song of the Sun God took form and substance that I realized how much I loved doing it and that I really wanted to keep doing it. I wanted to create a career out of it, and I wanted to be published. There is a certain point when you are writing where you realize that you do not want to just write but you want to be published.

BH: You want to share it, your story.

SC: Yes, you want to share it with a wider audience, and you also want the validation of being published. With this particular novel, it’s from my heart and it’s for my people, so the motivation to share it with a wider audience became very powerful. You know, there is something that seeks that external validation. In terms of how long I had wanted to be a writer, I knew that I loved writing from the time I was a child. I could sense that I enjoyed it. “Enjoy” is such an empty word—I loved it. When I was in fifth grade, my teacher gave me a diary and she literally said to me: “just keep writing”. And so, I used to journal on and off from then, and I would write short stories but never consistently and never critically. I would write something but never go back to it and try to make it better. But writing has always been a way of comfort for me, a form of therapy and also one of affection. I loved it since I was young.

BH: You wrote your first novel, Song of the Sun God, on a Sri Lankan Tamil family’s history and lineage. Could I ask an additional question about why you returned to Sri Lanka and not to Sydney for your first novel? Were you returning further back into your roots from the disappointment of Sydney? Were you reaching back to ancestral roots—a diaspora tendency of course, as evidenced in several of the interviews in this book of Creative Lives—springing from lack of roots in the process of your (three-continent) routes?

SC: In Song of the Sun God, I returned to Sri Lanka and eventually settled in Australia. This narrative follows the course of my family’s life and mine—geographically but also spiritually I suppose. At university, I read T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”. The following lines have stayed with me:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

I sound so tragic, but these lines still move me and I often find myself thinking about them. As a member of a diasporic generation born outside of our ancestral homeland, I have often felt without roots. I have often felt untethered and have longed for that deeper sense of belonging that my parents take so deeply for granted that they do not even know they have it.

Growing up in Australia, I did not feel I “fitted”, nor did I have a relationship with or lived connection to Sri Lanka. Song of the Sun God was a way for me to explore, find or even create, a connection to Sri Lanka—the actual Sri Lanka, the historic one and the Sri Lanka that I had received through my family’s memories. The family in the book, like me, loses home (in the different ways we define home) and must create a new one. Writing the book was developmental and cathartic for me in that it helped me understand and accept so much: where I have come from (ancestrally); what I cannot have, reclaim or be; and who I am now. All of that is evolving, dynamic and imperfect but it’s mine.

BH: It is interesting that you are using words like “comfort” and “therapy”. I wonder whether it was the very act of writing that helped you navigate all these shifts in your life at that time?

SC: Absolutely.

BH: So, writing is an escape, a comfort and an energising force; you write from the nest of the family. But are you also escaping the wider diaspora of Sydney in which you live, into a Sri Lanka that might have been more positive and inclusive of you, perhaps? An original homeland—even if you were not born there?

SC: No, because it is very hard to see Sri Lanka, given its recent history, as a place that could be more inclusive of the Tamil people. For that, I would need to re-write history, and I wanted to create a novel that was as historically accurate as I could.

BH: The process of writing and sharing your story with a wider audience can be unsettling. Does the act of writing—developing a story, its characters, a setting—still serve as something settling or comforting for you?

SC: I think, 100 percent, yes, it does. Overall, I am, as a person, far more grounded and at peace with myself when I am writing. It comforts me, it uplifts me, and it connects me to myself. I feel my most authentic self and very present when I am in the middle of writing. It might seem contradictory that I feel very present when I have deliberately taken myself to another world. When I am writing, I am 100 percent in that world to the point where my husband is concerned that if there was a house fire, I wouldn’t be aware of it. So, I don’t write and don’t even edit on screen when my children are home. I will research when the children are in the house, and I will edit on paper. I can sit with them and do a bit of editing, but I would never work on the first draft of a manuscript or an idea when they are around because I am too deeply absorbed into that world. It’s not fair for them, and it’s not safe for them. I owe them as their mother the mindfulness and the presence. I need to give that to them when they are with me.

The other part of that answer though is that I often write about very traumatic things and that is unsettling for me. It is traumatic for me. When you write, you really are inside your mind, the picture is very clear, and you are with those people. You are as close to them as you could possibly be, without being them, and that is traumatic. At the end of the day, depending on what I have been writing about, I find that I really need to take some time to pull myself out of that world and re-set my mind for reality and my children. On those days, I need to just hold them for a while to be reassured that reality is safe and secure, and that my children are OK.

BH: You write about the Sri Lankan civil war in both your first and (I gather) third novel-in-progress. What is your angle? How do you see it, as someone in some senses outside—a diasporic—returning to the land of her ancestors, one that is not immediately “yours”? Also, did you feel welcome in Sri Lanka? How did Sri Lanka receive you?

SC: For both Song of the Sun God and The Phantom Limb (my third novel), I spent a lot of time researching and interviewing insiders—Sri Lankans with lived experience of the events and places I write about. However, my writing will always be from the outsider’s perspective. I am a diasporic outsider, someone with an ancestral connection and love for the place, but still an outsider. At times, this gives me an ability to see things that are best seen from the outside. And at other times, it means that I am not seeing as much as I should. My lens is obscured and distorted.

My angle is Tamil and I can’t apologise for that—I can only tell the reader who I am. I can declare my conflict of interest as it were, whilst also reiterating that I tried to write as historically accurately as I could, interrogating the motivations, actions and failures of all of the stakeholders in both the micro (family) and macro (political) story I told. I felt that bias and inaccuracies would undermine the veracity and credibility of the whole piece, and I wanted people to read this perspective of Sri Lanka rather than dismiss it. The lawyer in me also wants detail, facts and testimony—in a sense, the truth.

I felt so welcome in Sri Lanka—all people welcomed me and supported my research. People wanted to talk and share their stories, even the ugly, hard ones. All people are storytellers, not just writers. We are unburdened by telling stories. We bind ourselves to each other by telling stories. I felt truly welcomed. The response to Song of the Sun God in Sri Lanka has been really humbling. People read it and reach out to me. It has been an honour to write something that seems to resonate with Tamils and Sinhalese people.

BH: In fact, I was wondering how you would manage to switch between the often-violent worlds of your writing and the all-encompassing world of motherhood. I can imagine that moving from writing a war scene onto making dinner or helping with homework can be quite exhausting. And even if the process of writing is mostly comforting for you, the task of traversing both worlds—the real and the imagined, the one around you and the one inside of you—might drain energy from you as well.

SC: I think one of the contradictions of writing is that it is really energizing and exhilarating to write. I am very uplifted when I write and if I don’t write, I can feel a heaviness within myself. If I don’t write, I am difficult to be with. I am uncomfortable with myself, and I am slightly agitated and unsettled. At the same time, though it is energising and exhilarating, it is also meditative and prayerful. And it is traumatic and draining. It is all of those things.

BH: But fulfilling in that way?

SC: Yes, ultimately, it is incredibly fulfilling. I feel extremely fortunate that I had a job in the law that I loved. I would wake up every morning with a rush of adrenaline and march into the office determined to do something useful today. And I feel so fortunate to have had that for more than ten years, and I loved it. I thought I would never love a job as much as I loved that. But when I began to write, I realized I had found something that I loved more.

BH: Judging from the two novels that came out in one year, and the third one already in the works, you are undoubtedly a prolific writer. This makes me all the more curious about your writing routines, especially being a mother of four. You’ve already shared some of your routines but how exactly do you find the time and space to work on your manuscripts? And do you have a fixed workspace from where you write at more or less fixed times, or do you squeeze in time for writing whenever and wherever you can?

SC: That is a great question, because I love to hear how other authors do it. I am fascinated, because every author always thinks of other authors doing it so much better. I work in a very small study, which is about the size of a closet and has no windows or natural lighting. My husband finds this hilarious and a little unhealthy, too. He worries that it is just not natural to sit in a small windowless room for hours on end with the doors shut. When he tries to work an hour in the shared study, he finds it very difficult. For me, the reason I am fine with that space is because I am not there. It is because I will be inside my mind, I will be in Sri Lanka in 1932 or in 2014 and, most recently, I’ve been in Sri Lanka in 2009. So, I am not in the room, the physical room, but mostly in the past.

From 2013 to 2016, I had a very good routine. Whenever the children were not in the house, I would sit down to write. When my youngest child started school, I was able to do this more effectively because I had no children in my house then. I used to walk the children to school, with the dog, and run back to start my day of writing. I am quite organized and disciplined and try to ignore everything else during the middle of the day. Chances are I did the laundry at ten o’clock the night before, because I yearn for my time to write. There are a number of things that eat into my writing time but on a “writing day” I will sit down at 9:15 to write and at 2:30 a really loud alarm will go off to give me 15 minutes to pull myself out of wartime Sri Lanka and allow myself to re-enter the leafy streets of our neighbourhood. And then I will be with my children in the way they deserve it. So, I have a really compressed writing schedule, which can be very stressful because there is so much to say in so little time. All the things that parents do, I will try and do late in the evening, like cooking dinner for the following night, bulk producing spaghetti bolognese and chicken curry, answering the endless notes from the PTA. This is how my day used to be structured in the past.

BH: So how has your routine changed, and what prompted you to change it?

SC: With my third novel, I tried out something different. It was very deliberate because that year of my life was a very unsettled one. We had a lot of sickness in the family, and I returned to work as a lawyer. So, I had things that pulled me away from writing, and I was becoming increasingly stressed and anxious that I was not writing my third novel. I had an idea, but I was not able to create or protect the time to write. I remembered Stephen King’s book On Writing where he says: “just put superglue on your bum and bash it out”. It’s easy for Stephen King to say this because he is a full-time, successful and well-paid writer, but I thought, OK, let me try this. He sets himself aggressive targets, like 3,000 words a day in six hours of writing. I was at a stage where I just could not give it six hours of writing a day. But I could put superglue on my bum, and I could set some targets for myself. I am very target orientated, perhaps because I am a lawyer. If you set me a target, like a robot, I feel the need to achieve that target. So, I would say 500 words a day or 1,000, and I would secretly be aiming for 2,000. I wrote the first draft of that third novel in eight weeks because in every spare moment, I would try to channel Stephen King. Even if it were only for ten minutes, I would sit down and just bash it out. I didn’t look at it again. I didn’t read it. I didn’t ask myself if it’s any good because those questions are the death knell. I just tried to bash it out. And then I had to stop when my first and second novel came out, so I didn’t look at the draft until some four months later. I was terrified to open the document, to look at what I had actually produced. I went back to it very anxiously but, for a first draft, it was okay. It needs a lot more work and it needs energy and it needs time. I have been doing that this year, but I need to do more. As a first draft, it wasn’t terrible though, and I was relieved to realize this.

BH: Indeed, it must have been very reassuring to realize that you were able to pull this together despite your disrupted and unpredictable schedule. How would you describe the next stage of writing a novel, that is, your process of editing a first draft?

SC: It is different, but a big job. For the next round of edits, I really feel that I need a lot of time because I actually need to restructure it. I can edit language while I am in the car waiting to pick up a child from their guitar class but, for a structural edit, you need to step back and look at the whole novel. Then, you need to step in and look at individual scenes. You constantly step out and step in, and this process requires time. I do not have much time any more because I’ve returned to running a social justice program. Given that writing is not necessarily a way to create a sustainable income for a family of six, I have focused back on being a lawyer at this stage in my life. I feel fortunate to return to the law after a few years of not working in the paid economy, and I am very fortunate that it’s a job that I love.

But I do hope that I will be able to write at least a minimum amount that nourishes my soul. Time and fatigue are my worst enemies. I need to think, once again, about Stephen King and work out how to make time my friend. And I do have an hour or two in the evening if I can overcome my fatigue. Of course, we also need to allow ourselves to not write. We have to recognize that all the other things that we’re doing are valid and necessary because, as writers, all we want to do is write. That is all I want to do. I want to be with my children and my husband, occasionally hang out with friends and then write some more. I would very happily have a completely binary life where I am either with my family or writing, either writing or with my family.

BH: Maybe one day …

SC: One day, one day.

BH: I gather that that Song of the Sun God has been accepted as the basis of a TV series. Could you give an update on the progress of that project?

SC: I’m excited about the proposed TV series. Olivia Hetreed, BAFTA-winning writer of Oscar-nominated film Girl with A Pearl Earring, will adapt the novel for Synchronicity Films, producer of the recent ABC / BBC drama The Cry, and Australia’s Dragonet Films. Olivia is working on a six-part series based on the novel, and the adaptation will focus on the youngest generation through Smrithi, a young woman living in London, who is disconnected from her culture and long-held family secrets. I have been working with the team over email and was fortunate to go to London in January 2020 with Karen Radzyner from Dragonet, to work with Olivia and Claire Mundell from Synchronicity in developing the adaptation. The team has created a compelling overview of the series which is now being pitched for development funding.

BH: A final question about the process of your writing. I was wondering how you gather and develop ideas. Do you simply type them into your computer? Or do you prefer to keep a notebook where you can jot down notes or map out more complex ideas like the intricate web of family relations in Song of the Sun God?

SC: I make notes of interesting ideas or scenes—sometimes a scene will just flash into my mind—or words. I love words. I have a notebook where all of this just gets dumped but sometimes I will put up a file on my computer where I collect ideas for future books. I keep this document secret somewhere in my computer because I think my husband would be terrified to see it—“What? You haven’t finished with the third book?” But when I write, I write directly into the computer. For Song of the Sun God, I did do some writing on a notepad because my children were much younger then, and I often needed to sit in a doctor’s waiting room or one would have speech therapy, and for an hour or so, I would just handwrite scenes. But nowadays I write directly into a computer and I actually prefer it because it is very fast, and it allows me to check my word count. A good day of writing, though, is a day when I forget about the targets because I am absorbed into my world. And when I emerge from that world, I realize that in those few hours, I wrote 2,000 words. You know, that is a beautiful day. And there are days like that. They are a real joy, and I feel that they are good for me.

Bibliography

Chandran, Shankari. 2017a. Song of the Sun God. Colombo: Perera-Hussein Publishing House.

---. 2017b. The Barrier. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia.

In a State of Indifference:
Amit Chaudhuri in Conversation with Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Photograph of Amit Chaudhuri by Geoff Pugh

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, three collections of poetry. a collection of short stories, three books of essays, two works of non fiction and numerous edited collections. Finding the Raga, about his relationship to North Indian classical music, will appear in 2021. He is also a composer, singer, and a concert performer of Indian classical music. His musical creations are known for their eclecticism, improvisation, and experimental quality across genres: jazz, blues, and classical Hindustani. Born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay, Chaudhuri spent his formative years between London, Bombay, and Oxford before choosing Calcutta as his home. Chaudhuri’s artistic oeuvre is at once expansive and elusive. It is hard to pin down his work to a specific genre, tradition, or movement in the catalogue of literary criticism. He is a diasporic South Asian writer in the sense that his geographical location spans Europe and India, yet as he says in this interview, the terms diaspora, exile, nation and identity make his mind “fog over” and are not at the forefront of his artistic practice. Modernists, postmodernists, and postcolonial critics have all grappled with his work, and at times, struggled to place him amongst canonical literati.

Chaudhuri is one of the great stylists of modern fiction. The difficulty of defining his output can be gauged by the fact that while the novelist Sumana Roy (2017), in an engaging essay, recalls her delighted laughter on first reading Chaudhuri’s first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address (Chaudhuri 1991), critic Ian Almond (2010) has written of “melancholy, fantasy and economy in Amit Chaudhuri’s short fiction”. Both responses are valid. The delicate, poetic richness of his writing, and his avowed debt to the great Bombay poets Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Arun Kolatkar (Chaudhuri 2017a) give his novels a particular sense of intimacy. This is the case with the walks through London of 22-year-old Ananda and his uncle Radhesh in Odysseus Abroad (Chaudhuri 2014), where the attention to relations between the generations is characteristic. It features, too, in the vivid detail of the return to Bombay of a novelist named “Amit Chaudhuri” in Friend of my Youth (Chaudhuri 2017b). In the opening pages of latter novel, the narrator finds himself in a taxi, registering unfamiliar aspects of the city:

the new flyovers, the disappearance of certain things which weren’t quite landmarks but which helped you orient yourself—furniture showrooms, fisherfolk’s settlements. I would be surprised—maybe even disappointed—if these large-scale changes did not occur. On the right-hand side at the end of the road from the airport towards Mahim is, I know, the mosque with loudspeakers, hemmed in by traffic on the left; further up, past the brief stink of the sea, will be the church where I once went to attend an NA meeting. I was keeping Ramu company.

The details carry the mood, the sense of connection and detachment, the significance of the narrator’s friend Ramu who is his remaining human connection to the city. It is not surprising that Amit Chaudhuri, in his interview here with Pavan Kumar Malreddy, expresses his admiration for D.H. Lawrence, recalling his first reading of Sons and Lovers and his sense of Lawrence’s desire to convey “the incandescence of living in the here and now”. Postcolonial criticism, as Sumana Roy says, often tends to focus on the nation, the race, the marginalized. Chaudhuri’s writing, while it does not ignore these elements, is, in Roy’s words, “grounded in explorations of the sensuous, the emotional, the affective” (2017, n.p.). Cristina Sandru (2010), writing in the volume Rerouting the Postcolonial, has noticed a similar development in postcolonial writing.

In his review of Odysseus Abroad, the writer Neel Mukherjee (himself interviewed elsewhere in this volume by Anjali Joseph) remarks that Chaudhuri’s “signature sentences” are “elegant and classical, rich in parentheses, subclauses and digressions; unexpected, surprising spaces open up within them to accommodate the ever-present past and the infinite branching of thought” (Mukherjee 2015). Throughout the novels, there are piquant observations concerning social and intellectual life. The taxi journey of “Chaudhuri” on his arrival in Bombay soon leads him to reflect mischievously on his early years and to the comment that “Lacan says our subjectivity takes form at the ‘mirror stage’. The term and notion are so well worn they might make you laugh—the fate of most revolutionary ideas in psychoanalysis”. This piquant observation does not prevent the narrator from exploring his early years and impressions in intriguing ways. In similar fashion, Chaudhuri can turn the usual advice to aspiring writers on its head: “For me, the protagonist is only one element in a story: evening, room, wall, smoke, car, are other possible ones” (Chaudhuri 2016), or mount trenchant social and political commentary on contemporary India: “India has not, outside of Indira Gandhi’s declaration of emergency, been in this place before, and certainly not with the degree of popular support we see now, which can only be characterized as a form of inebriation” (Chaudhuri 2019).

In this interview, which took place at Amangalla Hotel on 25 January 2018 in Galle, Sri Lanka—“against the piano tinkles of a guest performer in the lobby, and the distant echo of Tamil vocals from the wall-mounted radio”, recalls interviewer Pavan Malreddy—Chaudhuri discusses his literary influences, musical inspirations, and what it means to produce art in an age of “market activism”.

The interviewer, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, teaches English literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. His recent publications include a monograph, Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism (2015), the co-edited collections Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (2015), and Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (2019). He has co-edited special issues of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2012), ZAA: Journal of English and American Studies (2014), Kairos (2018), and European Journal of English Studies (2018) and has authored over 30 essays and chapters on terrorism, political violence, and postcolonial theory in journals such as The European Legacy, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Intertexts, and AlterNative, among others. He is currently working on a monograph titled Insurgent Cultures.

Pavan Kumar Malreddy (PKM): Let me start with a quote from the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah: “Being away has helped me to write with a clear vision. Distance distils and makes ideas worth pursuing. […] One needs to extricate oneself from the daily needs and demands of living at home” (quoted in Jonas 1988, 74–75). I am aware of the fact that you are neither a diasporic nor an exile writer but you do spend a considerable amount of time away from home; you hold a professorship in England, and you have a second home in Oxford. But unlike what Farah is saying—that one needs to extricate oneself from the grind of domesticity, you seem to make an art out of domesticity. Much of your fiction is, in my reading, about the aesthetics of domesticity, the slow and slumbering lives of the urban Indian middle classes, where nothing moves. How do you look at this rather enabling tension with domesticity in your work?

Amit Chaudhuri (AC): Firstly, I think what Nuruddin Farah says must be true, but for me, my mind fogs over when I hear terms like exile, diaspora, nation, and identity, just as my mind fogs over when I see terms like description, character, or setting.

PKM: That’s the reason you once said you don’t like 19th-century novels?

AC: Right. So, categories like those are very difficult for me to comprehend. My mind won’t get around them. I think, yes, distance can produce a renewal of perception and perspective. It certainly happened to me when I was in London [in the early 1980s] without my being aware of it, because I was in such agony at that time, of homesickness. So being away not only influenced the way I’d look at home, but also the language—in terms of the way I use words, and the way those words change in their resonances in other locations.

PKM: And their effects?

AC: That too. But I also know that it is possible to have that kind of renewal and that sense of movement even if one has not travelled very far, and you might be living in a city whose landmarks you’ve never seen. In fact, we do not visit the landmarks of our own city, or certain places in one’s own city that may be 45 minutes away by car. One might find these places not only strange, but almost unreachable because one hardly registers their existence. I think it is important to understand those experiences as to why a place that is just 45 minutes away is so seldom visited by you. Why, when you go there, you feel a reconstitution of what you know about your city. I think those things are of great interest to me.

PKM: The difference between Farah and you is that you talk about a certain variation and the creation of these affects rather than having a clear vision, or an objective vision. But thinking about movement—at least the way you talk about it—that is, moving without having travelled afar—reminds me of Yann Martell, who told me that he writes while moving. He has a treadmill in his garage with a writing desk mounted on it, and he writes while strolling on the machine.

AC: That’s fantastic.

PKM: Like I said, I don’t consider you as a diasporic writer who is on the move, but you do move quite a bit between Mumbai, Calcutta, and Oxford.

AC: But I also move between rooms in my house because I don’t have a fixed writing desk or spot. People do ask me about it, especially when they come to photograph me after an interview: “where do you write?” I don’t have one place. I move between bed, sofa, bedroom, and drawing room. And I often write, because I write longhand, in my notebook while walking from one place to another. So, what you’re saying with Yann Martell surprises me because I didn’t realize there were other people like that. But I do write and revise often while walking.

PKM: In movement.

AC: Yes, while walking.

PKM: Yes, that’s one of the arguments made in performance arts, that artists think better when they’re on the move. On that note, I wanted to ask you about another kind of movement, that is, movement between different kinds of thinking or, say, imaginary worlds. You are one of those rare people who have a foot both in fiction and academia. In the academic world, there is this idea of dialogue and public engagement. But in fiction, there is a romantic notion that writers do everything in private; they are under no obligation to reveal their notes or sources of inspiration or imagination. How does this tension play out with you as a fiction writer? Do you collect some sort of ethnographic notes, and is there any kind of dialogue in your fiction in the process of its making?

AC: Of course, yes, but firstly, I don’t see myself really as part of academia. I see myself, throughout my life, as having used academia to further my interests as a writer. I make use of certain fringe spaces in academia to have discussions which involve not only academics, but also artists, publishers, and thinkers. I want a space which is unlike an academic conference or a literary festival. I feel it’s important to have that space. And to get back to your question: yes, writers are always in a state of argument. Writing itself is a form of argumentation. When you write something, you reject a whole range of things as part of a dialogue with yourself and your traditions. On some level, it would have been easier to go in a direction which is familiar; the direction that the time or age is going in. And yet, there are writers who step out of their time and reject that direction. So, there is always a process of dialogue and argumentation in the moment a writer takes a decision about the direction of his or her work. But it’s not even a decision; it’s not even a choice to do something that their innocence compelled them to do because it would be much easier to go with the flow. Once you go against the current, you’re in a more difficult position. But you do this because you have to do it. And in that, you’re engaging in an argument. Your writing is an argument.

PKM: So there is a dialogue, an internal dialogue.

AC: Yes, there’s a dialogue not just internal, but with existing structures, conventions, your past, your inheritance and more importantly, with what you are supposed to be as a writer, and what is expected of you as a writer; as an Indian writer, or as a writer of novels—all the things that are expected of you, you are in dialogue with that.

PKM: This is very avant-gardist, in my view, though I am not sure if that is a term used to describe your work, as it is typically associated with European art. Your response reminds me of G.V. Desani’s (1948) All About H. Hatterr, and now I think of it, there are parallels between Desani’s classic and your Odysseus Abroad (Chaudhuri 2014). It also reminds me of Borges’s famous quote on Kafka that “every writer creates his own precursors” (1964, 177), in the sense that a writer’s work sheds a renewed perspective on other (established) writers. Odysseus Abroad does exactly the same: it casts a new angle on Joyce, Homer, or G.V. Desani. I know this is a question that should be reserved for critics, but I wonder if you’ve ever thought about your work in this way.

AC: You know, it is very interesting you should say this and I hesitate to make this reference because it’s a reference that both touched me and also it’s one, as you said, others should be talking about. The other person who said this, oddly enough, was the novelist Will Self. When introducing me at a particular event, he made the same comparison, invoking Borges’s essay on Kafka. I feel very embarrassed because I don’t deserve …

PKM: But I have a specific example in mind that prompted this comparison, from your novel The Immortals. The protagonist Shyamji says: “you cannot practice art on an empty stomach”. Now, in his famous story “The Hunger Artist”, Kafka turns this empty stomach into a form of art. But my question is more general: why is it that in the Indian literary tradition, writing against set conventions, or bourgeois conventions of art, or doing “art for art’s sake” has not been very fashionable?

AC: If you look at Indian vernacular literatures in the past, they have astonishing avant-garde traditions, some of which have also been translated into other domains such as cinema and art. We only know of a few of these great avant-garde figures like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mani Kaul.

PKM: Adoor Gopalakrishnan, O.V. Vijayan …

AC: U.R. Ananthamurthy, and Urdu writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, where you often see not just a testing of extreme experience but also a sense of drift, and a sense of pausing over inconsequential things with an absurd amount of attention to them as well. You see these avant-garde preoccupations by which I mean, slightly irresponsible traditions, very robustly forming in Indian vernacular writings. I wouldn’t even call this an “art for art’s sake” avant-garde tradition, but a particular kind of exploration of consciousness.

PKM: On that note, it is also quite refreshing to see your work not being labelled as “postcolonial literature”, though it’s not a term you completely disassociate from, and you do use it very carefully and selectively, especially in your essay collection Clearing a Space (Chaudhuri 2008) where you make a case for “lowbrow” modernities. But you do not talk about middlebrow modernities as such, although most of your stories are about urban middle classes who, in your own way, fall under the subaltern category. I find this curious because much of the postcolonial discourse takes the middle classes for granted, as though they do not deserve the same kind of security or attention as the rural or peasant subalterns.

AC: I don’t like the middlebrow as a category because the middlebrow is a mainstream category where the parameters have to do with conventional realism, all of the things I don’t like. I’m very interested in, as you’ve said, the avant-garde and modernist element. But the history of the middle class does interest me and it’s a very rich history in India. We are all products of that history. So, to suppress the ways in which we are products of that history is to suppress our own everyday. Indian Anglophone writing and thinking is often about suppressing ourselves and inhabiting some kind of transcendental, neutral tone. Even the postcolonialists do not speak as themselves, but within a kind of neutral tone of an objective academic discourse …

PKM: Speaking for others?

AC: … and speaking in a way where, somehow, they are not enmeshed directly, the persons who have seen those things or are writing those things are not enmeshed directly with what they’re saying. This reproduces a sort of enlightened objectivity of speaking from above, where the self’s existence in the world and its memory don’t come into play. All those things are suppressed.

PKM: It’s very interesting you say this because in your piece in Literary Activism (2017c), you invoke this very intimacy and memory you say is missing in postcolonial Anglophone discourse. You start with a peculiar encounter in a car park and suddenly drift into involuntary memory, delving into insignificant yet intimate details. This is quite formulaic of your literary essays, most of which begin with your own personal encounters. Even when you are addressing serious discursive themes such as modernity, intertextuality, or deconstruction, you tend to refrain from an overtly scholarly or value-neutral tone.

AC: Because these things, in my case, are always emerging from a life encounter. It’s an encounter in life that produces the thought process. So, the encounter with life has to be a part, in my essays, of the thought process.

PKM: I find this approach all the more remarkable in your book on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry, in which you propose a major theoretical intervention between canonical and communal poetry. But I have always wondered why you were so drawn to the poetry of Lawrence? I mean he has enough prose to inspire, or was your book D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (2003) completely an academic exercise?

AC: I was transformed by my reading of Sons and Lovers (Lawrence 1913). As I’ve said many times before, Sons and Lovers, to me, was the first text I read that was contemporaneous with the modernists, which seemed to reject the metaphysical, by which I mean an extraneous source of value—whether that source of value is religion or heaven, or whether it’s a lost religion, or a lost civilization—as was the case with a certain kind of modernism. That civilization once existed and it had been fragmented, and, it was those fragments that animated a kind of sense of value that was receding. With Lawrence, there is no sense of civilizational crisis in Sons and Lovers. There’s a rejection of that idea and a kind of affirmation of being in the present, the incandescence of living in the here and now. And he was saying something in Sons and Lovers, without using so many words—and I’ve said this before—which he would say again closer to the time of his death in a book called Apocalypse (Lawrence 1931): “whatever the dead and unborn might know, they cannot know the marvel of being alive in the flesh”. This seemed to me a rejection of metaphysics on behalf of the fact of existence. I realized when reading Sons and Lovers that this was very important to me—the affirmation of the fact of existence. So that directed me in the ways I was to think about writing.

PKM: Your fiction writing?

AC: And that transformed into my fiction writing, beginning with A Strange and Sublime Address (Chaudhuri 1991), which I wanted to be a narrative about the present moment: what it means to inhabit the present moment. I could have made it a narrative about childhood or the past because I was basing it on precisely those things, or my visits to Calcutta from Bombay. But I decided in some subconscious kind of capacity that I would make it about living in the here and now, and thereby reject this narrative to be grounded in the past, of what has occurred. Roland Barthes says the “unreal time of novels, cosmogonies, and histories” depends on the simple past tense. And it begins with, in the case of the novel, a sentence in the simple past tense like “The marchioness went out at five o’clock”. So, I wanted to reject that sense of time, where the narrative represents something that’s over and perfect and available for reproduction in a novel. I wanted to reject all of that. It’s not that I didn’t write in the past tense. But you can use that tense to somehow still give a sense of the present moment.

PKM: But besides Lawrence, one also sees the influences of the likes of Joyce and Borges in your work. These are canonical writers now, but were avant-garde figures in their own times. Writers likes Borges are also fabulists, and fabulists, as William Golding (1989) argues, are moralists who “cannot make a story without a human lesson tucked away in it” (77). So, do all your influences—be they modernist, avant-gardist, or fabulist—reject metaphysis in the way you just described, or do they also inculcate moral lessons? Or do they have their own kind of politics?

AC: I think they comprise their own kind of politics, and their own kind of argumentation. I don’t like moralism, again moralism depends so much on the suppression of the self and its encounter with life. And I don’t like that.

PKM: But coming to the music part of your work, there is a lot of improvisation which is again a sign of being in the present, or performing in the moment. Is there some sort of interaction between your writing and your music? I remember you telling us in Chemnitz at the 2013 Association for the Study of New Literatures in English conference that you were practising your vocals in the hotel minutes before you came down to deliver a lecture on art and literature.

AC: I neither think of them as existing separately, nor do I think of them as separate selves co-existing with an overseer looking upon them, where that overseer is somebody who exists in my brain. They are discontinuous but related.

PKM: They feed off each other?

AC: They must do so, because of their existing neighbourliness. But they’re not aware of existing in relation to each other any more than when you’re sitting in one lane, you’re aware of what is going on in the next one. There must be some kind of give and take going on between that lane and this one.

PKM: But you don’t do it consciously.

AC: Yes, you don’t do it consciously.

PKM: But it’s very interesting though because in your music, you work within traditions, there is no rejection of sorts?

AC: But I also experimented, with jazz and the blues.

PKM: That’s right, your own beginnings were a bit unorthodox; you wanted to become a Canadian singer-songwriter? Could you tell a bit more about how you became interested in Hindustani classical music?

AC: As I was growing up in Bombay, my creative life, like my musical life, had been very fitful, and I arrived at places without expecting to arrive or wanting to arrive. I never knew I would be a prose writer when I wanted to write poetry. But that’s what happened. Similarly, I never knew that I would become a Hindustani classical singer. Once I became a Hindustani classical singer, I completely rejected other kinds of music, like my earlier background in western popular music. So for years, I never listened to western music, especially after I started practising Hindustani music when I was in England. Only after 16 years did I go back to listening to western music again. That eventually led to the experiment I mentioned earlier. One morning, I thought I heard the riff to “Layla” (by Derek and the Dominos) as I was practising raag todi. So I decided to do something with the notes I was singing in compositional terms. But if you told me in 1985, when I was in the midst of training myself as an Indian classical singer, that one day I would be listening to Derek and the Dominos again, or that I would be incorporating something that they had written into a composition involving raag todi, I wouldn’t have believed you. If somebody had told me at the age of 14 when I was listening to The Who and playing the guitar that one day I would be a classical singer, I wouldn’t have believed them either. At each place, I’ve arrived by chance.

PKM: It’s your own odyssey in that sense.

AC: Perhaps, yes.

PKM: Talking about experimentation again, my thoughts drift in the direction of your latest novel Friend of My Youth (Chaudhuri 2017b), which is, in my reading, a prime example of experimental avant-garde. Fiction, non-fiction, or auto-fiction, however you want to call it. Usually works involving autobiographical elements arrive at the end of one’s career. I’d like to think that there is a lot of writing left in you. I’m just curious why, at this stage of your writing career, you decided to write a semi-autobiographical work. Is it something you had to do now?