Your first short story published in the print media was in 1970. Your first collection of short stories Legacy, was published in 1978. Your latest work Shadow Play came out in 2013. It has been more than four decades. How do you look at your evolution as a writer?
It has been a fascinating journey. I started off as just an ardent and voracious reader with great love of words and ideas. And then I plunged into writing, innocent of everything but the desire to say something. I soon realised that this was what I really wanted to do; in fact, I found my work and myself as well. Along the way, on this journey I also discovered the form that suits me best – the novel. This has been most fulfilling and satisfying for me; I am speaking of the writing itself, not of anything else. Each day has been a day of learning and a little more about writing. The learning process never seems to come to an end and I never cease to find writing enormously exciting. When I look back, what is significant is that I kept going. Nothing stopped me – neither lack of encouragement, recognition, nor money. I have managed to survive the positive puttingdown (middle-class, woman writer, writing about women, about domestic/family life, etc) and I wrote through all kinds of situations, many personal crises.
You have expressed your dislike of being labelled a woman writer. Yet, your protagonists have always been women and the point of view has also been of several women? How do you explain the contradiction?
There is absolutely no contradiction. How do my protagonists being women have to do with the title of being a woman writer? So many men have male protagonists. Are they labelled male writers? A writer is a writer first and foremost. Gender is one of the many things that go into the writing. Different themes, people, situations and ideas ignite our imagination. But once we begin to write, we are solely writers trying to say something, finding the best way of saying these things, struggling with language, form, etc. To me, the term ‘woman writer’ has a pejorative connotation. It brings in nuances of being limited, of being secondary, of being concerned with insignificant themes. This is what I want to deny when I reject the label. I am taking a stand, which should be understood.
Your writing is defined by a constant and fluid movement between the present and the past, generally closing with an open future. Does this reflect your personal obsession with all that is dead and gone? You have done it in almost all your novels. That Long Silence, The Dark Holds No Terrors, The Binding Vine, Small Remedies and Moving On. Why?
There is no obsession with the past, not at all. I feel that we cannot see ourselves or our lives solely in terms of the present. The past has shaped us; the past is always with us. It is like the thread that holds the flowers of a garland together. Even as we breathe, a moment slips past us and becomes the past. Do we then regard it as being over and done with? Besides, we have tangible connections to the past, like historical records or personal ones like diaries, photographs, letters etc. And there are the intangible ones that live within us like memories, both personal and collective memories. As far as parallel stories are concerned, they are part of the connections that are always there. I only flesh them out.
Though your protagonists are women, one notices that male characters are handled and fleshed out realistically, even with a sense of empathy. In That Long Silence one cannot really get angry with the wife-battering husband. The same goes for Manjari’s father in Moving On. In this sense, would you agree that the feminist tag that often attaches to your works is a myth?
I would call my novels feminist in one sense – that they project a vision, a point of view that not only presents the female experience and the female voice, but refuses to regard these as ‘the other view’. But if feminist means that I am writing out of a certain feminist theory, I reject that label. I am writing about real people who are not living by theories, but are trying to see their own lives and their relationships without the blinkers of established societal views; who are trying to find their own answers, living by their own values. I think my earlier novels did not have much of the male view. The intensity with which I was bringing out the female experience made that voice loud and drowned out the male voice. Since A Matter of Time, I have been more conscious of the male voice and in Small Remedies and Moving On, these are louder and, I hope, significant. I am more sensitive to the fact that neither of us can live our lives in isolation. Male and female – our lives are enmeshed together.
You space out your novels with a threefour- years span or more. What are you doing in the meantime? And why do you space them out so widely though you have an international readership?
Firstly I do not have an international readership. What I now have is a fairly good Indian readership. But this has nothing to do with the time I take to write a novel, which invariably is about four years. It was five until I started working with the computer. There is not much of a gap between two novels, for almost always before I finish one the other comes to me. I deliberately block it out until I am through with the earlier one. And though I focus completely on a novel once I begin, there are interruptions I cannot help – travel, lectures and articles to write, plus the problems and pleasures of personal life. But generally a novel takes over my life and when I finish it is like waking up after a long time and seeing things anew.
What motivates you to write today?
The same thing that motivated me to begin and kept me writing all these years – I feel the urge to write because I want to express something; I have these stories to tell, these ideas about the world. And language and literature have always been at the core of my life from early childhood.
You just won a prestigious award from a regional writers’ group in Kolkata. It is different because generally, regional writers remain ghettoised within their languages and are not known to care for Indian writers writing in English. How do you respond to this unusual award which for the first time stepped outside its language limits and decided to award writers in other Indian languages not Bengali?
The Soi award in Calcutta was a complete surprise. When I was invited by Nabaneeta, she was very vague – deliberately, I was told later, because they wanted this to be a surprise. When I learnt this was an award my first thought was – but I write in English! Nabaneeta said that didn’t matter, they wanted to honour good writing, and that I was really an Indian writer. These are views that are not generally held. This award mattered a lot because of its inclusiveness. After being a part of Indian literature for so many years, it hurts when one is brushed aside as an English writer who ‘writes for the West’. Therefore this award is special, even more so because it has been given by a group of writers, Bengali writers.
You are an extremely disciplined writer. From personal experience, I know that you have also been the perfect housewife and mother. I would like to ask how you managed this tightrope walk with all the physical problems that have also been part of your growth.
Disciplined writer, yes, but perfect wife and mother? Can anyone be that? I think it is a myth. Like all humans, I am always struggling to do what I really want to do as well as what I have to do. Like all humans, I keep feeling I am failing someone. I don’t know how fair I have been to the family, but the truth is that since writing is done at home, one has the satisfaction of being on the spot. At the same time, there is the awful problem of being interrupted any time. In fact there was a time when I was full of rage – not raging against anyone, but against my inability to get time when I wanted it. I think That Long Silence, came out of that. I don’t think there has been any balancing. Rather, I kept going, focusing on what I was doing at the moment but holding on to writing desperately. Now, thankfully, I am able to give more time to my writing and with less guilt.
You have dealt with sexuality within a broad spectrum of possibilities from rape to adultery to the growing sexual frigidity within marriage. But you have always kept away from getting into explicit, graphic details and kept sexuality on a rather low key. Is this because your language and style is so structured and has evolved in a way that makes explicit sex unnecessary or is it that the modes of conventional morality the middle-class Indian woman is conditioned by makes you somehow shy away from graphic descriptions? Or perhaps you prefer to handle these things in as subtle a manner as possible?
I don’t think one would keep away from any theme because one’s language or style is structured in a certain way. It’s the other way round – one’s language and style are shaped by the theme. And I have never shied away from sex. My very early story The Intrusion, which deals with this subject, released me from certain inhibitions. Since my main interest is the human mind, it is what happens there that has been more the focus than bodily activities – which are the same for all humans anyway! It is within the mind that I locate the act of sex. But in The Dark Holds No Terrors, where the physical was important and needed to be said, I have done it. So too in Moving On, in which the body is the focus, I have brought in the body. As for the question whether I am, as a writer conditioned by modes of conventional morality of the middle class Indian woman? If I, as a writer, was to be restricted in this way, why would I write at all? One writes to explore, to go past the facade, to say the unsaid, to break through the barriers.
What is your take on literary festivals mushrooming all over the place? Do they help littérateurs or are they more about hype and glamour than quality writing?
Literary festivals do not do much for writers. I heard that there are today 175 literary festivals taking place throughout the country. There is emphasis on celebrity value, on foreign writers, very little time is given to writers to say anything, the sessions are just gone through as a duty, books are launched by the dozens – one minute launches – and above all, the festivals are a place where writers’ egos are either pampered or bruised. Some writers seem to have become used to hopping from festival to festival. When do they write? There is some point in writers meeting, especially in English where there are such few for a for writers to get together. But now it is becoming just ridiculous – each city or town has a festival. Money is spent, the organisers feel important for a few days, they have the power to invite or not invite – that is all that happens. But I guess this is a trend which has to be gone through. Writing, publishing and selling books – these are what really matter. But to move from the second to the third, you need marketing. And this has taken priority over all else. Good writing does not come out of festivals – or anything else – but is always spontaneous and chancy. But writers need to write first, all the rest should be far less important.