Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Anjum Hasan, author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head, and the short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures. She has also published a book of poems called Street on the Hill. Her latest novel, History’s Angel, is making waves and recently won the Godrej LitLive! Fiction Book of the Year and FICCI Fiction Book of the Year awards. Anjum writes for various publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.  She lives in Bangalore.

 

Thank you Anjum for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with The Wise Owl.

 

RS: You are a writer with a number of novels and a poetry collection to your credit. For the benefit of our readers, please tell us what made you gravitate towards writing, and why you shifted from writing poetry to writing novels..

 

AH: There is no essential difference for me between the language of prose and the language of poetry. Wordsworth already said that about two hundred years ago. I’ve produced only one book of poems but might return to it some day so the shift to fiction is not, I hope, a permanent one. The economies of poetry publishing and novel publishing are wildly different though, and we tend to take our cues from that rather than the history of literature.

 

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RS: Your latest work, History's Angel delves into the lives and struggles of Indian Muslims today, a sensitive and timely subject. What was your experience like while writing Alif Mohammad's story, and what do you hope readers take away from this book?

 

AH: It’s about one particular Muslim family and in Alif Mohammed I wanted to create a stubbornly self-contained Dilliwallah rather than a demographic sample. Though that’s really the question in the novel – is any kind of individuality possible or worthwhile anymore when we resort so much of the time to demographic samples. So I hope readers take away that – Alif’s troubled interiority – as much as the reflection on Muslim lives.

 

 

RS: Your debut novel, Lunatic in my Head, set in Shillong, captures the city and its characters with deep lyricism. What drew you to this setting, and how do you feel Shillong's unique character influenced the narrative?

 

AH: It’s set in Shillong of the ‘90s, which was the decade of my twenties when my eyes first opened to the strange beauty of the place – its mix of urban and pastoral and the fact that so many apparently incompatible realities, colonial and post-colonial, Indianised and Westernised, are all squashed together in a modest sized city.

 

Like other modern Indian cities, Shillong had for a long time stayed more or less the same. The slow pace and tentative quality of urban change was similar everywhere till the goggle-eyed consumerist tsunami, not to speak of the breathless building construction tsunami, of this millennium hit. And this makes the older era seem innocent so I was trying to capture something of that, a time when the private disappointments of the three main characters could be shown to carry some weight.

 

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RS:  Neti, Neti follows the journey of Sophie, a character torn between worlds. What is it about this existential exploration that you find compelling, and how much of this character’s experience reflects your own observations?

 

AH: Neti, Neti is a sort of a sequel to Lunatic in my Head, though it can also be read independently of that. Sophie is torn between the Shillong she left behind, an imaginary place in some ways she eventually sees, and the new Bangalore being imagined into existence. Aren’t all novels in one way or another about existential explorations, starting with the first, Don Quixote? Doubters and dawdlers are the lifeblood of fiction – because through their studied self-awareness we see something of the societies they’re part of.

 

RS: In The Cosmopolitans, you weave a narrative that explores art, culture, and the individual’s place in society. What are some aspects of modern art and its relationship with society that you wanted to critique through this novel?

 

AH: There’s a comical side to gallery art, inadvertently funny when it gets pompous. Which it can when big money and personal fame and inflated jargon get attached to it. So the main character, Qayenaat, responds to this ridiculousness; sometimes she is ridiculous herself and has to pay the price for over-reacting. I saw it as a comic novel, and even the other sort of art described here, the so-called traditional Indian one, turns out in Qayenaat’s encounters to be mothballed and hollowed out though it’s still held up as the real thing.

 

 

RS: Your work often explores characters dealing with personal and societal conflicts. How do you think Indian literature can continue to evolve in addressing complex social issues?

 

AH:  It’ll only evolve if it holds on to the special language of the form, stays safe from the many functional languages that surround us – of journalism, social sciences, advertising, self-help. But I don’t know how much longer we can maintain this distinction, it’s getting harder to write novels not only because of the increasing hold of all those other fields but also because literature is more and more equated with only its storytelling aspects and that in turn is equated with entertainment.

 

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RS: Many of your characters grapple with belonging and identity in a changing world. Are there any particular experiences or themes from your own life that resonate with this exploration?

 

AH:  Belonging and identity seem to be big preoccupations in the academic criticism of the day and perhaps that’s seeped into fiction rather than the other way around. These things concern me less than the soul or lack thereof in regular English-speaking urban Indians. To that extent I am writing about people like me. But this, again, is getting harder given the identitarian bias now. In the hands of older writers, the early novels of Upamanyu Chatterjee say, the voice of this class really shines.

 

RS:  What advice would you give to emerging writers who want to address societal issues in their work but struggle with how to balance storytelling and social commentary?

 

AH: Read how the greats did it. The Russians especially.  Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov could be all the education one will ever need in marrying commentary and storytelling. But I am also getting interested in how convincingly many contemporary Chinese writers do it – Yu Hua, Yiyun Li, Lu Min among them.

 

 

RS: Our readers would love to know what you're currently working on.

 

AH: I’m working on a book on Shillong – a sort of oral, urban history lashed together with moderate servings of the personal. Hope to finish it by next year.

 

Thank you so much Anjum for talking to The Wise Owl. We wish you the best in all your creative and literary pursuits.