In a short span of time, poet and novelist Anjum Hasan has carved a distinguished place for herself in the Indian literary world. Not only is her writing distinctive, what is even more interesting is the deftness with which she sidesteps the traps many Indian novelists writing in English fall into.
The two novels she has authored are refreshingly free of raving matriarchs and the suffering middle class women who invariably commit adultery. Instead they are about urban pressures, the large scale migration from small towns to the large metropolis, cannabis and rock music.
Her second novel Neti, Neti was launched earlier this month by Roli books. Excerpts from an interview:
Neti, Neti is not a sequel to Lunatic in my Head . The adult Sophie Das we encounter in your new book is very different from the eight-year-old child we met in the first. Why was it important to continue with Sophie given that the protagonist in the new book could have easily been another individual?
Thousands of young people move from the North-east to work and live in the metros. I wanted to explore this and from the characters in the first book, Sophie seemed the most likely to make the move to Bangalore.
She's swept up in this brave new globalised world – at one level she's just another young woman looking to get out, make a little money, live her own life. At another level, she's sceptical about this very dream and wants to live at an angle to it.
Your two books are as much about two cities as they are about the characters, and the style you have adopted for each of them seems to be guided by their ethos. The first one set in Shillong is languid allowing the reader enough time and space to get into the book, whereas I found Neti, Neti to be much more frenzied…
Yes I do try to contrast it with Shillong and capture the mood and pace of Bangalore, especially the version of the city Sophie lives in, the version in which things happen so fast they numb you, and your head is so crowded with images that dream, reality and fiction start to leak into each other.
I find it intriguing that you have so many inter textual references going on. The title has Vedic roots, your chapter headings seem to draw in equal measure from Shakespeare and rock music, one character is called Ringo Saar. Not to mention all the references to Madame Bovary and Vivekananda…
Shakespeare and rock music are part of the texture of our middle-class lives so it's strange that we don't talk more about such things in our novels.
I wasn't interested so much in intertextuality in the literary sense as in the question of how we live – how do the books and music we love affect our judgements, what kind of avenues of escape do they offer us?
If Sophie thinks of Madame Bovary when she's in love, it's not for intellectual reasons, it's because Emma Bovary is a kind of secret touchstone.
I find it interesting that your protagonists are always “outsiders.” It was true of your first book and it is certainly true of the second.
I think outsiderness is an interesting position in fiction because it allows you to consider the world as essentially strange and therefore worthy of close attention. And there are many sides to it. You could feel out of sync, or, turning this on its head, you could feel, as JM Coetzee says in his latest novel, that your presence in a place is ‘legal but illegitimate'. I'm attracted to writers who explore outsiderness – WG Sebald, Marguerite Duras, Vladimir Nabokov and, of course, Coetzee.
I know the British author Scarlett Thomas who brings in mathematics in most of her novels. That is her rebellion against the cubby holing that happens with women novelists — the silly notion that they are best at writing family sagas. You seem to do the same thing with rock music…
Though not with a vengeance, I hope! I like the idea of rock music as something that gives you a vision for how to live your life – something I explored in Lunatic in my Head with its young men dreaming of salvation through Pink Floyd, and in this novel with Shillong's supposed mania for Bob Dylan.
In their centres of production these bands and musicians may mean one thing but they naturally acquire interesting new meanings in outposts like Shillong.
What next? Are we going to encounter Sophie Das in your next work of fiction too?
No, I think I'd like to take a break from her. But one never knows. She may turn up unexpectedly and then I'll have to see.
