A Lonely Harvest

"Yes. It was a fantastic novel, and did very well despite that. But it ended with a couple facing a dilemma. He then made a very unusual decision as a novelist to write two sequels to his own novel: twin novels, both of which start from this situation and take it in two very different directions. I should make clear that I’m not on the prize jury. I don’t choose the books for the shortlist, but I do listen in on the discussion. It was fascinating because the jury, which this year includes three novelists, simply couldn’t believe it was possible to write two equally convincing books about the same situation. Most of them didn’t even want to read both of them because they felt there would be too much duplication. But in fact, these two novels are very, very different, and they’re both extraordinary. So eventually, when everyone on the jury had read both books, they all agreed unanimously that it was impossible to choose between them. They really had to stand together as a single entry. Perumal was on last year’s shortlist, which shows just how fast and prolific a writer he is. He’s produced three novels in the past two years. They’re very powerful. He has an incredible voice, deeply inspired by the life he sees in rural Tamil Nadu. The translations from Tamil are also very beautiful. There is, if you go back quite a long way. For Gandhi, for instance, the village was the essence of India. The cities were a Westernized distortion where people came into contact with capitalism, technology and so on. It was in the villages where we had ‘the real India.’ That tradition is very apparent in the modernist Indian novel. The Independence generation of writers was quite preoccupied by rural dramas. It was a turbulent time in the countryside, and Indian peasants were central for writers such as Mulk Raj Anand: the sufferings of harvests and famines, the violence of caste, the oppression of landowners. In English-language writing, certainly, these themes had become much less prominent by the 1980s, and indeed the novel had become a distinctively urban form. If we think of Salman Rushdie’s great writing about Mumbai, for instance, that set the tone. “Increasingly we’re seeing novels where human dramas are a footnote to greater, inhuman ones” But I think the countryside is coming back for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s always been more present in languages other than English, and now we’re seeing more translations, so the literature broadens accordingly. The second is that ecological themes are becoming very prominent in contemporary Indian literature, just as themes of gender and gender violence are. The landscape is making a return through a new, ecological lens. Ecological devastation, drought—all these sorts of themes are very present. In Perumal Murugan’s novels—especially Poonachi , the novel shortlisted last year, in which the protagonist is a goat and water scarcity is a central dramatic issue. But increasingly, we’re also seeing novels where forests, oceans, coastlines, lakes, rivers, and mountains become principal characters, where human dramas are a footnote to greater, inhuman ones. That was the case with another novel from last year’s shortlist, Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup."