Rana Dasgupta's Reading List

"This is a debut novel—in fact, we had quite a lot of debut novels on the list this year, which is exciting. Roshan is a young writer. He’s in his early thirties, somebody who has been dreaming of doing this for a long time, but it’s taken him many years to get around to this point. The novel is set in Bangalore, which is where Roshan is from, and it’s about the kinds of things that many young, middle-class people in Indian cities contend with: a slightly orphaned feeling, a feeling that they’re not well-understood by their parents or others of the previous generation, and who are looking for some kind of new way to think about the meaning of life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The titular Ib is a young man with dysfunctional parents. His father is mentally ill; his mother doesn’t really have a lot of influence over things. So he retreats more and more into his head, and his life takes some strange routes to exploration, eventually following a kind of hermit up into the Himalayas. What’s compelling about this book, I think, is his portrait of contemporary urban Indian youth. As you know, India is a young country. It’s dominated by its youth, and Bangalore is probably the most youth-dominated city of all. It’s the city of the tech industry, where a lot of people roll up from other places to work in those kinds of jobs, and so it has a lot of people like Roshan, middle-class young people looking to make a life in the city, and often being disappointed by the promises of contemporary India. Well, Roshan is very interested in the big experiments in language that are out there. He workshopped the book by reading texts like Ulysses , and his conception of the novel changed each time he discovered a writer who offered him a new conception of language. I was at dinner with him the other night, and he was telling me about his love for Saul Bellow and we were bonding over the fact that reading The Adventures of Augie March was a definitive moment in both of our reading lives. That book helped him to imagine how he might find a language for what he was doing, and it has something to do with his very jagged, strange, expressive sentences."

"I really love this book. It’s written in three parts which together speak to the emotional, chronological, and sexual maturation of a gay man from the community that Sowvendra himself is from—a tribal community called the Santhals from the state of Jharkhand. An important fact about Sowvendra is that his previous book was banned. In fact, two of the writers on our shortlist have previously had books banned. In a country as multi-religious and multi-ethnic as India, there are constant sensitivities about how different groups are represented, and the pretext for banning books is usually that they might otherwise inflame sectarian sensibilities. Hansda’s banned book, The Adivasi Will Not Dance , was a book of short stories about his own community, which included one about a poor woman who was forced to sell herself into prostitution in return for bread. He’s a very fine writer and the book did well. But members of the Santhal community started protesting on the streets against their women being represented as “whores”, in this pornographic way. It became very dramatic. Effigies of Sowvendra were burned in the streets. The book was banned by the government. He was removed from his employment as a medical officer in a government hospital. It was terrifying. “Effigies of Sowvendra were burned in the streets. The book was banned by the government. It was terrifying” The book that he’s just written comes out of that context. He wrote it very fast, and I think it was, for him, a very angry gesture, a gesture of defiance towards everyone who had tried to suppress his previous book. (The ban was eventually removed, and he was reinstated in his position.) This book is intensely personal. It is divided into three acts: ‘Lover,’ ‘Friend’ and ‘Father.’ He refuses to comment on precisely how autobiographical it is, but the first section, which contains very explicit sex scenes, describes an extremely moving love story between two men. The protagonist is eventually rejected by his lover, however, and he’s devastated. He realises that this kind of love is very difficult to sustain in this social context, and he progressively abandons his own desires. There is a resolution of sorts at the end, but it’s a sad one. He resolves much of his conflict with his father and comes home. Father and son find peace working together in a garden. It is a kind of refuge."

"Yes, it’s a very unusual literary moment. Perumal Murugan published a novel recently called One Part Woman ."

"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."

"This is a wonderful debut. It’s a big novel: an old-fashioned, multigenerational novel, which feels neither like a debut nor a book written by somebody so young. This is the story of a young woman from Bangalore whose mother has recently died, who goes to Kashmir (where her mother spent a lot of time) to find out more about some of the hidden aspects of her life. Through that, the author tells a huge story about generations, class, religion—and about Kashmir itself, which as you probably know has a very contested history. Coincidentally, just around the time the novel came out, Kashmir, which had something of a semi-autonomous status within the Indian union, was annexed or reclaimed (depending on your political perspective) by the central government. Kashmir has been plunged into a media and information blackout ever since, and it’s very difficult to know what is going on there. So it’s really topical, this novel. “India’s relationship to Kashmir has always been strangely eroticized” India’s relationship to Kashmir has always been strangely eroticized. Kashmir is an exquisite place, a Himalayan state with lakes, cool climates and extraordinary landscapes. According to a prevalent Indian ideal of beauty, the fair-skinned people of Kashmir are considered particularly attractive. In this novel, the young woman investigating her mother’s past uncovers an erotic history between her mother and a Kashmiri man. And through this relationship, subtly and knowingly, the author unpacks the very troubled political, military and sexual relationship between India and Kashmir—a region which is of course also divided with Pakistan."

"This is another incredibly powerful novel. It’s written with almost no decoration: it’s a fast and extremely economic novel about a man and his attempt to escape from jail. It’s set in the time when Manoranjan himself was in jail in 1970s Kolkata. At that time, West Bengal—of which Kolkata is the capital—was gripped by revolutionary uprisings led by a movement of students, farmers and industrial workers known as the Naxals. In the early 1970s, there was a large-scale crackdown against the Naxals by the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. Hundreds were killed in military operations, and thousands jailed. Yes. He was poor and illiterate, and he joined the Naxals because they had been nice to him. They had saved his life. And he ended up in jail. This book describes a character rather like himself who ends up in jail in Calcutta in the 1970s. It’s a story full of suspense: it’s about the planning and execution of a jail-break. But along the way, it describes the entire universe of the jail: not only the prisoners, but also the people who are guarding them—who are also, of course, very low down in the social hierarchy, and in many ways hardly more privileged than the prisoners themselves. This is a powerful, angry, yet beautiful novel. It’s about terrifying desperation, but also relationships and hope. Yes. He’s a very, very funny individual, and the novel is full of hilarious insights. It’s very sardonic. Manoranjan declares that he writes out of anger. He declares that his books should be considered as weapons against the great inequality and injustice of Indian society. There is a kind of force to them—a smoldering, angry force. But he is himself hilarious. He takes for granted that the way that Indian society is organized is so unjust that it’s just something we can only ultimately laugh about. He talks about nearly everything, nearly every institution, as self-evidently illegitimate. It’s this perspective which makes his work so original. Some readers might find his assumption that the institutions of commerce or the law deserve so little respect surprising or shocking. But when you read the experiences of the characters in his novels, it seems like the only just conclusion. It’s easier to think of India as like Europe, rather than as like an individual European country. When we think of ‘Indian literature,’ it has the range and scale of ‘European literature.’ And if we are to make ‘Indian literature’ a reality, translation is fundamental. Without translation, there is no such thing as Indian literature, because no reader could ever approach it or see it. The old socialist government, like many similar socialist governments, treated literature as a very high calling, and put a lot of effort into translation. So you had many truly national literary stars. Writers like Premchand (who wrote in Hindi), Mahasweta Devi (who wrote in Bengali), or Qurratulain Hyder (who wrote in Urdu) were well known across the country. Translation has not done so well in recent decades. But it’s making a come-back now because the English-language publishers are fully aware that English is not necessarily the most exciting literary language in India today. If they want to reflect the range and quality of contemporary Indian writing, they really have to go into some of the other literatures. With the prize, we’re trying to help this revival of translation. We are committed to the idea of ‘Indian literature,’ and that means multilingual literature: literature written in 22 official languages, plus English. So translation is key. Encouraging more translations of better quality is very important, and next year we’re launching a whole new translation initiative, which will focus on improving the status of translation as a career."