The Philip Roth of Indian Fiction?
PW Talks to Abha Dawesar
by Michael Scharf -- Publishers Weekly, 4/10/2006
After Miniplanner (a love quadrangle from the perspective of a gay man) and Babyji (rich girl gets sapphic with servant) comes That Summer in Paris (Reviews, March 6), a literary May-December romance between aspiring novelist Maya, 25, and Indian Nobel laureate Prem Rustum, 75.
By writing so frankly about sex and ethnicity, are you doing for Indian fiction what Philip Roth and Saul Bellow did for Jewish fiction in the '50s and '60s?
Not quite. But India is in the throes of some sort of sexual revolution. Every time I go back, I'm struck by the number of young urban Indians of the larger middle class—I'm not speaking of the super-rich—who are doing things, sexually, that would definitely not have happened 10 years ago.. So in that sense there may some sort of parallel to what happened here in the '60s, though a lot of the Indian writers seem to stay away from it. Babyji, which is set in India, was a lot more hotly debated there than Miniplanner, which is set in New York.
It's surprising that your books, including That Summer in Paris, aren't available in the U.K.
I grew up in India, where my family continues to live, and have lived in New York for the last 11 years. What I've heard time and again from people in publishing is that the U.K. has somany Indian writers of their own that they're trying to publish, that there's a little of, you know, that going on.
You have three books—and there are triangles in all of them—you set one up within the first few pages of That Summer. Do you find triangles productive for you as a writer?
I hate to admit it, but I never really think about the plot as I get into it, and then I realize that I have a triangle. And I sort of make do with it.
Is Prem Rustum an attempt to get a hold of the legacy of the male Indian writer?
No. I was seeking something... older, wiser, a sort of spiritual guru. You can't just go and find one. I thought, as I wrote, that maybe Prem could be one for me, but then I think it's really the book that is a godfather of sorts. I was very young as a writer when I wrote Miniplanner, and Babyji was sort of my adolescence. I was ready to move on.
