Anindita Ghose on decoding India’s political zeitgeist in her debut novel

Anindita Ghose is a writer and editor based in Mumbai. She holds postgraduate degrees in linguistics from the University of Mumbai and journalism from Columbia University. In 2019, she was a Hawthornden Writing Fellow in Scotland. The Illuminated, her first novel, made it to the prestigious HWR-Nielsen top 50 fiction bestsellers list this month.

The novel connects the personal grief and struggle of a mother (Shashi) and her daughter (Tara) to the larger socio-political concerns in contemporary India, which is grappling with a rise in fundamentalism as it impacts her protagonists’ lives.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

When did you realise you had a novel in you?

I always wanted to be a writer, which I think is true for most novelists. You don’t become one overnight. But I needed to have a career because that’s what I knew to be an adult rite of passage, and so I chose journalism. As a journalist, I was frequently approached by commissioning editors to work on non-fiction books but it never seemed like quite the draw. I do know the exact day I started thinking about this novel. It was in August 2015 at the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival in Thimphu, Bhutan. At the festival, a writer had spoken very eloquently about how writing fiction is sometimes about knowing your destination and sometimes just about seeing what your headlights reveal. I realised that writing fiction is what I really wanted to do even though I had no idea where it would go.

I found The Illuminated, a page-turner, a novel about perception. What was the thought behind the title?

Thank you, Joydeep. ‘Page turner’ always brings to mind E.M. Forster’s maxim about the novel: “It can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next.”

The Illuminated has a lunar scheme. It started off with the names of the women to the chapter titles and eventually expanded to the metaphor of light. The metaphor of light is a powerful one from the Upanishads (Hindu sacred treatises written in Sanskrit expounding ancient Vedic texts) to Rumi to Audrey Lorde. I was interested in questioning the accepted hierarchy of the solar system. Why must our lives revolve around the sun?

How did you come up with the mother-daughter characters of Shashi and Tara?

I was interested in telling a story through the perspective of different women and a mother-daughter duo with their shared social background but different psychological makeup seemed like a good way to do it.

How difficult is the craft of delving deep into South Asian female characters, who are well-rounded? How did you go about delineating each of these characters who have been endowed with distinctive personal traits?

Growing up, it was hard to find well-rounded women in books beyond the Jane Austen-George Eliot space. But then suddenly there was Ammu in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Nazneen in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, who were not only complex, but also South Asian. In The Illuminated, I was interested in creating female characters who were dissatisfied with the hand they were served. I was keen on female friendships that went beyond societal barriers. And I wanted them to have personal ambition that went beyond love and marriage.

Was it a conscious decision to suffuse the novel with mythology and Sanskrit in the backdrop of India’s right-wing?

One of the questions I was interested in is ‘what’s the other story?’ Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to love and erotica and also socio-political commentary. But when we think of Sanskrit now, we only think of shlokas (Sanskrit verse) and liturgical texts. I wanted to introduce readers to a different dimension of the language, to reclaim it from its associations with religious chauvinism.