The Indian diaspora is often written about, but not the stories of migrants within the country, Anjum Hasan tells Neha Bhatt
Anjum Hasan’s second novel Neti, Neti (Not This, Not This) follows a young girl — Sophie Das, who we met in her debut book — into adulthood, from Shillong to Bangalore. Hasan gets under the skin of the big city, the chaos and the changing urban landscape, till the longing for the more familiar, gentle pace of life in Shillong takes over. In the process, the author tells us in an email interview, she has explored different ways of writing about Indian cities, a subject which forms the core of both her novels.
How has your experience observing the hurriedly changing Bangalore been, having lived there for a while now?
To the extent that I consider any place home, Bangalore is home for me. The speed at which things change in Bangalore is frightening but the other side of the same coin is that it’s a remarkably hospitable city, it takes all manner of changes in.
Neti, Neti begins many years after your first novel, Lunatic in my Head, ended. How was the transition between writing about a quiet hill town to a loud, buzzing city?
I enjoyed the transition. Even though I’m describing a sense of loss, I’m also exploring ways in which one can write about an Indian city, and that was exciting. Also, I wouldn’t like to think of it as “sweet, small town and big bad city”. It’s more complex than that, I think.
Your new book is distinctly less lyrical than your first, less mystic, less gentle and more dramatic.
The style followed from the subject matter. Also, when I’m inside a book, my other writing seems very far away so I wasn’t consciously developing a new style. This is just the voice that naturally came to me when I worked on the book.
What made you follow Sophie, your protagonist, also a character from your previous book, into adulthood? Is her story partly autobiographical?
I thought the fantasy life she lived as a child would be interesting to track into adulthood. Sophie is not me, though like her I did move from Shillong to Bangalore.
You highlight a popular paradox of wanting to move away from a small town at the first opportunity, yet nursing a great longing for the same familiar surroundings after one has spent some time in the big city . Is it a case of the grass being greener on the other side or is there more to it?
I think there’s something atavistic to it — possibly many of us have this longing to go back to the quiet, pastoral roots of human existence, and feel oppressed among buildings and cars and streets. And yet we are increasingly urban creatures — we need and want the city. So that’s the paradox and we try to create different escape routes from it.
In parts, your protagonist feels she belongs in this new space, though in moments that sense of belonging withers away. Are we often delusional about such a sense of “belonging”?
One has to develop a new understanding of belonging. In India we tend to think of it in terms of language and ethnic commonalties. But at the same time we’re a country of migrants. People are always moving between cities, from village to city, from town to town. I think it’s time we stopped thinking of this as an oddity or an aberration and told more stories about it. We tell stories about the Indian diaspora, but what about the stories of people who move within the country?
Sophie’s escape route takes her back to her hometown. Can one imagine settling back into the slow pace of a hill town having been in the rush of a big city?
People make different choices about where they want to live; some people who leave Shillong to study and work return to the town, many don’t. What I’m more interested in is perception — how do you imagine the place you left behind? How do you connect with the place you live in? Do you create your own version of it? Are you curious about how other people live in it? In Bangalore, when Sophie sees the wandering minstrels through her window, or when she sees labourers on a construction site, she realises that they live in a different city. Those moments interest me most. It’s also about the connection or lack of it between fantasy and how things actually turn out to be. There’s a constant play in the novel between these two planes and Sophie is caught in that — the life around her and the life in her head.
Would you consider returning to Shillong and writing more about that life?
I really enjoyed writing about Bangalore and the new novel I’m working on is partly set here too (a book connected with the world of art). But I’m not done with the North-east. I would love to write more books set there even though I’m not sure yet what they will be about!
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There is much talk of some good writing from the North-east.
I think the connection between ethnic identity and writing is a tricky one. Writing is often about questioning one’s given identity, playing with it, subverting it. So this category “North-east literature” is puzzling to me. There are some who tell stories of the North-east — some live there, some of them don’t. Some of it is interesting, some isn’t. I think a writer should be judged on his/her own terms. I don’t like the idea of putting writers in large boxes.
NETI, NETI (NOT THIS, NOT THIS)
Author: Anjum Hasan
Publisher: Roli Books
Pages: 287
Price: Rs 295
