Complicating the Idea of India: A Conversation with Aruni Kashyap
Indian literature is extremely diverse, spreading over multiple vernaculars and dialects, each with vibrant histories. Indian writing in English also represents an old body of work that long precedes the country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Despite this dynamic literary landscape, literature from India’s Northeast—a self-sufficient region with a mélange of languages, cultures, and peoples—has remained relatively obscure to the wider world until recently. In the last two or so decades, a number of outstanding writers and translators of fiction in English have emerged from this region, dispelling its obscure position and challenging the way Indian literature is read globally.
One prominent name associated with this dynamic wave of storytelling is Aruni Kashyap. Consider this sentence of his: “He felt like he shouldn’t be there; like that classmate who came to school with long nails and smelly clothes and got bullied by everyone.” If one wanted to find the ethos of India’s Northeast, this one sentence would suffice. The region’s marked seclusion vis-à-vis India’s territorial mainland is portrayed in Aruni’s latest book, His Father’s Disease (Context, 2019). His characters are ordinary people who draw from a lineage deeply rooted in the environment and cultures of Assam, one of eight Northeast Indian states. Aruni scoops the extraordinary from the mundane, like many good writers of fiction. In addition, he captures the everyday fully loaded with the nuanced histories of the place he comes from. His position as a writer of fiction from Assam is an urgent one given his ability to portray India’s complex Northeast. Tales of insurgency and violence, of myth and history, of sexuality and demography, of diasporic and local frontiers make his new collection of ten short stories simply an enthralling experience. These stories do not just foreground the region; they offer different lenses for the readers to look at it. I spoke with Aruni about how his book explores language, history, and politics from India’s Northeast.
Dhrijyoti Kalita: Congratulations on His Father’s Disease. Your book begins with a story of unease titled “Skylark Girl.” The main character in the story, who is also incidentally a fiction writer from India’s Northeastern region, finds himself in a very uneasy position when he encounters his colleagues in a conference in Delhi, in mainland India. A volley of questions is thrown at him quite abruptly just because he has chosen to write on something that is not insurgency—an issue close to Northeast India that often gets fetishized in the mainstream Indian narrative. What do you want to imply in this story?
Aruni Kashyap: India’s Northeast, as you know, is one of the most ethnically diverse regions of the world with numerous tribes and indigenous communities; this also means that it is one of the most misunderstood and poorly represented regions of the world. Thus, it has been at the receiving end of state apathy, leading to many small and big armed militant movements on ethnic lines that demand more development or political autonomy. I grew up in Assam, one of the states in India’s Northeast, under the shadow of the gun. I often write about life in this region, but as a writer from an underrepresented or misunderstood literary tradition and region, I have often been expected to write a certain kind of story by the mainstream literary establishment. If I write stories set in my home state, I am asked, “Why do you write stories set in Northeast India so often? When are you going to write a story set in Delhi or Bombay?” It is like asking N. Scott Momaday, “Why are you setting your fiction in Oklahoma?” Or it is like asking Louise Erdrich to prove her caliber by asking her to write only about non-native people as if that is a higher degree of artistic achievement. Similarly, if I write a story that foregrounds oral cultures, I am asked why I decided not to write about the state and its excesses, or the violence of the militants against common people. When I was curating the stories for this collection, I was thinking about what it means to be a writer from a poorly represented, misunderstood region, when every time we discuss the region in the mainstream, the terms of the conversation are often set by the dominant culture. So, I decided to create an audience-accommodation atmosphere in the first story—a courtyard, a passage, that would enable me to retain the flavor of my culture, my rootedness, but also make it accessible for the audience. I wasn’t interested in compromise because I would build this passage or courtyard with my brick and mortar, set the temperature inside it according to my requirements, but it would allow someone outside my culture a safe passageway to my world. I thought once the reader entered this space, I could then make them sit down and start telling the story. Also, now that the reader is in my house, I can set the terms of this conversation: sit down quietly, let me tell you a story. Often, mainstream that wants to patronize, represent underrepresented literary traditions, are not interested in listening. So, this is a triumph already for me, that I can make someone listen.
DK: The character in “Skylark Girl” is also a victim of language. He does not speak English and feels uncomfortable in the company of others in the conference who speak fluent English—often a marker of class in India. I know you are a bilingual writer and a translator. As a postcolonial writer from a newly emerging Anglophone literary tradition, how will you elaborate on the linguistic imbalances in a multilingual country like India?
AK: India has more than twenty official languages and thousands of other languages. The literary traditions of most of these languages date back to at least a thousand years. My language, Assamese, has written works dating back to the 5th century and has consistently produced literature since then to the present date. These are durable, sustained literary traditions. The postcolonial experience is also about epistemological violence, where native literary traditions were suppressed so that English could replace them. In India, this project largely failed because we absorbed English and turned it into our own. Indeed, a sizeable monolingual group of writers who work in English disproportionally represents what the world understands as “Indian literature.” This has always troubled me because I grew up reading British and American writings in English, as well as Russian literature in translation, Assamese novels, and Bengali novels. I try to rectify this imbalance that you talk about by regularly writing and translating literary works from the Assamese language to English. I have written several novellas in Assamese as well as a novel that was published in 2019. I think Indian writers must remain deeply connected to regional literary cultures in India and support, promote them, to cure this imbalance. The Indian experience is multilingual. That is why the “Indian English Writer” is broadly rejected and challenged in India. I believe I have never faced that challenge because Indian readers see me as an Assamese writer who works in Assamese and English.
DK: In “Skylark Girl” the writer-character is required to get his story translated to English to be able to attend a conference in Delhi. To what extent does translation play a role in the promotion of regional languages? Does translation also diminish the possibilities of regional and world literatures to emerge?
AK: I think translation is crucial, but at the same time, we have to work with the assumption that not everything is affable. We should be ready to gain and lose in the process. I couldn’t have read many of the European greats if they hadn’t been translated to English, Assamese, or Bengali. I read Pablo Neruda’s autobiography first in Assamese. I also read One Hundred Years of Solitude and Kafka first in Assamese translations.
DK: G. Pandey, who teaches at Emory University, has a write-up on Indian multilingualism, a provocative piece in which Pandey reminisces about a time when India used to pride itself on its multilingualism. He observes a sharp distinction at the moment with the dominance of more and more English speakers. He thinks that the nation has now entered a new phase in history with the full internalization of the English language by its citizens. Do you feel the same?
AK: I haven’t read Dr. Pandey’s article, so I don’t want to comment on that. But my upbringing has been multilingual. I spoke Assamese and English at home. At school, I spoke English and Hindi. All my cousins went to schools where the medium of instruction was the Assamese language; they knew how to read and write English but stumbled in speaking. They also stumbled speaking in Hindi but understood it correctly. My Hindi wasn’t good enough until 2004 when I moved to North India and had to use it regularly. We have internalized the English language, but we have always internalized many languages. I also think there are many different kinds of Indian Englishes, such as Assamese-English, Hinglish, etc. There are now movies made in Hinglish. We are a genuinely multilingual society. English is one of those languages and serves as a lingua franca in large parts of the country.
DK: Northeast India is a land vitally endowed with an assortment of stories and so betrays the danger of modern myth creation, you know, of reiterating “a single story.” What does storytelling mean for Northeast India?
AK: Like any embattled region, storytelling is the vehicle of human rights discourse. Any narrative is an act of storytelling, and it is only when these stories circulate, travel outside their original shores, that a conversation about justice is possible. In that way, storytelling from underrepresented regions is a way of promoting and ensuring justice. There is a significant body of Indian-American writers who tell diverse Indian stories in America, but fiction with tribal, indigenous, or lower caste characters from Northeast India—as you would see in my stories—is rarely in Indian-American fiction or most of the Indian fiction published in North America. In that way, I believe my stories complicate and expand the idea of India in this country. It does the same in South Asia, where stories from my region continue to be less visible. In the last ten years, I have seen more writers from the Northeast getting published, but there is a long, very long way to go!
DK: The story “His Father’s Disease” portrays the homosexual flings of a married person in a small hamlet in Assam. Why does the story use the term disease? Is there a politics that concerns the region you belong to in the way you define disease in the story?
AK: “His Father’s Disease” is inspired by true incidents that I witnessed in our village. The story is told through the perspective of a rural woman who doesn’t understand why her son has sex with men and won’t marry. She concludes that he is “diseased” and accepts him as he is. In our village, there is no word for homosexuality, but there is awareness and even tacit acceptance of queer behavior. People talk about men sleeping with men, women desiring women, in everyday conversations, but they also legitimize it for themselves by calling it “disease.” This is the only way they can make sense of this phenomenon. I have seen the lives of many queer men in India who don’t have the freedom I have, to lead a life on their terms. I wanted to write about this but also extend the metaphor of disease. It is a diseased society that doesn’t allow two men who love each other to be together. The tragic ending of the story points toward that. At the same time, the story enables me to break down the machismo of the Indian state by depicting a gay soldier desiring a colonized subject and even building a tender relationship with him. To make queer identities acceptable and commonplace, we must queer the state, and I thought this was a way of doing that. The story collection explores the metaphor of disease by extending it. In “Bizi Colony,” the story about a family that is trying to cope with the tragedy of its mentally ill son, the father repeatedly says, “We are living in a state of terror,” because they don’t know what is going to happen next. In “After Anthropology,” set in the Midwest, we see the disease of racism in Matt’s father’s character who doesn’t like his son’s husband’s presence in his house because of homophobia and racism—Matt’s husband is Indian. You will see American racism, of what it means to be brown and a new immigrant, in “The Umricans” and “Minnesota Nice.” Thus, “His Father’s Disease” is both a commentary on the society and the diseased state that commits excess on its citizens, dehumanizing and erasing them.
DK: “Skylark Girl” is one of my favorite stories in the collection. It is a mixed bag of contemporary and folk traditions. Do you see this type of fiction as magic realist? Or do you prefer other names? I imagine you have more such stories lined up for your future works?
AK: Thank you. Yes, I think it is safe to call it magic realist, for lack of a better term. It is my way of allowing the folk, the oral, to the realm of the fixed, modern, printed text. I have written several stories that are inspired by folk narratives.
Aruni Kashyap (@arunikashyap) teaches Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. He comes from the Northeast Indian state of Assam. Aruni writes on Northeast Indian issues in various national and international journals and newspapers. He has also edited a new collection of fifteen short stories by writers from Assam, How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency (Harper Collins India, 2020). His first novel, The House with a Thousand Stories (Penguin Random House, 2013), was a period-based work that took a hard look at the state-sponsored secret killings of the families of insurgents in Assam during the late nineties and early 2000s. CNN has praised Aruni as “one of the most original and honest voices from contemporary India, and not just India’s north-east.”
Dhrijyoti Kalita is a doctoral candidate in South Asian literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and a graduate fellow at the university’s Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. His research explores the intersection of postcolonial Northeast Indian literatures and environmental studies. He is a writer and translator and works in both Assamese and English. He is currently translating an Assamese novel that documents the plight of ecological migrants in the state.