Writing in Past Continuous

An interview with Sunjeev Sahota

A version of this interview was originally published in India Today.

By his own admission, British writer Sunjeev Sahota’s novels “tend to come down to a few brown people living in north England or India”. But within this framework, Sahota wove richly detailed lives and unique voices in his first two novels: Ours are the Streets (2011) and The Year of the Runaways (2015), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. China Room, his third, also weaves together past and present, moving between the late ’20s and ’90s. Geography and ancestry bind the stories of a young British man spending his summer in the family village in Punjab, and his great-grandmother, one of three women married to three brothers in a country that is, as a character says, “waiting for us to raise her on to our shoulders and up to the light”. Sahota spoke with Sonal Shah about the novel and more in a video call.

Q. From Salman Rushdie, whose work was your introduction to novels, to Jhumpa Lahiri, who often speaks of her ‘linguistic exile’, writing in English is fraught for many (usually urban) diaspora authors. What’s your relationship with language, and has it been shaped by your family’s rural roots in Punjab?

The idea of home is quite a vexed one for me. I never felt quite at home in any particular land – when I’m in Punjab I’m always made to feel as if I am English or British. Though I’ve grown up in the UK I was never quite able to feel English either. But the English language – because it is just so capacious, infinitely changeable, it has undergone so many transformations of its own – for me the English language is what I’ve grown up in. The instability of the language has always felt quite comfortable to me because it mirrors the instability that I feel myself. I’m never more at home than when I’m reading. The English language is home for me. Sanctuary.

Q. Did you approach the historical setting of China Room differently from the more contemporary worlds of your previous books?

It wasn’t that different. I see all my characters, regardless of gender or time period, as capable of feeling any and all emotions. Obviously, some of the women in the historical strand of China Room aren’t able to voice or act upon their feelings the way male characters might. But they can certainly feel as calculating, as wronged, as aroused, ambitious.

There wasn’t that much research required, because I know the Independence movement, which is the backdrop to the historical section, really well, because it had such an impact on my family. A branch of my family had to flee after Partition, leaving in the middle of the night to cross the border. And because I know rural Punjab quite well and go there often, it wasn’t difficult to draw upon that, or to ask my grandmother in India what the practicalities of life were like. It’s a cliché to say that India exists in many different centuries, but in some rural places, attitudes and practices haven’t changed much in the past hundred years.

Q. Were there certain things that felt taboo to ask about or even imagine?

The seed of the story is that one of my great-grandmothers was apparently one of four women married to one of four brothers. None of them knew which husband was theirs until a year later when they saw who was holding whose baby. It was always spoken about with a degree of levity – ‘ ah those innocent and unquestioning ancestors’ – but, to me, it seemed like quite a painful, dark story. Who knows how much the story has been embellished over the decades. Family lore does get changed. But I didn’t feel any kind of pushback. My family is largely uninterested in what I write or how I write. It doesn’t’ really take up that much space in my extended family’s lives, and I encourage that.

Q. One of the things I thought was very well done in Runaways was the moral ambiguity of north Indian masculinity, particularly with respect to Randeep. There’s an echo of this in the character of Suraj as well in China Room. Though these characters are decades apart, is there some kind of persistent feature of South Asian masculinity and sexuality that connects them?

I’ve not made that direct connection, but they both start of as being quite immature and being full of this kind of violence inside them that they don’t know how to acknowledge. I don’t know if that’s feature of South Asian masculinity or not, but for both of those characters it’s something that finds it’s release in quite horrific ways. In Suraj’s case it’s this profound deception, which he carries out in what we would consider rape. And in Randeep’s case, it’s a sexual assault. That is as a result of kind of this unacknowledged, pent-up, roiling kind of violence they have inside them.

What’s put that violence there is probably a mixture of lots of things. What puts violence inside anyone? Whether it is their place in their family, or in society at large, what they feel they’re being denied – I think that’s quite a big part of it for Suraj: the sense that he’s not in control of his life. With both Suraj and Randeep they have this sense of entitlement as well. Randeep because he’s the son of a government employee and Suraj just feels he’s owed a lot more in life than he’s given. That sense of entitlement urges them to this kind of behavior.  Suraj is a very tricky character, because he commits this profound act of deception but then he’s also, by the end quite sure he’s [another character’s] lover and willing to do a lot for her.

Q. It almost felt like this historical couple is re-enacting a kind of romantic Punjabi folktale. We often celebrate the beauty of stories like Heer Ranjha for example, without maybe acknowledging the coercion.

It seems to me coercion has always been part of it. Leaving anything unexamined is dangerous because it festers and allows others, with different agendas, to lay claim on and shape disaffection. Artists, writers, filmmakers, we should be at the vanguard of such questions and put them forward as honestly as we can.

That triangle in China Room is complicated. Suraj and Meher confess their love for each other, but I wonder how much of that love is corrupted by these power dynamics. Meher says she loves Suraj. But how much of that is a projection of her desire to be free? Is she just trying to escape? And Suraj says he loves Meher, but how much of that is his desire to, as he says, destroy the world?

Q. You’ve described different kinds of hate crimes or violent discrimination towards different generations of immigrants in your novels – where do you think we stand now in terms of the forms of violence towards perceived outsiders?

It’s quite horrifying to see, for example, the violence inflicted on people from China and East Asia at the moment –increased levels of harassment of members of that community in the UK, the US and perhaps elsewhere. And on the back of the Brexit referendum we saw an increase in racial violence as well; an increase in anti-Semitism which we’re seeing in western Europe – so it feels like we’re in a very precarious place, and we can never be complacent. Especially when you’ve got leaders like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Duterte. These men who give a lot of credence to the idea of scapegoating immigrants and the othering of people. It feels like we’re in quite a dangerous space at the moment.

Q. I think there’s a tendency in a lot of recent novels to try and respond to these current crises very quickly. How do you think about the relationship between what’s in the news, and how it gets folded into fiction?

The challenge is that it’s too soon. We don’t actually know what’s happened. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace sixty years after the Napoleonic Wars, there’s a reason for that. It takes time for things to settle to even start to get a handle on them. It hasn’t even crossed my mind to write a novel that would involve the pandemic. It doesn’t appeal to me because it just feels like it’s not something I’ve lived through yet or something I want to process yet. It’s just happening to me in the way that a sunrise happens. You have to put your arm around it, look under it, look around it. At the moment it’s just a litany of facts. It’s not the stuff of fiction yet.

Q. As a teacher of creative writing, what excites you most about your students’ ideas or work, and what worries you most?

What I look for as a reader—and I try to put it in my writing practice as well: Give me something new. It could be subject matter, style, form, structure, or just in the way you notice things—but I like that sense of something new. It’s a lot to ask of writers who are just starting out, but that’s what really excites me. Or, just find that burning bush that you really want to write about. When the work’s good it’s because the student is tapping into something that they really feel close to or are passionate about; there’s something inside them that they really need to get on the page.

What worries or concerns me I suppose is when I see students who want to be writers rather than wanting to write, which is different, isn’t it? The idea of being a writer is neither here nor there. But what I think is worth aiming for is to try and get your consciousness and the way you see the world, get that on to paper, or on to the screen. There’s a lot said about the attention spans of younger people, but I don’t agree with that; we’re not going to have long, three-page descriptions of a scene anymore. The form of the novel and the style is changing to accommodate the fact that people are thinking differently, because people’s thinking is being influenced by the internet, by Instagram. That will change the way they use language. Literature will have to change to accommodate that. Literature is made by people, and as people start changing the way they process information, the novel will change as well.

Q. You’ve given almost equal weight in your work to events in the home country and in the UK. Have reviews and reactions of readers in the west been markedly different from those living in South Asia?

With China Room it’s too early to tell, it’s just come out in India. The readers in India of Runaways tended to be of a particular strata of Indian society who are quite well-versed in literature. When they spoke to me about The Runaways they seemed surprised that this level of caste violence was happening. And I was surprised that they were surprised. They seemed kind of open-eyed about it. And I saw a degree of shame, whereas the narrative about India was very much India shining and all that. I don’t know how much the media in India is on the front foot in reporting these things. That’s always a vexed question, about the media in South Asia.

What made me smile was that Indian readers would say, ‘The bits in India were all very sad and unsurprising, but what happens in England was really shocking; that was brilliant, riveting’. And the English readers would say ‘the bit in England was fine, but the bit in India was really exciting.’ It’s almost like people don’t recognize representations of themselves or of their own countries, but it’s always quite easy to see the other much more rapidly. They can’t actually see what’s going on in their backyard in the same way.

Q. Stylistically, each of your novels is very different. Do you consciously play with format and style or does the form emerge more organically from the story you’re trying to tell?

I really like this kind of terse lyricism, so they’ve all got that about them. But the way they express their concerns is quite different, in terms of their form, which is the only intellectually honest way I can write. It’s a way of putting characters first by letting the book form around their needs.

Q. What are you working on now?

When I started China Room, the idea of the doppelganger as a symbol of danger or a dark portent was quite important. It kind of transmuted to the narrator being a version of me. The idea still fascinates me. Maybe my next novel is going to take that more surreal tone.

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