INTERVIEW

Neel Mukherjee is the author of A Life Apart, The Lives of Others and, most recently, A State of Freedom. Here, he talks about his writing and his life

Q. What was the germ of this book?

An idea, as always: the wish to sabotage realism from within while keeping its surface effects, purposes and moral focus intact. Another idea: to see how much of the principles of coherence we can take away from the novel and still leave something standing that can answer to the name of ‘novel’; with the connective tissue taken out, if you will.

Q. You switch between dense realism and a kind of supernatural haunting—is that a metaphor for the social world?

I don’t think of the rubbing of the two polarities in the novel against each other as metaphorical but instead as a formal experiment. How much can realism accommodate within its boundaries? I wanted the foundations of the novel to be based on a large spectrum of the idea of migration, not only its realist aspects but also its metaphorical resonances (a ghost is, in some sense, an unsuccessful migrant).

Q. How do you identify yourself among diaspora writers, Indian writers?

I don’t see myself as part of the world of diaspora writers. I see myself as an Indian writer who lives partly in the UK, partly in the USA and partly in India. I think my Indian contemporaries are doing amazing work, both in fiction and non-fiction. I particularly admire Anjali Joseph, Aatish Taseer, Aman Sethi, Sonia Faleiro, Tabish Khair, Raghu Karnad. They are serious, intelligent writers, the real deal. They look at the world carefully and crucially, they have a vision.

Q. Did you carry the many places in India here from your own life?

Yes, some of them, but what makes you think that I don’t visit and spend large chunks of time in India? I wanted the book to be a slap across the faces of the useless metropolitan chatterers who think that because I live abroad, I have somehow lost my ‘authenticity’ and traded my ability to write about India truthfully. Well, f*** them. Intelligent people do not ask where a writer lives but exactly the opposite: the places that live inside a writer.