‘Our ideas of love, romance must change’

Payal Dhar, 45, doesn’t write romances. She writes for the young adult, she says, and love just happens to be a part of their lives. What makes her books stand out is the vast array of relationship formats she explores.

Her novels feature chosen families based on trust rather than birth; single mothers raising children with each others’ support; traditional families; traditional but dysfunctional families.

Her latest novel, It Has No Name (Red Panda, 2021), is the coming-of-age story of a lesbian. The protagonist is a teen girl, who doesn’t want to be girly, and the story tracks her life after she moves back to a small town where she was bullied as a child.

“I knew by the age of seven that I wanted to be a writer, but of course it was a long time before I figured out what that really meant,” Dhar says. “When I started out, in journalism and publishing, writing fiction was on my mind. It took almost a decade before my first novel was published.”

That first novel was A Shadow in Eternity (Zubaan, 2006), a fantasy / adventure work.

It Has No Name is her tenth book. “I think we have a great deal of visibility of different kinds of people in our literature in India, but our ideas of love, romance, and commitment remain very traditional, conservative, narrow-minded even. Even stories of queer love are told from cishet norms. I would love to see that change,” Dhar says. “Mainstream notions of what relationships are, what healthy relationships are, and so on, need to be questioned. Patriarchy needs to be challenged; notions of the family need to be challenged.”

In her personal life, she isn’t romantic at all, Dhar says. “As an autistic person, I don’t ‘get’ romance, really. I also am bad at reading between the lines. But in terms of love, I think I’m lucky to have what I need.”

Mainstream notions of what relationships are, need to be questioned. Patriarchy needs to be challenged; notions of the family need to be challenged.