Meet the Indian women wowing the West with their first novels

Shubhangi Swarup began working on her acclaimed first novel Latitudes of Longing in 2011, travelling for research to the Andaman Islands, Myanmar, Arunachal Pradesh, Bhutan, Ladakh and Kashmir over the next seven years. “Many people said, why don’t you write things you know,” she recalls. “Why should my creativity be limited by patriarchy? I grew up reading Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh who wrote wonderful travelogues, but where are the travelogues by women?”Swarup had to finish her work within the daylight hours, ask local friends for help after being followed, and cut a trip short because of a stalking episode. As a result, the research took more time and money. “My own vulnerabilities allowed me to connect with the vulnerability in each character,” she says. “It opened my eyes to the small creatures and narratives that the lofty stories ignore, like geckos and crabs and the history of pebbles and leaves.” The novel went on to win the Tata Literature Live Prize for debut fiction, was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature, and was recently recommended by Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow’s book club. medium77347937Swarup is among a set of first-time women writers who have recently made a splash in the literary world. Recently, Avni Doshi’s first book Burnt Sugar (Girl in White Cotton in India) was included in the shortlist for the Booker Prize. New York-based Megha Majumdar’s first novel A Burning, which traces the impact of a train blast on the lives of a young Muslim slum dweller, her PT teacher and a transwoman in Kolkata, was roundly applauded by western reviewers. Bengaluru-born Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field, which won the JCB Prize, Amrita Mahale’s Milk Teeth about a changing Bombay in the ’90s, and Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line about child kidnappings in a slum, have all been widely celebrated.medium nocaption78186877 “It’s important to see people like yourself writing and being represented in literature — it offers a kind of permission to explore something that might have seemed implausible,” Dubai-based Doshi told TOI over email. “For me, seeing Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai receive accolades created a sense that there was space in the literary world for new stories and voices.” Doshi wrote seven drafts of the book in eight years with different points of view and voices, a period she describes as a “dark and difficult journey”.Doshi’s agent, writer and publishing commentator Kanishka Gupta points out that the nomination is significant because the book was first published in India, almost a year before the UK. “"It also happened to be the only book from south Asia in the longlist, in a year in which quite a few heavyweight writers from the region were eligible for the prize.”Rahul Soni, executive editor at HarperCollins India who commissioned Doshi, Vijay and Swarup’s books, says they are very different in their aims, structure and settings. “The common thread is that they are supremely ambitious works, telling important stories and telling them well.”Women writers are gaining prominence in literary fiction, but also other genres such as YA (young adult), science fiction and horror, says Gupta. Women are taking more risks and experimenting in their books, he says. medium nocaption77347961Often, the risks are literal, not just literary. Swarup recalls hiding her experiences with sexual harassment from her loved ones. “I took it all as part and parcel of being a woman writer until the MeToo movement, when I realised it shouldn’t be,” she says. “I realised how dangerous my silence was, yet no one really asks these questions in interviews, lest it reveal how unequal the experience of writing can be.”A 2019 essay in The Atlantic highlighted the persistence of the “gender seriousness gap” in writing, where men’s work is assumed to have more weight. “A white, male novelist is a novelist first and foremost. He doesn’t require any explanation,” Doshi says. “Those of other colours or genders would have to justify what they are doing, to come up with a reason for their very existence.” Swarup points out how people focus on the theme of nature in her novel, but not climate change.The perception of an artist still remains “obnoxiously patriarchal”, with physical isolation and boozy evenings, she says. “For my debut, I relied heavily on residencies and fellowships to get work done, and festivals to promote the book,” she says. “Now that I am a mother, those options suddenly don’t exist for me as they are only for authors and don’t accommodate artists as primary caregivers.”Many female authors also have to deal with the assumption that their fiction is a thinly-veiled version of their lives. “I’ve stopped taking the question seriously. Many of my female peers get asked the same kinds of questions,” says Doshi, whose book explores a mother-daughter relationship.Vijay questions the use of labels such as ‘women-centric’ narratives for her work. “The women writers I most admire are doing work far too subtle and expansive to be thus categorised. Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing, for instance, doesn’t even put humans at the centre of the narrative. The greatest favour we, as a reading public, can do for writers like Shubhangi, I think, is to refrain from categorisation, and allow them to write in a way that is as wild and unfettered as possible,” she says. medium nocaption77347987However, Indian writers still have to jump through hoops to break into publishing in the West. Lavanya Lakshminarayan had a first-hand experience of this when she pitched her first speculative fiction novel Analog/Virtual at a US conference. Set in a futuristic Bengaluru run by a corporation and divided by technological disparity, “it is a feminist critique of the world we inhabit, but it was dismissed outright,” she says. “It eventually emerged that I did not adequately represent the ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ perspective of India, which my second manuscript was encouraged to do.”The Booker is still a Westward-facing award, with Western agents and editors as gatekeepers, Soni points out. “It is rarer still for books that have been acquired, edited and published in India to land on these awards lists,” he says. While it is inspiring for her to see women writers receive recognition, Lakshminarayan points out that there is a need for more diverse perspectives across genres. “An ‘authentic’ Indian work seems to be one that includes exotic locations, high drama, emotional characters, mysticism and gods of all kinds — ideas which arise from the West’s inability to outgrow the postcolonial gaze,” she says. Vijay has a different take: “There will always be a market in the West for the usual Indian clichés. But I would be lying if I said nothing has changed. The success of a novel like Vivek Shanbag’s Ghachar Ghochar, for example, is proof that Indian novels don’t need to sing the old spices-and-spirituality tune in order to find an audience in the West,” she says.Untitled Carousel 76783379