Anuja Chauhan, Navtej Sarna on fiction as family history

From conniving aunts to mysterious people in family photograph authors Anuja Chauhan and Navtej Sarna discussed what it takes to write about families and family histories in the world of fiction, with Indrajit Hazra at the Times LitFesr on Sunday.
Family features very strongly in the works of both the authors. Talking about how they deal with as Hazra puts it,”a massive beast called family” Sarna said “it would be difficult to think of any fictional book which in some way or the other is not dealing with family.Whether it is a troubled childhood, a divorcing couple or an extramarital affair or a three generation saga whatever you call it I think its family. Infact family history is becoming a genre more in the non-fiction sense.
Increasingly with the digitization of our records more and more people are digging into family history beyond what they could hear from their grandmothers. So I think that it is a kind of an accepted non-fiction writing today.”
Anuja Chauhan said that she treaded into writing about families because of the family stories she heard.
“The first stories you hear are family stories. All the did you knows and don’t knows. Everyone’s memory of the youth is quite fresh and it comes back when you write.
Nobody is complete till they are in there with their little venn diagram of intersecting circles which is the people touch.” she said.
The authors also spoke about how their personal family histories and instances shaped their writing. Sarna’s short story called ‘Death in Winter’ which he wrote on the 1984 riots draws some influence from his family history during partition. “ While I was trying to decide on the structure of the story it suddenly came in a big flash and linked to my family’s history of 1947 and so without sort of meaning to I began writing what i had heard from my grandmother .It all mixed into this fictive context. In a way you can tell real history if you are not pushing it too much.” he said.
In her book ‘Those Pricey Thakur Girls’ Anuja Chauhan sets the family in pre-liberalization days. The authors feel that locating a family in a particular era also in a sense gives glimpses of the way life was lived in that era and saves history from being lost.
“While writing I like to look for things that deserve their little place like pre-liberalization days. I felt my children needed to know about those times.I wanted to write an ode to the 80s, those time of lush bungalows in Delhi and times of the trunk calls.” she said