Q. Why don't you tell us about the two novels that have recently been released by HarperCollins: A Speck of Coal Dust and The Enclave?
A. The first one, A Speck of Coal Dust is in fact a reissue of In The Light of the Black Sun, the novel that won the Betty Trask Award. It's not exactly the same novel, I've made some amendments here and there. The second novel that's come out is a new one, The Enclave, and it's been written over the last few years.
It's very different from A Speck of Coal Dust in point of its setting, in point of its characters, in point of the style of writing and the tone in which I've written it. So there's a fair amount of contrast between the two novels.
Q. Your writing spans over three decades, three novels. One of them remains unpublished. What's the then and now scenario?
A. It’s a little tough to encapsulate what's happened to one and what one has been doing over such a span of time. Around the mid Nineties, In The Light of the Black Sun came out, and then around 12 years after that was this other novel, A Place in Mind. And even though it won the Tibor Jones South Asia prize, didn't quite get around to getting published. And then another 12 years down the line. What's happened in between is that I have, in the first block of a dozen years as well as in the second block, tried my hand at several other novels and abandoned some of those ideas at the time anyway. The other is that my job has kept me quite busy and I've tried to do justice to what I'm supposed to do at IIT. For instance, over the last dozen years I've supervised about a dozen PhD students and their thesis. And I've also tried my best to teach as well as I can, which is what has also borne fruit. I've won several of these teaching awards at IIT and then this national award from the Indian National Science Academy. And then, of course, there was that book on IIT's history that I wrote, which came out in 2008.
Q. Your writing changed in its tautness. It was as if you had found a way of being more confident as a writer.
A. The register in which The Enclave is written is consciously very different from the register in which A Speck of Coal Dust is written. The tone is very different in The Enclave because it describes a very different kind of world. We are dealing here with a woman who's in her early 40s, A Speck of Coal Dust was dealing with the life of an 11-year-old. So then there is this vast difference in the lens through which things are being seen. The Enclave is much more to do with
urban life
and A Speck of Coal Dust is about life in the back of beyond, out in the hinterlands. But I'm very glad that you felt that the quality of the writing has been sustained.
Listen to the interview here:
Rohit Manchanda Discusses His Novels and Writing Style
Q. It seems as if you’re telling your reader that this is not social realism, but social commentary in the garb of fiction. Come along for the ride.
A. In A Speck of Coal Dust, there's this passage which is to do with just hunting around for mosquitoes. It describes in detail the frustrations, the bafflements as well as the joys implicit in the act of hunting mosquitoes, trying to kill them. When the book came out, that passage mystified a lot of readers. Quite a few of them said to me, what was the point of writing this particular scene? And there are passages of that sort also in other chapters in that book. There is a three-page description of just the river and the storm and the scene as the storm breaks. What I did was to write those sorts of passages in order to capture and recapture for myself a certain place and time. If readers happen to like it, good, and if they don't, well, that's tough luck. There are some scenes in The Enclave as well that seem to kind of get nowhere. They're just sort of detailed descriptions of moments.
Q. At moments in the The Enclave, it felt that it was going into a kind of satire.
A. Yes, I have done that. I have. In The Enclave, one of the things that I've tried to do is to explore a certain kind of persona, which is Maya's persona, as a tribute to a certain kind of woman, more broadly, to a certain kind of person who insist on marching to the beat of their own drum. They will do just as they please. They will not take instruction. This sort of thing was starting to happen around the early 2000s, in at least the middle classes, which are the bastion of conservatism. The other thing I wanted to portray was what happens when somebody living in this freewheeling, very feisty way get a little above themselves? What happens if they start to look down on certain things around them? What I've tried to do also is to portray life as it happens from day to day, where humour is an essential ingredient. Satire and irony are the best forms of comedy. Where you need to be subtle. You just convey a certain irony of a situation or of a conversation through that conversation itself. So that's why I took recourse to satire.
Q. This whole thing of experiencing of empowered women was also a reflection of that moment of time because the women's movement had been so strong from the 1970s, eighties and nineties in India that women had more freedoms than we have today.
A. That is certainly very true. And that is one reason that I thought I should depict the India of the mid-2000s, especially in the cities, as to what a very open place it had started to become before the ranks started closing in. It's part of the driving force for me to portray that particular era and not set it up as a contrast to the present, but for readers to deduce that contrast, to make it out for themselves.
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