Interview: Is fiction-writer Siddharth Chowdhury creating a new literary form?

An interview with one of my favourite contemporary writers, the inimitable Siddharth Chowdhury, for Scroll:

‘I see my individual books as part of one big novel that I am working towards.’

Siddharth Chowdhury's first published book was a short story collection called Diksha at St. Martins (Srishti, 2002). Some characters who first appeared in those stories, like Ritwik Ray and Mira Verma, went on to play starring roles in his next book, the brilliantly unpredictable Patna Roughcut (Picador, 2005). 

Chowdhury's next novel Day Scholar (2010) saw a shift of setting from 1980s Patna to 1990s Delhi, with a new narrator called Hriday Thakur opening up a deeply male world of Bihari hostellers who live on the fringes of Delhi University and in the terrifying shadow of Zorawar Singh Shokeen, political broker and property dealer—and their landlord. 

His most recent book, The Patna Manual of Style (2015), is a set of interlinked stories that returns us to Hriday's world a few years after Day Scholar with Chowdhury's usual comic acuity.

Chowdhury's fiction combines a joyful political incorrectness with deep affection for the characters who populate his world, the idealist, the eccentric and the downright dubious. He is possibly a combination of these things himself. He is also quietly holding out against the onslaught of everything 21^st century publishing tells writers they should do to gain readers: Facebook, Twitter, book launches and litfests. We agreed on an email interview, but he prefers to write by hand, and so I received his handwritten (photocopied) responses by courier. A couple of follow-up questions were answered on SMS.

Both your recurring protagonists Ritwik Ray and Hriday Thakur share their Bengali-from-Patna past, their Delhi University present and their writerly ambitions with you. What's easy and what's difficult about using autobiographical material?

The trajectory of my novels and stories is autobiographical. But autobiography can only be a take-off point for the imagination to soar, I feel. So 90% of my fiction is pure storytelling. Fiction is the only medium through which I engage with the world. So a lot of other elements—politics, social commentary, various axes to grind—seep into the fiction as I go about stringing the reader and myself along. In the first draft I rarely have a clue where the story would take me. By the second draft things become clearer. The difficult thing is when readers start imagining that all of it is autobiographical. But I have realized over the years that, too, gives pleasure to some readers.

In The Patna Manual of Style, Zakir Hussain College and Delhi University's English departments are populated with professors who teach at these places in real life, some thinly disguised, and some named. You once said that your parents in Patna tell people who ask that your books are “out of print”. How have friends and acquaintances who have read your books responded to becoming characters in them?

My friends and family rarely become characters in my fiction. Once in a while I would introduce a real person to establish locale or atmosphere, and more often than not it is meant as a tribute. So it is with my teachers in Zakir, like Lima Kanungo and Anuradha Marwah, or Vikram Seth or Sujit Mukherjee when I talk about publishing in 'Death of a Proofreader'. I never introduce a real person in my stories to spite them. Using real people or institutions also imparts a sense of hyper-reality and leavens the more fabulist elements in my fiction.

The wishes of my parents have now actually come true. Both Diksha at St. Martins [his first short story collection] and Patna Roughcut are out of print. Day Scholar will be, too, if Picador doesn't bring out a paperback soon.

How do you name your characters?

Very carefully. I collect names. I like names with a bit of vajan, as they say in Patna. With the right name half of your work is done. It is like casting in movies. Sometimes I feel I could have been another Lynn Stalmaster.

Your characters often live inside books and films, from Javed “would have been a friend of Ghalib's” Siddiqui in the first story in Diksha at St. Martin's (2002) to Ritwik Ray in Patna Roughcut kissing Mira Verma “how James Dean had kissed Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause”. This carries on into The Patna Manual of Style: Hriday's girlfriend from Dhanbad (named Charulata, like the Satyajit Ray film) reminds him of Supriya Chowdhury in Meghe Dhaka Tara (a Ritwik Ghatak film); a Patna girl is named Sophia after Sophia Loren in Marriage, Italian Style and haunted by the film all her life; even Jishnu da, importer of blondes, expresses his angst by reciting the poetry of Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar'. Other characters write imaginary books -- Lawrence Lytton-Mobray's Purulia-set detective stories, Anjali Singh Nalwa's Tarn Taran, or my favourite, Ritwik Ray's Mao for the Misbegotten – but are described as reviewed in real journals, like EPW and Biblio. Is this all just your own fiction-haunted mind writ large, or do you really know a lot of people like this?

Well, I do know a lot of people who want to write, or to act or to direct movies, but have chosen to do something else for a living. Of course most of them have artistic ambitions without the requisite talent. But it is a good thing. I don't mock it. I like writers and write about their world. It is an abiding theme. So to me an unpublished writer is as important as a published one.

Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar' is a Patna speciality, and I, like many others of my generation, can quote him in chunks. It is like Pushkin and the Russians.

I know how hard it is to write a halfway-decent poem or a story, so writers would always have my compassion. But in the end, it is all fiction, the wisp of blue smoke curling away from my mind.

What books have been your strongest influences? And anything you read lately that you were struck by?

Well, Philip Roth, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, the early Naipaul, Salinger, Jack Kerouac have been significant influences. Lately I have enjoyed The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri a lot.

What do you re-read?

I re-read the collected stories of John Cheever, the first 49 stories of Hemingway, parts of Anna Karenina and A Sportsman's Sketches by Turgenev once in a while.

Your books have always declared your cinephilia. Do you have favourite filmmakers, or genres, or eras? Would you ever write a film script? And important side question: did world cinema trivia really impress Patna girls?

Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Saeed Mirza have been huge influences. I also like the early stylish Godard, Sam Peckinpah, Billy Wilder and John Ford. I love cinema across genres. Also I can sit through anything by Scorsese, Tarantino and Woody Allen. I am sure I have missed out on twenty other names. If there is a special preference, it would be American cinema of the 1970s. Those magnificent Easy Riders and Raging Bulls.

No, I wouldn't write a screenplay, as cinema is a collaborative medium, and I am a lone wolf by inclination and training.

My experience is that the easiest way to lose a girl's attention is to talk to her of world cinema or literature. But then I rarely meet the right kind of girls.

Ah, that question was inspired by the narrator in your long-ago story 'A Scene from Class Struggle in Patna' who says his movie trivia is good only for quizzing and impressing girls. But that will teach me to stop imagining that all your narrators are autobiographical!

Moving on: your characters – even the exceptionally literate, film-society-going ones – inhabit a world that's often violent, sometimes sleazy. Did you ever fear your readers might be repelled?

Some readers are always going to be repelled by the world I portray. Many are also bored stiff. But there is a tiny minority which will sit through anything that I write. God bless them.

One of the things that has always made your writing stand out for me, at least within Indian English fiction, is how frankly you deal with the presence of caste – its networks, stereotypes, battles – and the presence of sex. “A woman who shouts "Jai Mata Di" or "yes please", or better still, "aur tani jor se" in throes of sexual congress, is worth pages of description of the furniture in the bedroom,” as you once put it. Did/does this unfetteredness come easily to you?

No, the unfetteredness does not come easily. It shouldn't either. As starlets in India traditionally say, they would wear a bikini if the role demands it, so it is with me. I will do the swimsuit round if the role demands it. Otherwise I am a wallflower by nature. As for caste, it really can't be avoided if you are writing fiction in India.

Is Delhi a kind of exile from Patna, for your characters? And for you? Do you feel part of a Bihari cultural diaspora?

In some ways, yes, it is kind of like an exile. But then I do Delhi also. I seriously started to write only when I came to Delhi University.

Do you hang out with other writers? Do you discuss your writing with anyone while it's happening?

I am afraid I don't hang out much. I do not have the time. My first reader is usually my wife. Sometimes I do share my finished work with Pankaj Mishra and Amitava Kumar. Pankaj especially has been a great support over the years.

You don't do the litfest circuit. Do readers ever write to you? Any interesting responses?

Sometimes I do get emails. Mostly of hate, but once in a while of love, too. In Chandigarh, at the only literary festival that I have attended, I was accosted by two ladies who said that they had come all the way from Canada to meet me. Turns out they wanted to meet Siddharth Chowdhury the painter. Talk about taking a wrong turn.

You have a day job in a publishing house. What does your work day look like? Does the publishing life intersect with the writerly life?

I think my day job as a publisher certainly enriches my writing. I get to read a lot of stuff I wouldn't normally pick up otherwise.

I believe you do all your writing by hand. How does the rewriting and editing happen?

I usually write the first three drafts of all my stories or sections in a novel by hand. With yellow Staedtler pencil on small spiral bound notebooks which I carry everywhere in my satchel. The fourth draft is usually typed out by my wife when she finds time. Afterwards I tinker with it for months on the computer, mostly working on the timing. For instance, the two stories that book-end Patna Manual, 'The Importer of Blondes' took over two years to write, 'Death of a Proofreader' close to a year.

You've published two story collections and two novels. But Patna Roughcut, for instance, though called a novel, is as much a series of episodes about overlapping characters, as The Patna Manual of Style, called 'Stories'. If publishing didn't need these categories, would you describe your books differently?

I see Patna Roughcut, Day Scholar and The Patna Manual of Style as part of one big novel that I am working towards. In that sense it is unfinished. Readers can read it in any way they want. As individual stories or short novels which are part of a larger whole. As long as they get it, it is fine by me. Labels are anyway only a marketing tool. I am meanwhile working on a long story about Sudama Pathak of Patna Roughcut, called 'The Prince of Patna'.

Published in Scroll.

Book Review: Siddharth Chowdhury's Day Scholar

Brilliant Tutorials: my review of Siddharth Chowdhury's new novel, in Biblio 

On the face of it, Siddharth Chowdhury’s Day Scholar, is a coming of age novel. The book’s own inside cover actually describes it as a “crazed and profane coming of age tale”, whose plot is ostensibly about how Patna boy Hriday Thakur (“who hopes to be a writer some day”) is first “trapped… by a series of misjudgements” and later “saved from a terrible end”. But much like Chowdhury’s previous offering, Patna Roughcut (also billed as “a story of love, idealism and sexual awakening” that takes us to “the heart of an aching, throbbing youth”), Day Scholar – despite a self-referential moment when its protagonist is asked by his father about how his Bildungsroman is coming along – is not a book that seems containable within the neat boundaries of the coming-of-age genre.

This is not necessarily a criticism. While there are those who might be baffled by the freewheeling air with which Chowdhury moves in and out of the lives of several different characters, or even feel cheated out of the readerly pleasure afforded by deep identification with a single protagonist, he has an admirable ability to weave what may seem like disparate anecdotes about several kinds of kaands into a seamless narrative. (“Kaand”, for those not party to the often sublime pleasures of Hindi, is a word that can translate into something as neutral as ‘event’, or acquire as vast a sense as ‘catastrophe’.) He is a master of the shaggy dog story, often going off on long-winded tangents that seem entirely unpremeditated – until you realize that he has managed to entirely shift the emotional register of his narrative within the space of a paragraph, or even a sentence. So a quietly cynical account of being a small-time reporter (“I am not one of those hot shot political analysts who ferret out important things about life and corruption. I write about minor cultural happenings and if Patna had a vibrant cocktail circuit I would be what you call a society reporter”) can segue, quite without warning, into the chillingly banal details of a “human interest story” about “a carpenter by caste” being found dead inside Golghar alongside a suicide note saying that his Bhumihar wife of two months had been abducted by her parents. Or a bunch of regulars at the run-down Annapoorna Café can move from sniggering about the death of someone they know as his being “’set’ for life” to being forced to reluctantly register the event as a tragedy (“The laughter slowly left their lips. They lowered their eyes and dragged on a Charminar.”)

The constant movement between cynicism and sentiment seems, in fact, to be a characteristic of Chowdhury’s narratorial voice. In Patna Roughcut, his first novel, published in 2005, this voice was even more unpolished, literally rough-cut. That book opened, for instance, with the following analogy: “Dreams are like cut-glass carafes… [they] only look beautiful on the sideboards of the rich because if a particular dream suddenly shatters, they can always buy another. The poor shouldn’t dream. They can’t afford it.” There is something about this, combining as it does the dramatic tone of 1980s filmi dialogue with the attempted epigraph-like tone of teenage autograph books, that comes off sounding much less cool and much more sentimental than it seems to aim for. At first reading, it appears naïve, cliched and wannabe philosophical, all at once. But then it strikes one that may be precisely the tone that the author intends to create – the voice of a narrator who is much less cynical than he pretends to be, whose self-conscious veneer of bravado is often betrayed by a rather emotional, even romantic core.

This tone is common to both Ritwik Ray of Patna Roughcut and Hriday Thakur of Day Scholar, whose first person narratives make up a great part of those books, respectively (though Patna Roughcut does contain sections narrated by figures who have previously appeared in Ritwik’s narrative as characters). There are several other things that Ritwik and Hriday have in common – their Patna pasts, their Delhi University present and their writerly ambitions. They share these with each other as well as with Siddharth Chowdhury – which might push readers in the direction of reading these novels as autobiographical. Which they may well be. But Chowdhury pre-empts any such boringly linear thoughts with some clever intertextual jugglery, making Ritwik, his girlfriend Mira Verma and the Subaltern historian Samar Sinha from Patna Roughcut make guest appearances in Day Scholar. This constant cross referencing of characters, even minor ones – like Sudama Pathak, who appears in Patna Roughcut as the author of the masterful and deeply unsettling “Patna Good Food Guide” and reappears in Day Scholar when he befriends Hriday, his junior at Commerce College, and then plays a critical role in his arrival at Shokeen Nivas, the faux-hostel full of (largely Bihari) Delhi University students that is the setting for Day Scholar – creates a kind of deliberate jigsaw of characters and events, and goes a long way towards making Chowdhury’s universe come brilliantly and cinematically to life, in the manner of some Robert Altman movie.

The other thing that Chowdhury has, and has in abundance, is a sense of place, which is linked, of course, to a sense of time. If in Patna Roughcut he cuts rapidly between Patnas past and present, deftly splicing his account of the still seersucker-suited ex-zamindar Mrinal Thakur-Chowdhury being escorted home by rickshaw in the 1980s with say, the near-mythical encounter that took place between a Pathan miner and an Ara Rajput on Direct Action Day 1946, in Day Scholar Chowdhury concentrates on recreating an early 1990s world. It is the world of pre-liberalisation India, constituted in no small measure through the invocation of a constellation of (often branded) objects whose names are enough to jolt the Indian reader of a certain age into a shared nostalgia for a middle class material culture that seems historic even if its constituents may in fact survive: Sandow ganjis, Rajdoot 175 motorcycles, Brilliant Tutorials, portable Panasonics, flared black jeans, “the kind one bought cheap from Tank Road in Karol Bagh”, Graviera suit lengths offered as gurudakshina to those who wrote exams on one’s behalf.

In terms of locale, with Day Scholar, Chowdhury’s centre of gravity moves from Patna’s Kadam Kuan: “a place of genteel shabbiness, large colonial houses with peeling paint, peopled with once-aristocratic families come down in life” where “ambition and upward mobility are looked down upon and the trading classes frankly distrusted” to the badlands of North Delhi, encompassing Delhi University, with Shokeen Niwas at its centre. The pride taken in the acquisition of Shokeen Niwas by its half-Jat half-Gujjar owner, the formidable light-eyed political broker and property dealer Zorawar Singh Shokeen, gives Chowdhury a chance to mull lovingly on the spatio-historical landscape of North Campus and its hinterlands:

“From the terrace Zorawar can see… Kirori Mal and Hansraj College at a stone’s throw. Beyond loom the dense kikar-encrusted Delhi Ridge and Bara Hindu Rao, where in 1857 Zorawar’s Gujjar ancestors fought their last stand against the British and their Sikh mercenaries and forever lost the land on which the North Campus would later be built. Hindu College, St. Stephen’s College, and the back gate of Miranda House… If Zorawar turns his head he can see Roop Nagar, Shakti Nagar, Amba Cinema Hall and outside it Darvesh Dhaba which serves wonderful frontier food, and finally Malkaganj where Mrs. Midha, his future paramour, lives with her homeopath husband and fourteen-year-old daughter.”

Later in the book, Chowdhury pithily describes the campus coming alive with the public theatre of male-female interaction: “Like in most small towns of Bihar, when evening descends and people saunter off to the nearby railway station for entertainment, so in Delhi University Biharis… lit out for Chhatra Marg. There they would dawdle for a couple of hours, have tea at Jai Jawan dhaba, meet their girlfriends… and thrash out ‘compromises; without any group coming to real blows. ‘Compromises’ were usually about imagined slights to one’s dignity concerning a girl who was a ‘sister’ even though the girl may not have known the guy but was from the same town.”

As should be apparent from all this, Chowdhury has few equals when it comes to the deftly drawn pen-portrait. His prose may appear littered with names and places and dates and events (mostly remembered ones, though sometimes also, as in the passage above, events still to come), but if you look carefully, this dense accumulation of detail is carried out with the utmost attentiveness. The throwaway ease with which new characters are introduced and side-stories told is a narratorial strategy, deliberately crafted to create the impression of chatty, gossipy storytelling – what in North India might most clearly be described as gup. And one of the most striking things about this gupbaaz tone is its uncensored, unexpurgated quality. Among the things Chowdhury is not coy about is sex: Day Scholar opens with a sex scene that involves not just its mutually consenting participants but also a contingent of Peeping Toms. Later, it introduces the reader to such remarkable psycho-social concepts as the chutpal: “[J]ust like every door has a dwarpal every chut has a chutpal. A chutpal never gets the chut just like the dwarpal rarely gets to sleep in the master bedroom. Every good girl needs at least one chutpal, to run errands for her and listen to her bitch about her mother.”

Even more striking, though are Chowdhury’s (or rather his characters’) unabashed references to caste, around which most Indian writing in English tends to maintain a cordon sanitaire of coyness and/or stifling political correctness even stronger than that which surrounds sex and sexuality. Chowdhury has no such compunctions. From the Bhumihar Jishnu da’s distrust of Bengalis (“They think too much. You cannot trust such people”) to the matter-of-fact reference to the delicacy of “Bania girls before the fat finally catches up with them”, or Mrs. Midha’s comment about liberalization as God’s gift to the upper castes, this is a world in which caste is simply a fact of life – the basis of opinions, alliances and battles, not something swept under the carpet. Like with much else in Day Scholar, it may seem unsavoury, but it seems real.

Published in the March-April 2011 issue of Biblio.