Fiction is better than fact

Here is a collection of “new Indian writing” that defies the present state of Indian writing: its fiction is more interesting than its non-fiction, though there is less of it.

Urban Voice 4:
New Indian Writing
Editor: Sunil K Poolani
Leadstart; Rs 150; Pp 184

For instance, here is Ramachandra Guha with an essay titled “Social Banditry”, on re-reading historian E J Hobsbawm’s classic, Bandits. Hobsbawm makes a distinction between ordinary criminals and “social bandits”, who are drawn from the peasantry and have local support; Guha measures India’s Maoists against this definition. Match? Yes, he says, but also no.

Aakar Patel writes on “The Ugly Indian Middle Class”. The class has no “culture”, he says, and offers, among many other things, numbers and examples relating to classical music events (audience size and sophistication, ticket prices, financial support) in Indian and Western cities. Kankana Basu, in “Gone Away”, tells of the epidemic of lonely senior citizens in India, with children lovingly raised but now living in other cities or other countries.

Wider family bonds are dissolving, says Basu, and the price will eventually be paid by the children.

Shashi Warrier in “So Betrayed” recounts a chance meeting with a Bhopal gas survivor who tells how the tragedy changed his family’s lives. “Bush killed foreigners. Our government kills its own,” Warrier concludes.

Tishani Doshi in “A City Called Madras” nostalgises about genteel Madras before it became brash Chennai.

Full review here Business Standard

Tishani Doshi unplugged!

Tishani Doshi was born and lives in Chennai. After completing her studies in the US, Tishani worked for a while in the UK before returning to India. She began her career as a dancer and performed for five years with Chandralekha’s troupe. Already a published poet, she has recently made her debut as a novelist with The Pleasure Seekers.

One word that describes you best?
Free-spirited.

Which superhero would you like to be and why?
Batman. Better outfit than Superman’s, and I like the fact that he has no special powers. He’s just broody and ridiculously rich.

If a traffic constable hauled you up, what would you do?
Try to look my innocent best.

Your first kiss was…
Forgettable.

Full interview here Hindustan Times

Pretty vacant

This is a queerish kind of book whose point is not too clear. It chooses to invest heavily in lyricism, a kind of poetry of contradictions that never states the real cause of things. Take this passage towards the end of the book: “[Ba] told Bean you could never be afraid of your own blood; that you could have a yearning for someone long after they’d disappeared from your life, but you could also yearn for them before they were born: Javier her unborn child.

The Pleasure Seekers
Tishani Doshi;
Bloomsbury; Rs 499; pp 320 

Ba told her to recognise these two worlds as one; to be easy and light so when the moment came you’d be ready to plunge. You wouldn’t have to go stooping around the edge with no fizz fizz in your step.” I am not sure that this kind of blather works in a novel.

This is not even   magic realism. This is the story of Babo, a Gujarati boy from what used to be Madras, his Welsh wife Sian, his two daughters Mayuri and Beena a.k.a. Bean, his parents Prem Kumar and Trishala and his grandmother Ba, who lives in a village in Gujarat and can smell people and events over great distances.

Full review here Hindustan Times

Interview: Tishani Doshi

Different people come to writing books in different ways. How did you come to it?  I came to it through writing poetry. That was compelling. It’s so wonderful when you find what you want to do at a young age. I was 20 when I came to writing. Then from poetry,

I began experimenting with prose. It was just to see: can I take this idea somewhere? I just started writing it. It changed so many times while I was writing.

How much of you is in the book? Pretty liberal sprinklings! The first novel is where a lot of writers put a lot of their life experiences in. I actually had to pull some of it out. There’s not just me, but also people I’ve met and seen. From those who’ve had great influence to passing encounters. And even things people have told me about what they have seen. For example, there’s a scene of a woman on a bus…it was a real scene, something I saw. I think that sort of thing is important for authenticity.

Full interview here Hindustan Times

Pleasure lost and pleasure found, in a book

In poet, dancer and author Tishani Doshi’s debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, “the language often rises – when speaking of the great matters, life, death, and above all love – to powerful metaphorical heights” says Salman Rushdie.

Such is the praise The Pleasure Seekers has received since being released, first in Italy - fitting given the Italian love for beauty and pleasure - and now available in India and the U.S. as of last Tuesday.

Doshi was inspired to write the story upon her discovery of love letters written in the 1960’s by her Welsh mother to her Gujarati father during a period of their forced separation. The book, a tribute to her parents' marriage, is a fictionalized version of their journey together. Weaving in themes of identity, home, family, and love, The Pleasure Seekers is an engaging and enjoyable read, reminding us of what it’s like to be human.

Ready to find Pleasure? We’re giving away 10 copies of the book to Republic of Brown readers. Just visit us on Facebook and tell us what brings you pleasure. (We'd like the clean version please - like eating chocolate covered strawberries with chilled champagne while watching an island sunset - our very own Geetanjali's favorite.) The top 10 Facebook posts win a copy of the book. And yes, we'll ship anywhere in the world.

Full report here South Asia Mail 

The Pleasure Seekers

It is difficult to put one’s finger on just what is wrong with Tishani Doshi’s first novel. After all, one can hardly hold the Rushdie blurb—“captivating and delightful”—against her. Further, there is a fluid competence at work—she is well-schooled, so there are no egregious blunders of language, there is a solidity of specification in the writing. Names, places, particularities, even the lives she writes about seem to hover on the edge of significance. (The self-conscious Rushdieisms—Doshi described them as “chutneyfication”—are a gratuitous irritant, not enough to save the novel, but she would be well-advised to steer clear of “shabing shabang” and “jhill mill” in future.)

And yet, the novel as a whole seems to have been assembled in a prolonged fit of inattention. Doshi has had some success as a poet, and there are occasional glimpses of poetic intensity, sudden crystallisations in the midst of the shapeless flux of the mundane. For the rest the novel just meanders on pleasantly enough through successive generations, countries, cultures, consciousnesses, but without discernible point or purpose. One wonders how the author is ever going to pull it together, bring the fluent burbling to the end promised by the dwindling number of the pages that remain. She does. It takes an earthquake, as Hillary Clinton might have said. One of the characters dies in earthquake-related circumstances and, it is fair to say, enough characters survive for the indefatigable Ms Doshi to have soldiered happily on but, mercifully, she desists.

Full review here Outlook

Mixed marriage and a real-life love story

Snooping around as a teenager, Tishani Doshi came across a bunch of love letters written by her Welsh mother to her Indian father and thought it would make a good novel. The Pleasure Seekers, just launched in India, was several years in the making for the 30-something Doshi, a debut novel for the poet, dancer and journalist who has also co-authored a biography of Sri Lanka bowler Muttiah Muralitharan. The novel tells the story of the Patel-Joneses, of the Indian Babo who falls in love with the Welsh Sian and how they navigate their way through the uncharted territory of a "hybrid" Indian family in the latter half of the 20th century. Doshi, who worked in London before moving to India in 2001, spoke to Reuters about The Pleasure Seekers and why her parents' cross-cultural marriage was perfect for her first novel:

How much of The Pleasure Seekers is autobiographical?
"I think to be fair there's a lot of real elements in the book, a lot of the characters began with an idea of a real person. Particularly the main love story of Babo and Sian, that was very loosely based on younger selves of my parents. But sometimes reality can bog you down and I was not interested in writing a memoir or biography and the fictional part is really exciting because you can take real things and make them into even better things. So yeah, it's hard to say what's real and what's not because after spending a lot of time with it, that line blurs and it almost needs to blur if it is going to be fiction."

As a teenager you discovered your mother's love letters to your father. Did that inspire the novel?
"This story of my parents, I always thought it was full of all the requirements of a good novel because it had the drama, it had the love story, it had the conflict. Actually, I think when I was growing up, I wasn't really aware of all the backdrop of that because everything was presented very hunky-dory, like it's all natural. When I discovered these letters, I guess I was snooping around when I shouldn't have been. I realised I caught the undertone of the fact there were a lot of hardships and sacrifices and conflict on both sides because it was this cross-cultural marriage and because they both came from fairly conservative families."

‘Party, but clean up’

Words are her forte and when she’s at it, they just flow.

Writer Tishani Doshi, who launched her debut novel recently, shares a complex relationship with the city. “It is inspiring, unlike barren cities like London,” says this Chennaiite of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Though she loves travelling, the allure of Madras keeps pulling her back. We shoot some questions to her ...

Chennai in a word...
Muggy-magic

One thing you miss about the Madras that was...
The drive-in Woodlands

One thing you’re upbeat about the Chennai that is....
Idlis will never go out of style!

One landmark that defines the city...
The Sunday crowd at Marina beach

Full report here Times of India 

Novel attempt

Tishani Doshi revisits her growing up years in a hybrid family in “The Pleasure Seekers”

This might have been the toughest book launch event Tishani Doshi has had to attend.

“It's very unnerving to be in a position where I know so many people in the audience,” she said with a laugh during the launch of her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers at Taj Connemara. “I feel you already know so much about me — it's almost better to have anonymity to start with and have the audience get to know you!”

It was a little unnerving for a couple of other people in the audience as well — her parents, since the book for the most part is inspired by their Gujarati-Welsh marriage and the ‘hybrid' family that resulted.

Full report here Hindu

Rushdie praises Chennai-based author

Chennai-based poet, dancer and writer Tishani Doshi, who's already making waves world-wide with her debut novel The Pleasure-Seekers, is no stranger to the spotlight.

Tishani, a literary debut, who has been working at for eight years, has already got high praise from stalwarts like author Salman Rushdie.

“I'd guess at about eight years from conceiving the idea to writing and editing. The main story was to take the love story of a Welsh woman and Indian man, and that was definitely taken from my real life, my mother is Welsh, father is Indian. I wanted to re-tell that story in my own way, and I wanted to tell an alternative family history in my own way - in a way to find out about myself,” said Tishani.

Full report here IBN Live

The story of a family affair

Poet-turned-debut novelist Tishani Doshi speaks to Meena Kandasamy about writing The Pleasure Seekers, a fictionalised chronicle of her parents' love story, her blood connection with Chennai and fascination with displacement.

The Pleasure Seekers tells your parents’ love story. Have they read your novel? How do you expect them to react to it?
No, they haven’t read it yet. I have a wonderful freedom, because I don’t expect them to read it and provide feedback. If they want to, they can; if they don’t want to, they don’t have to. I think they’ll probably read it, but not at the moment. I think they are going to wait.

Why did you choose to chronicle their love story?
 It was not so much a conscious decision like saying, “I am going to write this story.” It was always a story that I had. Because I am a poet primarily, I don’t think in terms of storylines so much — more  in images and different ways of looking at the world — in terms of my writing.. I had been doing short stories and I thought that for a novel, what I had around me was good stuff to mine and explore. I had to make up a lot, most of it is imaginary. I didn’t have my grandparents to tell me stories, even my parents were very reticent. I had the bare bones of this story, and I went for it.

You talk of the transition from poet to novelist. How was that experience?
 It was difficult, which is why it took me quite a long time to write the book. But I am very happy that I took this long. It is not easy to switch registers. I don’t know of any prose writers who have suddenly decided they want to write poetry. I think you can develop an instinct for different kinds of writing, and for me, I have always loved the novel as a form. You need to be able to contain a whole universe in your head. You need to be able to sustain it for weeks and months at a time. It requires so much stamina and continuity that are not necessary in poetry which involves little bursts of wondrous joy. There’s a lot of despair in a novel that I never feel with poetry.

Full report here New Indian Express

Memory games

Poet and dancer Tishani Doshi on her debut novel The Pleasure Seekers

In The Pleasure Seekers (Penguin India, Rs 499), poet and dancer Tishani Doshi’s debut novel, Sian Jones, a cream-skinned girl with a strict Calvinist upbringing from Nercwys, Wales, comes to India, with the intention of marrying Babo Patel, a Gujarati boy with “jhill mill teeth” based in Madras. They had met in London, where Babo had gone as a student; their covenant is to spend the first two years of their marriage in India, but at the end of it Sian decides to stay back. “We know about people coming to India for spirituality but I had never read anything about a westerner coming here looking for love,” says Doshi, lissome and graceful, sitting in the spare confines of the publisher’s office, occasionally looking out as the rain clouds darken that patch of sky visible through the partial blinds.

Babo and Sian’ s story is based on Doshi’s parents, the “original pleasure seekers” as she describes them in the dedication to the novel. “I did not grow up with lots of stories so I had to make them up on my own. It takes off from their lives but a lot of it is fiction,” says Doshi, 35. A memoir is risky, she says, being so inconveniently close, so the book turned out to be an “alternative history”. The probing was gentle, the narrative relying more on the “beauty present in wisps of memory”.

Full report here Indian Express

The story of a family affair

Poet-turned-debut novelist Tishani Doshi speaks to Meena Kandasamy about writing The Pleasure Seekers, a fictionalised chronicle of her parents' love story, her blood connection with Chennai and fascination with displacement.

The Pleasure Seekers tells your parents’ love story. Have they read your novel? How do you expect them to react to it?
No, they haven’t read it yet. I have a wonderful freedom, because I don’t expect them to read it and provide feedback. If they want to, they can; if they don’t want to, they don’t have to. I think they’ll probably read it, but not at the moment. I think they are going to wait.

Why did you choose to chronicle their love story?
It was not so much a conscious decision like saying, “I am going to write this story.” It was always a story that I had. Because I am a poet primarily, I don’t think in terms of storylines so much — more  in images and different ways of looking at the world — in terms of my writing.. I had been doing short stories and I thought that for a novel, what I had around me was good stuff to mine and explore. I had to make up a lot, most of it is imaginary. I didn’t have my grandparents to tell me stories, even my parents were very reticent. I had the bare bones of this story, and I went for it.

You talk of the transition from poet to novelist. How was that experience?
It was difficult, which is why it took me quite a long time to write the book. But I am very happy that I took this long. It is not easy to switch registers. I don’t know of any prose writers who have suddenly decided they want to write poetry. I think you can develop an instinct for different kinds of writing, and for me, I have always loved the novel as a form. You need to be able to contain a whole universe in your head. You need to be able to sustain it for weeks and months at a time. It requires so much stamina and continuity that are not necessary in poetry which involves little bursts of wondrous joy. There’s a lot of despair in a novel that I never feel with poetry.

Full interview here New Indian Express

Mellow, lasting love

An elegant and charming love story, a recalling of the author’s parents’ marriage

The Pleasure Seekers
Tishani Doshi
Penguin India
320 pages
Rs499.

Tishani Doshi has many talents. Her collection of poems, Countries of the Body, won the 2006 Forward Poetry Prize for debut collections. Earlier this year, she enthralled viewers in London in the dance ballet, Sharira (the body), choreographed by the late Chandralekha, who had trained her. She writes about cricket. And now she has written an elegant novel, The Pleasure Seekers, which is an affectionate recalling of her parents’ marriage.

Doshi’s Welsh mother becomes Siân Jones here, who has escaped her small village for the bright lights of London, where she works at an office. Her Gujarati father, known only as “Babo” in the novel, is at the office, sent by his father for work experience with their business partners, and to study. Love happens, movingly and charmingly, and Siân welcomes Babo to her world. Babo plunges into the new life with relish, eating meat, drinking alcohol and breaking virtually every promise he had made to his doting family when he left Madras for London. His parents get wind of the budding romance and Babo gets the predictable cable, saying his mother is seriously ill. He rushes home only to find his passport taken away. But Babo rebels, breaking the heart of a young Gujarati girl they’ve decided he should marry (and who he liked once upon a time).

He triumphs over a challenge, and Siân adjusts to her new life in India with remarkable grace—the colours and flavours of India easily vanquishing whatever charms Britain offers, including its “meager and ancient” light.

Full review here Mint 

Fiction writers aren't social commentators: Novelist

Indian contemporary literature is benefiting from the growing tribe of journalists who are writing books of late, points out award-winning poet, dancer and novelist Tishani Doshi. At the same time, she says, a fiction writer is not a social commentator.

'Journalists have powerful stories to narrate. They can play with the language and have a good ear for dialogue,' the Chennai-based writer told IANS in an interview in the capital.

Doshi, who won two awards for her anthologies of poetry, has explored 'reverse immigration' as a theme in her new novel, The Pleasure Seekers, to be released in the capital Aug 5.

'Commenting on burning issues is natural for journalists-turned authors because they draw matter from their beats - subjects that they know,' said the writer, who graduated with a master's degree in creative writing from the Johns Hopkins University.

But a fiction writer is not a social commentator though it is a mantle that contemporary writers are being increasingly expected to wear in this decade, she said.

Full report here Sify

‘I operate in a slow fashion'

Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, has received much praise from the likes of Salman Rushdie and Roddy Doyle. Now all set for the book's India launch this week, Tishani Doshi opens up to RANVIR SHAH about the various influences that have impacted her style.

Chennai-based Tishani Doshi has so far been known as a journalist, dancer and award-winning poet. Her first collection of poetry, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection in 2006. She also freelanced for various publications in India and abroad. Using her foundation in yoga, she worked with the legendary Indian choreographer, Chandralekha, and continues to perform all over the world. Tishani has appeared at Hay, Segovia, Galle, Berlin, Jaipur and Cartagena Festivals. Her first novel The Pleasure Seekers has been received with much acclaim abroad. In an exclusive interview in Chennai just before the book's India launch, Tishani talks about her maiden novel and future plans. Excerpts from the conversation:

How many years did it take you to write this book? I remember hearing in the media that it was coming out soon for quite a while now?
I moved back from London to write the book. It took a total of eight years. I met Chandra, started to dance at the same time as I started work on this and wrote poetry as well.

The last six years I was deeply immersed in it. I made the mistake of talking about the book in my enthusiasm, I was editing it for three years, it was invaluable. At the first draft I thought it was quite grand, but my publishers (Bloomsbury) in England guided me not to rush into it. This they said was my building block and foundation and everything else I did would be seen in reference to this.

Full report here Hindu