In Conversation With Rana Dasgupta

(First published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express on 26 April 2009. And I, as usual, was too caught up with too many things.. so I could not put it up.)

With an iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach, Rana Dasgupta’s Solo is about people who had to live through painful and pointless political projects, says Meena Kandasamy. This place is chaotic,” Rana Dasgupta complains even before we settle down to talk about his latest novel, Solo. At Chennai’s Landmark bookstore, where his publishers have spared him for half an hour, little children run around us, and some staff are sweeping the bookstore. His observation is sharp, but cloaked in that soft voice, it could be mistaken for a compliment.

This iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach pervades his writing. That is why, even though preservation of culture is an overarching theme in Solo, its dangers are accorded greater importance. “There is a difference between the attempts of an individual to find out what links their lives, and the attempts of a state or political party to impose a cultural homogeneity on people,” he says. “The protagonist in my book is in fact suffering at the hands of people in this category, and he’s forced into losing his culture in the name of a big political project.”

Speaking of “corrective history”, Dasgupta says the times we are living in make sense only through history. “I wanted to write a book in which the present is linked to a long past through the life of one character, the 100-year-old Ulrich.”

In that sense, Solo is essentially an alternative history of what is called the Anglo-American century. “The 20th century is shown as the American century, but I wanted to tell the story of people for whom the 20th century was quite meaningless, haphazard and full of pointless political projects that caused them quite a lot of pain.” Is that why the protagonist Ulrich takes shelter in daydreams, the only redeeming feature of his life? “No, to me Ulrich is like a novelist. On one level, Solo is an examination of how elements of life become mutated into fiction.”

I wonder why Solo was not set in India, given that Dasgupta has told a universal story. “Are you worried that a honest novel about India would face too much criticism?” I ask He pins down the emergence of such criticism to a “particular kind of psychological sensitivity in India that ridiculously claims that there is no poverty or violence in the country.”

That leads to the inevitable question, whether he will write a novel set in India. Dasgupta says he is keen to do so, but it will be non-fiction since the reality of this country is complete in itself. “The reality is so stark and intense that just reporting on it, as it is, is enough.”

He points out that he wrote about Bulgaria in Solo because he was bored with big countries that were full of arrogance and self-importance.

Likewise, he wrote about a doomed man’s life because he was bored by the success stories that surrounded him.

Now I understand why he writes about people outside the social system, such as the gypsies. He says he finds them fascinating since they refuse to allow an “identity” to be given to them from outside.

“I am like that,” he admits, “I refuse to be categorised.”