Saikat Majumdar, the author of four novels and counting. His deft use of the English language and the cinematic ability to create a lucid setting can make us smell the flowers on a certain north Kolkata street ( The Firebird) or that detail of that much coveted boiled egg lying untouched (as the only bright spot in insipid vegetarian meals) as the young ashram boys fight amongst themselves. (The Scent of God).
As an academic, he taught literature for several years at Stanford University; presently, he teaches English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Teaching helps him to hone his craft as he gets to discuss a broad set of issues that sometimes emerge as ideas for fiction and non-fiction. These straddle a wide range such as childhood, homelands, performance, religion, education, sexuality and other narratives political or otherwise as he tries to strike a balance between his fiction and nonfiction.
Earlier this year, Majumdar was Fellow at Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa; Abdulrazak Gurnah who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 was also Fellow here.The fellowship supported Majumdar’s research project resulting in the book. The Amateur: autodidactism and self-making in the postcolony, about unexpected forms of reading, writing, and learning as they unfold- ed on the corners of the historical British Empire.
Without dwelling on just his accolades, which are there on his website, let us explore how his work enriches us in myriad ways.
Majumdar who lives in Delhi makes it a point to visit his hometown Kolkata during the annual Durga Puja festivities to soak in the colour and sounds.. This year too is no exception.
The following conversation is a modest attempt to know whatever drives him to put ideas into words, the man behind the writer and the writer behind the man.
1. I remember a very close friend reading Silver fish (published in 2007) and telling me about it. But it was not till I chanced upon a copy of Firebird (2015) that I discovered you. Since then there have been The Scent of God (2019) and The Middle Finger (2022). What next?
Thank you you’ve been a very sensitive reader of these novels. My next fiction is a slim one, at 40,000 words perhaps more a novella than a novel. It’s titled The Remains of the Body, due out in June 2024. It’s primarily about three Indian immigrants in North America, and it explores fluid sexualities between a marriage and a childhood friendship.
2. Reading your novels give me a sense that in spite of the very dark aspects of life (whether sex- uality, religion, inter-personal relationships), there is humour. The pathos of the human condition that is trapped into situations they are not even aware of. I felt this most in The Scent of God where young boys are shown to be growing up against a bigger narrative. We from the outside make certain judgments and by judgments I mean form opinions which need not always be negative.
This is a very striking observation! Humour did not come easily to me there wasn’t much of it in my first two novels, I think. Indeed, it appeared for the first time in The Scent of God. Though the novel is about themes that are quite sensitive unusual sexuality in a religious-educational setting and it has even been a little upsetting for some people, I see a light playfulness in it. If The Firebird is my nighttime novel, The Scent is probably my daylit work. I’ve lived in a hostel similar to the one in the novel teenage boys are weird and absurd, in their friendships, studies, truan- cy, even in their budding sexual intimacies.
3. When did you feel the first stirring of a writer inside you? I know if I am ever asked this question I will say the time I wrote about my headless doll! How much has your own life the growing up years or that your mother was an actress influenced or rather shaped you as a writer? Creativity is broad- based.
I was a reader long before I wanted to write and reading continues to be a big part of my writing life. Books were also a refuge from a difficult childhood, which includes rather intense relationships with my mother’s life as an actress. So art was a pervasive presence, though in some ways literature was an escape from the visceral nature of performative art, which created some painful memories for me. The confusion between art and life was real, and it has shaped the beginning of my writing life. (I’ve written about this subject here: https://lithub.com/on-navigating a-polyglots-life- between-bangla-and-eng-lish/)
4. You seem to be very busy, teaching, writing columns, being active on social media and generally accessible (an extremely endearing quality), how does your day look like?
My writing life is at the centre of my days, and of my life. This also includes editing, redrafting, research for writing, etc., the entire paraphernalia of the writing life. Once I get my writing energies sorted for the day, everything else falls into place teaching during semester days, talks and events, administrative and of course family work. Writ- ing for the media is sometimes time-sensitive business and needs to be done quickly. I’m always available to my readers and fellow travellers on writing journeys.
5. How difficult has been your path to success? If you could point out some low moments? Looking back or even introspecting have your joys been greater or do you feel there is nothing called permanent happiness and that it keeps shifting?
I don’t think success is the right word to use for writing or any form of art or serious thought. I like to think of love and fulfilment nothing matters more than when something you write touches someone else’s life, and if you’re lucky, they’ll read it to reveal new meanings that you didn’t know your work had. I’ve been moved by the readers of my work, and they have taught me a lot.
But there’s no arrival as such it’s forever ongoing. Having published several books, now I sometimes wonder if I’ll be remembered as a writer, when I’m gone, if my words will live on. The lowest moment, too, is always with us people aren’t reading much these days, and much less with sustained attention. Nothing called permanent hap- piness, of course – there was a time when just a good review could make me satisfied – now I look ahead to the pit of memory or oblivion that might be one’s destiny.
6. Talking about genre, you are a novelist but what is your take on short stories?
I started my writing life with short stories, and my first published volumes were stories here in the Statesman Festival Issue, and in collections published by Writers’ Workshop. So they remain special. I write novels, though they are usually short and slim – I’m a writer of small, local themes, rooted in specific places. So I guess the short story writers is still alive in me!
7. Does a writer have to always be embedded in his own culture? Or the world is his stage, canvas? What are the issues that you feel need to be written more about though I have fiction here in mind, which may differ from people to people and is subjective?
A writer should be honest and write about what truly moves them, whatever culture that is. Two figures who have influenced me greatly are James Joyce and Nirad C Chaudhuri, neither of whom could bear to live in their own cultures but wrote about little else, but from a strange diasporic distance. I’ve lived in quite a few different places but I’ve only written about places after I’ve left them and some time has passed. You could say I’m an ethnographer of memory.
Artistic writing has no “better” or “worse” subject, art is blind. We do, however, need artistic voices that are unheard, and from communities that have historically been less audible than others. Truly new voices are new subjects.