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Bazaar
What are the challenges of telling a story from the
point of view of protagonists over a large span of time?
As the characters become more and more real to me, the
language for each comes quite naturally. There are many
voices—because one of the protagonists speaks as both a boy
and as a man. There are also translations from a Bengali novel,
as well as letters from Bali written by Gayatri. Especially for
these letters, since they have a completely different, intimate
tone and time period, I had to immerse myself in her. I read
memoirs, letters, and fiction from that time; I went for lots of
long walks to have conversations with her in my head.
The book refers to how worlds collide even when
seemingly apart. How did these connections develop?
The magical thing was how the interconnections became
apparent to me during the research. I started out with just a
boy; then, as I stood in a
museum in Bali before the
paintings of Walter Spies,
I discovered he died on January
19, the very day my beloved dog
had died, only a few months
earlier. I know this sounds
whimsical, but instantly it felt as
if my life, the novel, and one
real-life character were all
connected. Slowly these ripples
of connectedness spread wider,
and it became even clearer that
this world we think of as past is
close to ours, and very present
even in mundane ways: Travel,
hopes and dreams, health, the
discovery of new countries,
unlikely friendships. Where
there is a striving for happiness
in hostile surroundings, and
where overwhelming forces of
history sweep everything aside.
Much of the book is
recollection—what made you tell
this story through flashback?
I was writing a tragedy, and in narrating it this
way I simply followed one of the basic techniques of
Greek tragedy, which is to tell you at the start what
cataclysmic thing had happened, and unravel the
process that led up to it. It was a challenge
to myself: Was it possible to sacrifice
suspense,which is one of the main props of
fiction? I was going to replace the ‘What’s
next?’ question with the subtler ones,
‘How did it happen? Why? What
did it mean?’ ■NINE-YEAR-OLD
MYSHKIN returns home
from school one afternoon to discover
that his free-spirited mother, Gayatri, has
left their family with a German artist, Walter
Spies. She fights for her personal freedom,
as India’s revolutionaries gain momentum and Nazis
come into power in Germany. We meet Myshkin 60
years later, in 1992, and through his memories of his
mother—and the letters she sent while she was away—we
explore ideas of liberty, of patriotism, of cosmopolitanism.
All the Lives we Never Lived (Hachette), from award-winning
author Anuradha Roy, is a sweeping, immersive journey
through time, from the 1930s to 1990s, and place, from India
to Bali. Here, Roy, whose last novel Sleeping on Jupiter (2015)
was on the Man Booker Prize longlist, talks to
Bazaar about art during crises and the
commonality of wildly different worlds.
What made you want to address
freedom from different
perspectives? And given that the
novel is set decades ago, what is
the role of questioning and
understand freedom today?
Many of the characters are fighting
for freedom of different kinds.
Gayatri defies the accepted modes
of defiance; what she is fighting for
is not personal freedom to paint or
picnic (as her husband thinks); she
is struggling for the idea that you
cannot be caged into giving your
life to a version of freedom that
belongs to someone else, however
worthy that may be. This is an
urgent and live question even
today: Certain dominant modes of
thinking are being forced upon us;
our own choices are run down as
trivial or unworthy or unpatriotic.
The story alludes to opposing
ideologies of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma
Gandhi—what was your goal behind that?
During the non-cooperation movement in India, Gandhi
advocated suspending artistic activity and cutting off all contact
with the West until the battle for freedom had been won. This
was opposed by Tagore, who saw humanity as one, nationalism
as a narrow ideology, and art as the sacred duty of the artist. What
should be your response, as a writer or artist, when your country
is in a crisis? Should we turn into activists and cut ourselves off?
Or is our role one of translating our political concerns into our
own creative sphere? These ideas are central to the book.FREEDOM
WRITER
Anuradha Roy, one of India’s
greatest contemporary authors, talks
to Bazaar about her new novelBOOKIMAGE COURTESY RUKUN ADVANI