Conversing With a Literary Luminary

Aspiring novelists might find it heartening or daunting when one of the nation’s more masterful literary writers observes – in a candid, expansive conversation – that his own writing is girded by failure. As someone who constantly labors to find that exact turn of phrase, Saikat Majumdar says that language always fails to capture the elusive thingness of a place, or person or moment. Writers like Gustave Flaubert and Joseph Conrad might have believed in le mot juste (the perfect word). But as Saikat puts it, “Language is always doomed to fail.”

But it’s exactly such failure that keeps him hooked to the process. Deploying the analogy of a runner, he admits to being intrigued by athletes who almost make it to the finishing line and then fall short, rather than by those who snag a predictable win.

For folks who are unfamiliar with Majumdar, I should point out that “failure” is hardly the term to characterize his writerly or professional profile. He’s the author of five globally-acclaimed novels, The Remains of the Body (2024),  The Middle Finger  (2022),  The Scent of God  (2019), The Firebird  (2015), and  Silverfish  (2007). His works of literary criticism include The Amateur (2024) and  Prose of the World  (2013). His non-fiction book, College: Pathways of Possibility raises critical questions about the purpose of higher education, arming students and educators with fresh insights into a life-changing slice of young adulthood. He’s currently a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Ashoka University and has taught, in the past, at Stanford University. He’s also been a Fellow at many reputed institutions in the U.S., Africa, and Europe.

That is just a big-picture overview of his success. Zoom into any of his pages to uncover how in a few, careful words, he can evoke a mélange of emotions. Each reading throws up shades of new meaning. His lines are shiny and plump, daring to be prized open. All this, while tackling complicated themes in books that can’t be pigeonholed into familiar categories. In that sense, they’re deliberately ‘queer’, and not just because some characters are homosexual.

How did these works come into being? What triggered them? What was his writing process, starting with the first draft and through his revisions? In our hour-plus chat, Majumdar was kind enough to share nuggets from his journey, and insights gleaned from his writing and teaching career.

Reading The Modernists Triggers an Epiphany

Saikat grew up communing with books. Sometime in high school, around class XI, he encountered the modernists. Till then, he had, like most Indian kids, soaked up Victorian novels and stories. Reading James Joyce and Marcel Proust was an epiphany. These writers were doing things with language and form that felt astonishing. “It planted the desire to write. It was more than telling a story, it was something else.”

Then he wrangled with another conundrum. How could one depict the multilingual milieu he inhabited in English? At first, he thought his characters should be Westernized, “listening to jazz, drinking Scotch” till he encountered the early works of Amit Chaudhari and Amitav Ghosh. Who were effectively bringing their vernacular environs of Calcutta to life in an English that did not feel contrived.

In college, one of his English professors was the iconic poet and publisher Purushottam Lal, known popularly as “Profsky” or P Lal. Majumdar had already started dabbling with writing, and showed some of his stories to his teacher. When Lal read Saikat’s work, he responded with one of his famous calligraphed notes. He was so taken in, he asked to publish them. “I was completely surprised that he wanted to.” P Lal ran a legendary publishing house, Writer’s Workshop, that had published stalwarts like Ruskin Bond, Nissim Ezekiel, Shashi Deshpande, Kamala Das, Vikram Seth, and A.K. Ramanujan among others.

A teenage Saikat was thrilled that his stories had been lapped up by such a discerning reader. P Lal invited him to his home in 162/92 Lake Gardens to sign a contract. The small publishing house ran from P Lal’s house – from his living room and repurposed bedroom. P Lal did much of the work himself, though he was assisted with binding his books in handloom cloth, with borders from Orissa saris.

When his first handloom-bound book came out, Majumdar was in the first year of college, only 19 or 20 years old.  “I got published a bit too early. But that’s when I started thinking that this is something I want to do.” As it happened, he ended up publishing three more books with Writers Workshop – another collection of short stories and two novellas.

From Impressionistic Stories to a First Novel

In his earliest writing, which were short stories, the pieces were poetic and impressionistic. There might have been some semblance of plots, but they were not plot driven. “A lot of my stories were set in Calcutta buses.” Taking a leaf from the modernists, he shied away from linear narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends. Structures that felt inadequate to hold the images that tumbled from his bus rides, the labour of everyday life, and beyond.

He also started writing for newspapers, including for the Amrita Bazar Patrika (an English newspaper that shut shop in the late 1990’s) and for The Statesman. All along, he was always a reader. Besides writing fiction, he wished to think critically about literature. “I did not just want to write fiction, I also wanted to do interesting criticism.”

Thirsting for courses that would broaden his perspective, he quickly racked up degrees. A Bachelor’s followed by a Master’s in English, then an MFA in Creative Writing. Topped up by a PhD in Literature, all of which fed his appetite for language and its paradoxical limitations.

Alongside, he stayed a practitioner. He wrote his first novel, Silverfish (2007), while completing his doctoral dissertation. The novel juxtaposes two stories and eras: of a widow who inhabited 19th Century Bengal, and a contemporary schoolteacher, stymied by a Kafkaesque web spun by the Communist government. The next work, The Firebird, which appeared eight years later, was to be a more personal book. “I think I found my voice with The Firebird.”

Genesis of The Firebird

While teaching at Stanford University, he recounted a strange memory to a colleague: “At the age of five, I was watching my mother on stage and she was dying. And that I’m scared, very scared.” The colleague, who happened to be a theatre person, said: “I think there’s a novel there.” Her statement kept ricocheting inside Saikat’s head, as he dwelt on the confusion he felt as the child of an actress mother: “There was this constant blurring between art and life. Between what was real and what was theatre.” It wasn’t just about her pretend-dying. He also had to deal with caustic adult opinions. After all, he had inhabited a time when women who played certain roles were judged moralistically.

Writers often struggle to forge riveting first lines. The Firebird begins with this: “Disaster came early in Ori’s life, at the age of five, the first time he saw his mother die.” Starting from the muddled and precocious gaze of a 10-year-old, The Firebird leads us into a Calcutta that no longer exists. Through theatres filled with frisson and foreboding, into streets seething with disenchanted youth and wily Party Members, or into the “old woman smell” of his bedbound grandmother. The city changes with its protagonist. In an essay titled “The Ashes of Pleasure,” Majumdar describes how “the lights went out for good” in Calcutta’s professional theatres – many of which were burnt down, redeveloped or crumbled into ruins.

Because of the manner in which Saikat evokes his spaces, we grieve as readers, not just about Ori’s plight or his mother’s tragic denouement, but also about the perceptible withering away of a particular zeitgeist. It’s a spirit that roves inside the theatre’s dark basement and its wings and greenrooms, as much as it does inside his characters.

Evoking the Sensation of Places

Place, as a heaving, affective entity in his works, is perhaps not accidental. Majumdar observes that environments often take hold of him. Almost from the start, before his characters or stories emerge: “The atmosphere is very important.” With The Firebird, it was the theatre. With The Scent of God, it was an Ashram. With The Remains of the Body, it was an environment of ambiguous sexuality: “There’s always a physical sensation that triggers my writing. And if the sensation is strong enough, it will shape characters.”

This happens to him with non-fiction too, where a sensation frequently connects with a place. Like with The Amateur, he had this image of a backbencher in a class, reading, not paying attention to the professor but crafting their own whimsical arc of learning. “Readers find these atmospheres compelling because they actually come first. Everything else follows.”

When it comes to conjuring these spaces, he often relies on memory. Which, in his case, serves as a reliable filter. It yanks up the place with details that matter emotionally, and sieves out stuff that’s insignificant. For the process to work, he prefers using material from distant pasts. “When you’re in the middle of an experience, you don’t fully understand its importance. When you’ve left that experience, whether it’s a few weeks or ten years later, you remember strange things about it.” Recent events are too vivid and alive. He needs only a few scraps of sensation, “I want the material to fade out, to deplete.”

A Perpetual Fascination With Adolescence

Many of Majumdar’s works would qualify as Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novels. The Firebird and The Scent of God are typical of this genre. But even in The Middle Finger and in The Remains of the Body, his protagonists have an adolescent-like quality as adults – they are explorative about their identities, sexual desires and deeper yearnings. Adolescence is often a stage of disruption when childhood notions are discarded, and adult wrappings experimented with. His characters exhibit “disruptive desires” that do not subscribe to mainstream or heteronormative paths.

Saikat observes that when it comes to his own life, he has chosen adult responsibilities. Besides being a committed Professor and institution builder at Ashoka University, he’s married and is the father of two. When writing, however, he’s more like an adolescent – bumbling, curious, explorative. “You must create from a sense of confusion, of discomfort.” His formal responsibilities fall away and he can “inhabit a childlike self again.” It helps too, that he’s chosen a profession, where he’s surrounded by young adults: “And every year, that group stays the same age. You’re surrounded by an ageless population.”

Elements of the Self in His Works

Many of his protagonists quest not just for identities, but also for a sense of home. In his case, his parents were divorced in his childhood and a peaceable home was not a given. Like him, his protagonists often lead artistic, cultural or scientist lives. On a spectrum between the passionate and the pragmatic, his characters tend to veer towards the former. With a keen sense of how commerce shapes, colours and sometimes blunts such pursuits.

For instance, in The Remains of the Day, Sunetra misses the one-time zeal she had for science. She gravitates towards her husband’s friend Kaustav, because he represents her romantic, bohemian past – when anything was possible and her soul wasn’t tethered by corporate goals.

Folks like Kaustav deliberately avoid stifling, suburban lives. They choose, as a result, less remunerative pathways, but savour other kinds of riches. In his own academic career, Saikat felt the need to free himself from the professionalizing pathways of American academia.

Creating Arresting Female Characters

His female characters are notably striking, unconventional in distinct ways. Majumdar admits to being tugged by a feminine worldview, which can also belong to some men. Modernist writers like Joyce and Proust had this kind of window into female psyches, as did Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. “It’s a worldview that’s fiercely private and also intensely interested in the minutiae of domestic life.”

He’s less captivated by great wars, emergencies or riots. What really attracts him are the “politics of the bedroom, the politics of the tea shop, the politics of offices and college campuses.” And also perhaps the topographies of bodies, and maps of intimate desires.

His female characters (as also his male ones) defy stereotypes. For instance, working class Poonam in The Remains of the Body has a deep love for poetry. He urges his students to ask “why are you interested in a particular character?” Significant characters are invested with something standout. Writers then have to examine if the “specialness that draws you” can be framed within their human roots – like gender, social class etc.

Atypical Male Characters Who Buck Norms

Many of his male characters are androgynous, less masculine, ambivalent. They are thinkers, emotive, expressive, less obsessed with being mainstream males. They seem to don a maleness that was more pervasive in the subcontinent before rigid Victorian norms were imposed.

As Saikat astutely observes, colonialism was also a sexual struggle. With the victor emerging “on top”. Indian men were deliberately framed as effeminate and weak. Another reason his male characters might be softer is also because the Bengali masculinity that shaped him is a little softer than say, the kind of masculinity that is dominant in north India. Many of them are cosmopolitan in their worldview, even those rooted in provincial settings.

Reading and Writing Motivated by Pleasure

As Saikat puts it, pleasure is a great impetus for writing: “Roland Barthes writes about this. That pleasure triggers a sentence, triggers the writing of a sentence. And the reading of a sentence.” In particular, Majumdar is lured by pleasures which have to be masked, which cannot be normalized. “As a person, I’m interested in all kinds of pleasure, but as a writer, I’m drawn to the kind of pleasures which must hide themselves.” These hidden or subversive pleasures work at the plot level, but also at the sentence level.

As a reader, Saikat is moved by texts that make him feel, but where he also cannot pinpoint what he’s feeling. Texts that disrupt and confuse and provoke a mélange of emotions. Of course, as Majumdar puts it, children often experience strong feelings, but can’t always make sense of them. Later as adults, they might untangle some of those feelings, but not fully, and not always. There are many moments of confusion even for adults.

Doing The Grunt Work With Many Revisions

He tends finish first drafts fairly quickly. Then he spends inordinate time on revisions. Like with The Firebird, he was done with the first draft in two years, and spent three years revising it. He lays the manuscript aside for a period, so that he can return to it with fresh eyes. He also has trusted friends who read his work. And then his agent and editor.

He’s also a seasoned reader. Since he teaches creative writing, he has a good sense of what a manuscript needs. He admits that when it comes to his own work, sometimes the objectivity can be lost. Putting it away helps. He works on multiple projects simultaneously, so that he can turn to other projects while he has stowed something aside. “When I look at it three or four months later, it’s new again.”

In the last few years, he has also started reading his work aloud, since the ear is a harder taskmaster than the eye. “It’ll look fine on the page, but it will fail the sound test.” He definitely does that with dialogues. With his writing, he also finds that there is an aural act in his head.

More than facing writer’s block, he faces “false creations.” He has found himself discarding projects – after 80 or 100 pages. It’s more like frittering time on something that doesn’t go anywhere. Also, as a writer, he’s careful not to succumb to public pressure or publisher zealousness. When folks ask him “What’s next?” he doesn’t kickstart something till he’s sure. Some ideas need to be harbored for a while before he’s certain that they’ll stick.

Teaching as an Extension of Writing

He has the same zest for teaching as he has for writing. Teaching feels like an extended conversation with students: dissecting texts, discussing the mechanics of writing, sharing his own hard-won wisdom or absorbing tips from whip-smart digital natives.

As a teacher, he’s keen that students forge their own paths: “I’m not an intense-mentoring kind of professor. I’m more hands-off but I’m always available if they want to talk to me.” For him, the teaching, the writing, the conversations – litfest dialogues, conversations like this one – are woven into a seamless whole.

Reading as a Writerly Obligation

For students, who wish to be writers, he strongly suggests that they read. Creating and sustaining readership is very important for culture. “Everybody who wants to be a good writer must read. Without reading, you cannot be a good writer.”

In his book Partial Recall, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra said that writers always see the past when they’re writing. For instance, when Salman Rushdie looked into the mirror, he saw GV Desani, and Nirad C Chaudhuri saw Toru Dutt. “When we see ourselves in the mirror, we don’t see ourselves. We see a whole range of writers behind us.” Unless writers are attuned to the literary tradition and landscape, they cannot expect to become great writers.

He also suggests that writers must support other writers. Poets often do this for other poets, via forums, performance venues and so on. Fiction writers ought to do something similar. “We need to collectively create this landscape.”

Majumdar observes that world over, writers struggle to sustain themselves. It’s not been a lucrative profession in the past, and it’s definitely not one today. He says that writers are now more likely to earn their bread through journalism or teaching. Or through any other profession. But it’s important to treat their writing seriously. If they really want to do it, they must carve out the space and time for it. “If writing is a need, you will do it at four in the morning or you will write late in the night.”

References

Saikat Majumdar, The Firebird, Hachette India, 2015

Saikat Majumdar, The Scent of God, Simon and Schuster India, 2019

Saikat Majumdar, The Remains of the Body, Vintage, Penguin Random House India, 2024