Janice Pariat interview: How fiction can shape our understanding of the world

Longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature last year, the novel draws the readers into well-crafted worlds set in different geographies ranging from present-day Meghalaya to 18th century Italy. The four protagonists, which include German literary figure Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, hail from different time periods and places.

There is also an eager Edwardian student from England who hunts for “the tree of all trees” in a sacred forest in Lower Himalayas, even as Goethe voyages around Italy in 1782, stumbling upon a radical discovery in his time about the plant world. Nothing is inflexible or static as the reader rapidly journeys in and out of these multiple spaces.

In an interview with The Federal, Pariat, who was on a visit to Bengaluru, shares why she dislikes our tendency to “box” everything in our lives, what inspired her to write this book which seems to stem from a “larger ancestral power”; the proliferation of Indian writers and her view on the restive North East. However, Pariat, whose well-received debut collection of short stories, Boats on Land (Penguin, 2012) — set in Shillong, Cherrapunji and Assam — is reluctant to talk about Manipur, largely because she doesn’t want to be viewed as a ‘voice of the North East’.

Rising above labels

On her dislike for labels, Pariat sets out to explain, “Categories tend to diminish; they tend to singularize people and the world that actually exists in a messy, glorious abundance.”

“At a more personal level, it begins from having a very mixed ethnic heritage,” she continues.

“I lived in Assam for many years; my ethnic heritage is a combination of Portuguese, British, Khasi and the Jaintia in the Meghalaya hills. When people ask me where I am from, I still don’t know what to say. It made me uncomfortable that I wanted to fit in but I realised that pinning me to a place doesn’t do my ancestral history any justice,” she elaborates. And it was that shift in her that made her question “our great proclivity to categorise easily and quickly”.

But what prompted an author with a humanities background, who teaches Creative Writing at Ashoka University (here we go classifying again, sorry Pariat), to use botany as a “metaphor or vehicle” to question this? It meant that she had to start from scratch, from studying beginner’s botany to reading up core science texts, to craft a critique in her narrative on how mainstream science is practised in such a “rigid, deeply mechanical way”.

Maybe for Pariat, as Goethe says passionately in ‘Everything…, “To be inspired by plants is to learn to drop fixed ideas, to enter into an open-ended dialogue with the world… and maybe then all will be revealed…”

To get at this grand reveal, Pariat, fascinated by the intersection between botany and philosophy, tries to connect our deeply mechanistic way of learning science to the way we relate to the world as well. This is what Pariat unpeels — through botany she explores ways of how we connect to the world.

For instance, if we consider the plant in a fragmented way — divided parts thrown together — we will probably relate to the world in that way as well, she says.

Lessons from the plants

There is a parallel, refreshing narrative running through the book that offers a more nurturing way of learning about the world, which has to do with indigenous way of living and knowing.

Pariat admits being heavily inspired by botanist-cum-native American poet Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). In this book, Kimmerer shows how other living beings — “asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass — offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.”

“Kimmerer acknowledges plants and animals are our oldest teachers and shows in her book there’s also a parallel way of getting to know the world. Everything the Light… is very much a fictional expansion of that idea in some ways,” asserts Pariat.

“Some books you come across during research shape and change the way you look at the world,” she shares, adding that Pranay Lal’s Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (2016) and Robert MacFarlane’s Underland (2019) are other books that influenced Everything…

Ancestral power

There was also an ancestral power hovering around, impelling Pariat to write, to tell the stories of those who tread lightly on the earth, sharply conscious of the other living beings we share this planet with. Pariat says she was not really the sole writer of this book. “There was a support network of people and non-living beings that brought this book into being,” she underlines. Besides these mysterious unseen forces, other strong influences in her life that shaped this book were the storytellers from the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya.

“I grew up in Shillong, Meghalaya, in the Khasi hills and I was very much part of an oral community with vibrant oral storytelling traditions. I began by listening,” she says. Listening is also critical to writing, she says, and as important as reading books.

Coming from a part of the world rich in oral tradition, she regrets that literature is only treated as just text, script, printed words. “Literature is much more than that, for when you are able to listen, you build a bridge between being able to tell a story and write a story,” stresses Pariat.

Not a voice of the North East

When Pariat’s first book was warmly received, she was expected to keep writing about the North East. This expectation came not from editors, publishers, reviewers but readers as well, she recalls. But the author did not want to be boxed in.

“As a writer, I love to have a literary landscape that I can just explore without a need for policing. I’d rather not be categorised as a North East writer. I will write about the North East as meaningfully as I can because I share a deep connection with the people. But the North East is such a deeply complex region,” she says.

On being pushed to comment on the troubled North East, she says in a pained voice, “All I like to say is the larger overarching problem in the North East stems from the fact that it forms part of the border with China and hence so much has been sacrificed for India to have these borders. People have lost so much because we provided a buffer zone between the Indian mainland and China. I wish that this is acknowledged rather than treating the North East as this rebellious problematic place.”

Writing male voices

On being able to write as Goethe and Linnaeus, Pariat admits it was challenging. “It was also intimidating — writing white male figures like Goethe and Linnaeus, who are also exceedingly well-known figures in the scientific and literary world. Who am I to put them into my book — do I have the right to do it? Especially, since I am a brown woman in some corner in the world. These are the questions I asked myself as we often consider ourselves as not worthy. I had to work really hard to overcome that feeling to get into their voices,” explains Pariat.

On the explosion of Indian writers

In her view, there has been an explosion of Indian writers largely because there are more spaces today for the arts, with literary fests, liberal arts universities, Instagram and regional literature translations which have burgeoned. “Books written by Indian writers and English translations of regional authors feed into each other, allowing for diversity of voices. Having more interesting stories being told around you in itself is so inspiring,” says this writer, who probably has many more books coming in the future.

It will be interesting to see what she comes up with next. In Everything..., she has written her most political book yet, she says, since it questions our most fundamental notion of how we understand the world, to rethink how we learn. Yes, that she does very effectively.