Author Kiran Desai on political novels, diaspora, loneliness, and more
Kiran Desai says the 1980s anti-Sikh riots, Babri Masjid demolition and 9/11 attacks left a deep impression and found their way into books
Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai, who is currently in Bengaluru, for the city’s signature literary festival, said the most pivotal moments in her life she had witnessed such as the anti-Sikh riots, the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition and the 9/11 attacks in the USA, later made their way into her books.
Her first experience of violence was during her childhood in India when she saw the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984, she shared with the Bengaluru audience.
Desai's latest book
“The sky was full of smoke, and I had friends who were terrified of losing their lives,” she said. Desai, who left India when she was 16, kept coming back to meet her father and her family in India. So, she next got to witness the aftermath of “fear” that hung over Delhi after the Babri Masjid demolition.
Also read: Nobel laureate Ramakrishnan on ‘social’ impact of slowing ageing and a ‘magic pill’
“We were anxious and worried riots would start in Delhi. Of course, communal riots that would go on to become a common occurrence in India,” she observed.
The 53-year-old Desai, who has just completed her latest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which will hit book stands in September 2025, was one of the star speakers at the Bengaluru Lit Festival this year.
She was clad in simple black straight pants and a long kurta, sans make-up. Young girls were fawning around her, urging her to sign their copies of her book and swearing that she was their inspiration. Desai seemed to take all the adulation in her stride.
Talking about the impact of the 9/11 attacks on her, the writer also described her shock at the "wild and crazy rage" Americans were experiencing and how they lashed out at Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I was living in New York at that time and I was horrified to see how America went to war. There was enormous change and harm after that, cannot understand the exhortation of war," she said. She went back to read Hemingway again seeking answers for America’s behaviour, she revealed.
Politics for the sake of art
But what she finds strange is that today's fiction writers in America are writing books so divorced from political events – there is a need for a political novel, she reiterated.
Books without politics are as light as air and the writers get to focus on their characters for sure but one has to look at both, it should not be art for the sake of politics but politics for the sake of art, stressed Desai.
In her book, Inheritance of Loss, which won the Man Booker prize, she sets her story against the 1980s rebellion of the ethnic Nepalese in the Himalayan town, who are fed up with being "treated like the minority in the place where they were the majority". The rebellion is bloody and chaotic.
Indian diaspora in America
Chandigarh-born Desai also talks about how “political” the Indian diaspora in America has become today. The political dramas in India are transported to the US and the Indian diaspora is living them passionately like Indians back home, said Desai, who claims to be in the thick of it all living amid south Asian immigrants in Jackson Heights in New Y ork.
In her view, the success of Indians in the US is largely due to a secular democracy dinned into their heads as children which makes them tolerant of differences – however, both in the US and India, secular democracy is being seriously challenged right now.
Inspiration
Desai also talks about being inspired by the three Mumbai boys, Ismail Merchant (who made a movie ‘In Custody’ from her mother Anita Desai’s novel), M F Hussain and Salman Rushdie, who taught her to work with an open heart and great vision.
On her new book, which is her third, and which has emerged after 20 years, Desai said she had vanished into an “ocean of stories”, where real life had become more of a ghost life, and her books had become the real life.
Lexicon of solitude
She was working every day and in an endless manner. After 20 years of writing this large body of work, she felt it was now time to find a connective tissue and bring it all together. And that is how she put together a 700-page book Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, said Desai. It is a lexicon of solitude, she pointed out.
Loneliness has become a global epidemic. “Loneliness has a spiritual and beautiful side to it as well. In the midst of brokenness, a window opens to invention," she says, describing her writing style as "writing in a jigsaw puzzle way".
Mother’s daughter
On her mother, the acclaimed author Anita Desai, Kiran says that she is 87 years old now and is not keeping too well, and so she misses her.
“I lived my entire life within her writing life, I had seen life through her lens,” she admits. On differences between her mother and her writing, she said, her mother’s writing has become more spare and subtractive as she got older. Though their writing is different, some of the landscapes tend to overlap, she admitted.
A Mexican village they both often escape to appears in both their books, they both write about the same stray dog and the same scorpion. For Kiran, these common elements in their books are “lovely”.