Preti Taneja talks about the intertextuality of her novel We That Are Young. (Source: Rory O’Bryen)
In her debut novel, We That Are Young (Penguin Random House), Preti Taneja hurls a grenade at the myth that is India Shining. By transporting and transcreating William Shakespeare’s King Lear to present-day Delhi and Gurgaon, the 40-year-old British-Indian academic and writer explores social inequality and injustice through the lens of a crumbling dynasty. Since its debut in 2017, the novel has gained critical acclaim and has recently been longlisted for the 11th annual Desmond Elliott Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for debut novelists. In this conversation, Taneja talks about the intertextuality of her novel, the idea of dharma, and why she chose to write about Kashmir. Edited excerpts:
When did you develop an interest in Shakespeare’s works?
During my A-levels, my English teacher talked about the politics of his (Shakespeare’s) works, breaking down the language, focusing on its nuances. I was profoundly moved by that experience. As a bilingual young person being introduced to Shakespeare, I wondered what one can do with words. I was an avid reader and my parents encouraged us to read — they wanted us to have this life of the mind.
But you chose theology, not literature, in your undergraduate course…
I grew up in Letchworth Garden City, in Hertfordshire, UK, which has a Punjabi population that’s segregated from the white part of town. We performed Hindu rituals at home, went to the gurdwara to be part of the community, and I went to a white Catholic school. By studying religion, I felt I could understand how the society I was living in worked and what was under the surface.
You were 18 when you read King Lear. When did the idea of writing a novel germinate and why Lear?
I think the idea of setting the novel in contemporary India was germinating right from the moment I read it. Anyone who has fallen in love with a book or play will know what the experience is like: you read something that means so much to you and somehow helps you understand the world in a way that can never be subtracted from yourself. At 18, I didn’t think I was going to write Lear as a novel. But when I wanted to be a writer and was thinking of a project, this was the most obvious choice.
Much of your novel is about the form. It’s a linguistic map of how the five main characters speak and engage with the English language. None of the words in Hindi are italicised or translated. Was it deliberate?
Some people might say I have no culture and no country (born in India and now based in Warwick, UK), but I can see things from the outside, how they fit together and interact with each other. What I’ve written is what I’ve experienced. The story is what we perceive it to be, from wherever we engage with it.
Language is political — it shapes us and our identities. I don’t always want to explain what I hear around me in my book, whether it is ulti or “give my hi to your uncle”—people in real life don’t need to explain these things. I wasn’t thinking about who will read it; have they been to India? And if I start explaining things in my book to my friends in India, they are going to think I’m an idiot. So, I just wrote.
A lot of South Asian writing has been plagued by the desire to describe every detail, bordering on the exotic—smells, spices, colour, textures. You do it to an extent. Were you being ironic?
Yes. I’ve had comments from readers who don’t know India and they don’t see that irony. It’s what they expect because of the kind of books they’ve been reading about India. In the West, we’ve been fed this diet of Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, etc., but that’s nobody’s fault. They are reading what they want into what I’ve written except that I’m being ironic and commenting on that kind of writing.
My book is intertextual. You will find shades of authors Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis, Basharat Peer and Jane Smiley — not just Shakespeare. There’s very little in the book that is not a conscious decision. Every line, every name, every detail came from some kind of process. When I work, my role is to imbue my world with all of the weighted politics of our times, and use my tools as sharp as I can.
Your version of Lear is terrifying. You’ve conflated the story of one man with the story of modern India, in terms of enterprise and corruption.
For 400 years, Shakespeare’s Lear has been understood as a heroic tragedy of this male figure and nothing else. I see it as a social tragedy that affects everyone who built empires for those men. For me, Bapuji (the patriarch) is the male ego writ large. He has gone through 70 years of his country’s birth — from Partition, the Emergency, liberalisation and global capitalism — and become successful. He’s tied up the idea of himself and his company to nationalism, to what the people in power say and do, and it has always worked. He has been able to manipulate the system to protect his interests to the point of blinkered insanity.
Lear’s and others’ actions point to the idea of dharma. Is it an Indian characteristic to bring dharma into a capitalistic picture? It’s interesting how the women either question it or don’t engage with it.
Maybe it is an Indian thing. When I was reading up on business families, there seemed to be a strong aspect of checking business against faith, as if the third estate in those families is god. So, in the book, and in that family, I’ve explored the idea of dharma as a social hierarchy that supports social inequality. Because for me, the real dharma is to not allow structures to confine our minds. If you read the Gita and think you’re connected to everyone and everything, you are energy that cannot be created or destroyed, then you are rising above the matrix.
Gargi (Goneril) questions it. It’s easy to say that when a woman questions that kind of dharma, she’s too modern. That makes me furious. I cannot tell you what is the worst thing to happen to an Indian woman in my book because that woman in reality hasn’t had a chance to speak for herself. I can only quote from King Lear: “The worst is not/ So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’.”
In an interview, you said Radha’s (Regan’s) section would have been a little different had the #MeToo movement happened when you were writing it.
Regan/Radha is caught in the middle of her sisters, who are all played off against each other in the patriarchal divide-and-rule way that make us hate each other and fight for men. Colonisers work the same way too. I’m interested in seeing how the global aspects of the movement can connect with things that happen in India: early marriage, marital rape. Can we join forces and have that shared experience shape the movement?
Jeet’s (Edgar’s) journey is one from extreme wealth to poverty. Was it challenging to write it?
Yes, I did struggle to write that section, because I didn’t want to misrepresent or exoticise poverty. I’ve worked in areas like those slums as part of my career. Everyone there is so generous with their time and stories. But Jeet never lets anyone speak, nor does he listen.
Kashmir is a recurring setting in the narrative. The characters engage with it on socioeconomic and political levels. Why Kashmir?
The problem in Kashmir was caused by Partition; 70 years later, it continues. The lost narratives and lives in Kashmir really spoke to me; I had to go there and see it for myself.
I’ve been to the UN library in New York and researched documents from 1920s to Partition, to everything till the late 1990s, because everything from the last two decades is embargoed. There’s a polyphonic narrative of who is or isn’t responsible, and I wanted to deconstruct that and say that the only truth is that everybody there is in pain and that is not okay.