In conversation with Deepti Kapoor.
Deepti Kapoor was born in Uttar Pradesh and grew up in various places across North India. Her first novel, A Bad Character, was published globally by Penguin Random House, and in France by Seuil, where it was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis Étranger 2015. It was also shortlisted for several awards in India. Deepti writes for Granta, Conde Nast Traveller and The Guardian. She is working on her second novel, a multi-perspective narrative about an American yoga student disappearing in India.
Recently, Deepti contributed her piece ‘Mataji’ to Walking Towards Ourselves: Indian Women tell their Stories, an anthology edited by Catriona Mitchell and published by Hardie Grant Books. Deepti sat down with Catriona to chat more about the book and the stories that have shaped her life.
Catriona: Deepti, your first novel, A Bad Character, is about a young woman who ventures into sex, drugs and danger in lieu of living a more conventional life in Delhi — and in this way, does away with any exoticised notions of how Indian women behave (as described in much Indian fiction, perhaps largely written by those living outside of India). Was it your intention to break open stereotypes, when you started out with this book?
Deepti: I think if I’d entered into it with the intention of breaking open stereotypes I’d never have written this novel this way. It would have been more systematic, more a calculation. I was more interested in a barely contained explosion, more interested in the chaos inside that mind and that moment in time. It was very, very insular. That’s not to say I was unaware of the exotic India, be it of tea plantations, saris, beautiful bejeweled women, forbidden love, all that stuff, or arranged marriages or holy men etc, but it was far from my consciousness.
If I was interested in anything it was in doing away with the idea of the Indian girl who, despite the degrees of her rebellion, is essentially good, essentially respectful, loves the family, believes in that unity. I was interested in doing away with someone you can completely relate to and safely root for. The idea of a girl who is wronged somehow, has wrong done to her, is treated unfairly — the falsely accused, the unhappy but good girl, the complicated rebel who is ultimately relatable… all of this I wanted to get rid of. It would have been very easy to write a novel about a girl who has hopes and ambitions and sees them tempered or thwarted by an arranged marriage. Or a girl who is torn between her desires and her love and responsibility to her family. I’m not saying it would have been easy to execute, to get right, but it would have been easy to begin. It would have been easy, too, to write about a girl who runs away from that — like the girl who is Idha’s neighbour in the novel… but I wasn’t interested in that. I shut down all those narrative routes abruptly, it was a strategy. I was interested in a girl who disappoints you, who does wrong. And which nothing happens to. A girl who is neither punished nor redeemed. And I don’t think this is specifically Indian — I’m thinking of the recent US TV series The Girlfriend Experience, the way the narrator behaves and is portrayed in that, and also a novel that came out around the same time, Green Girl, which had an unpleasant narrator. Men get to have unpleasant narrators all the time.
So anyway, two things I was playing off, rather than actively thinking about stereotypes — were my own literary and cinematic influences and my own life experience.
And I’m actually very interested to write a calmer, psychologically realistic novel about women and families who are trapped by their obligations, and respect one another to a point while also trying to pull away. I’m interested in the push and pull between the individual and the family unit, where the unit in India still has primacy over the individual, the idea of the individual is still somewhat suspect. I’d like to write a novel or a novella that does in fact deal with a ‘good’ woman. But that was not for this novel, this novel wanted to destroy these things.
C: What has been the response of female Indian readers to the choices your character, Idha, makes (both critics and public)?
D: The reading public… I can’t really say for certain. But critics, yeah, many female critics, or people in the scene, writers, commentators, twitter types, didn’t seem to like her choices at all. Which is fine, except it always seemed to me that they conflated Idha’s choices with my choices or treated her choices as if they were my — the author’s — recommendations for life. And that’s where the problems start. So I got some shit. A bit of twitter hate from a clique of women, ones in publishing who guard the gate and hold the keys and so forth. I suspect some people started reading the novel and identified with the character, and then got completely let down by her, by the novel, by her actions, the novel’s actions, by where it was going, by what she was doing, what she wasn’t condemning overtly, by her failure, by the lack of an ending, or a correct choice or a call to action. They invested, and then they were disappointed.
And yet this was the point. The girl will not do what is expected of her, she will only disappoint, she will only let you down. She says it herself. Do not expect her to do the right thing. She will only let you down. And that’s her right.
One reviewer, who had a massive problem with it all, and with me it seems, wrote something along the lines of “what’s wrong with this girl, what’s she complaining about, if I were her Aunty I would have slapped her,” which tells me at least I pushed the right buttons in annoying people, but it’s a shame they didn’t stop to think that was intentional. Also, for a very privileged reviewer, paying lip service to feminism, it’s kind of a shitty thing to say.
A problem in India, I came to realise, is that there are very few slots for Indians in the global publishing world, so women are pitted against women. We’re competing for a few spaces. That means we tend to turn on one another, but also that the idea of what we can publish and say becomes narrow. We’re expected, somehow, to be representing India in what we say. American female authors, European female authors, aren’t expected to represent their continents and countries, but we’re positioned that way. Someone in the UK suggested the novel was the “definitive experience of middle class Indian female life”, which is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. I’d never claim it, and it would never be true. When such statements are made, and it’s usually just laziness, problems arise.
But you know, I was never interested in writing ‘documentary reality’. Idha’s reality is like an El Greco painting. And it must always be remembered that the novel’s reality is Idha’s reality, not the author’s. There’s a remove there. It’s called fiction.
C: You write that Delhi is ‘no place for a woman in the dark unless she has a man and a car or a car and a gun.’ Have you personally explored Delhi in edgy ways — by night, for example, driving around alone extensively as Idha did — and if so, are these your true impressions of the city?
D: Haha, yes. I used to drive around late night. I used to get up to some very stupid, very dangerous things with a variety of people. I was reckless. I loved my car. It was the only freedom I had. The only place I controlled. But at the same time, I was always on display in the car. At night, alone, every road, every junction, every traffic light, is an invitation to be observed, consumed in vision, objectified, terrified. Some women dispute this. I know lots of women who don’t even notice the staring, they either shut it out or just don’t care or they don’t see it. I know of rich people who operate in a world of power — everyone and everything is beneath them, they control the city, the world, and so people watching, staring, insinuating, they just don’t exist to them. It’s like they’re another species. But I didn’t feel like this, and neither did Idha. I felt, acutely, rightly or wrongly, the oppression gaze, and it had a profound effect on my existence. That line quoted though, has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s noirish hyperbole in one way, also bitter irony — in the sense she is going out, and saying I will do it and I’ll be fine, without a man, without a gun. Still, I wouldn’t exactly recommend wandering Delhi alone at night for extended periods of time, but then I’d say the same for so many places, and I don’t want to paint this apocalyptic vision of Delhi. Remember, the novel is set 16 years ago. The city has transformed. Young girls walk around HKV and Green Park in mini-skirts, they don’t seem to mind or care about the attention they get, they’re bold and unapologetic and I love, though it’s something I can’t quite get my head around, I can’t not see and be upset by the gaze. So students, young people, have changed the city, bent it to their will, and rightly so. But for me, what existed in Delhi, and what exists still, is this great repressive sexual energy. I don’t know of any country that’s as sexual as India, precisely because it’s so constrained, repressed, circumscribed, hemmed in, while women are so sexualised at the same time, turned into objects, beautified, covered in jewellery, covered up. I feel it pulsing through India, uncomfortably sometimes, erupting in violence, more so than other places, where it’s readily expressed in public spaces, or so open in the personal and social sphere that its energy is dissipated. New York, London, who gives a fuck if someone walks down the street naked? Most people would just be bored by it. And Thailand, too, there’s no repressed eroticism in the streets, sex is open, gender is so much more openly fluid there, it’s sexually playful, but strangely uncharged (and Thailand has its own problems of course). But India is charged.
C: My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken in the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping, and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night. The narrative voice in A Bad Character is so deeply haunting, the writing style so spare, that I felt hollowed out after reading it, and the feeling stayed with me for days. Is this a voice that defines you, do you think? Is it your signature style?
D: Thank you. A hollowing out is something I’m proud of. But no, I don’t think it’s a voice that defines me, nor is it my signature style. I think if you read the short story I wrote for Granta, A Double-Income Family, you probably wouldn’t recognise me, but that’s as much ‘me’ as ABC. If I were to become that voice all the time I’d be terribly, terribly restricted. It’s a very claustrophobic, charged voice. In many ways, I think the novel is this voice and nothing else. The voice is the only thing, and it took about a year to find it. I experimented so many ways, trashed so many attempts, and then I found it, and once I found the voice the novel wrote itself. I remember the handful of days when I hit on the voice and constructed the first fifteen or so pages, they were thrilling, I was suddenly in another world entirely, a twilight world. But no, that voice is unsustainable in such intensity. There are traces of it still, sentence structures, cadences, but I’m widening my range. Having said that, I just looked over a draft of something and realised it needed to be boiled down a lot more, given power. I feel like language can be witchcraft, and that’s what I’m drawn toward personally.
C: Your contribution to Walking Towards Ourselves, called Mataji, tells the story of the head of your family: your maternal grandmother, who was widowed when still young after bearing four children. She was ‘Suddenly, terribly free. A widow in India. The end of a life.’ What options would normally have been available to a widow in her position, at that time in India’s history?
D: Generalised normal best-case scenario: She’s looked after reasonably well by her in-laws (she doesn’t belong to her own family anymore so she must go with them). With no skills or education she can’t get a job. But she’s looked after on a basic level. Still, though, she’s set aside, marginalised within the family unity, and so has to look after everyone else. Hers is the family that everyone else has the right to kick.
Worst-case: abuse, mistreatment, she could have died or been killed by hunger, by abuse, by suicide. There was no obligation for anyone to treat a widow as anything but a burden. She could have been married off again, but that would probably have been unhappy for her.
This is all generalised, of course. There are many, many variations.
C: Your grandmother, Prakash, took an empowered route, by studying to become a doctor. Could this have been possible without the support and encouragement of her father (also a doctor)? How unusual was his attitude to education for his daughter? Is this egalitarian attitude seen more broadly nowadays?
D: I believe he was quite unusual. And I really have him to thank in many ways, for starting it off. It could have gone so many ways. For example, if she’d had nicer in-laws, who didn’t condemn her and call her a witch and accuse her of killing their son, she might have continued living in her husband’s home, in one of the scenarios in the previous question. Denied the right to education, living off scraps and pity, just trying to bring up her children with what she was given. And if she didn’t have three children, and her father was not who he was, maybe she would have been married her off to a widower or a much older, unmarried man. But it was his hard-headed, no-nonsense extreme practicality, and his belief in education and a modern life that made him encourage her to take up medicine, something that was very rare in his time, and something that created the family I have today.
It’s definitely a more equal society now than the 40s and 50s, and his attitude is much more common, but it’s so hard to generalize about India. It depends on the interplay of so many factors: income levels, class, education, caste, region, religion, all of which determine what kind of opportunities a woman will have. Large parts of rural and urban India are still consumed by superstition and cultural norms that value men over women, or have set roles for men and women that are hard to break away from.
C: Prakash ended up running a hospital in Uttar Pradesh, where she delivered babies. She refused to perform sex determination tests on pregnant women, adamant that ‘No girl would die because of her.’ And yet she maintained that to be born a woman was ‘the greatest curse of all’. Now in her early nineties and witness to new freedoms for younger generations of women (via you) does she still hold to this belief?
D: She still instinctively wishes for sons to be born, she believes a woman’s life is hard work, but she’s definitely softened her position in recent years. She’s seen her granddaughters live lives she could never have dreamed of, and she’s happy because of this. I think with the loss of her authority she’s allowed to be more accepting of choices. She doesn’t have to be brutal anymore.
C: You came into adulthood in Delhi at a time of ‘expanding horizons.’ Without a doubt, new freedoms for India’s women have come into play that were previously unimaginable — but is there a freedom that you long for in your day-to-day life, one that is still hard to come by?
D: The freedom to occupy public spaces in whatever mode that may be, in whatever manner and dress, without being subject to a dehumanising or predatory or moralistic gaze. Compared to what so many women have to deal with day by day, this is nothing, a luxury. But it connects to a larger idea of inequality, and goes all the way back to private spaces, and the conception of womanhood.
Deepti Kapoor is attending Sydney Writer’s Festival thanks to funding from the Australia-India Council.
