Related News
Shanghai inspires Indian writer
Print Edition
HAVING finished his 10-week residency last month at the M Literary in Shanghai, Jeet Thayil, an Indian performance poet and novelist, said his experience may lead to an interesting book on Shanghai in the future.
Thayil first came to the city in March last year to take part in the M Literary Festival. He stayed for eight days. When the opportunity for a residency came up, he applied for it.
During his residency, he held his reading at M On the Bund, played his music “When the High is Held High” for an audience, and sat through Nobel laureate VS Naipaul’s lecture during the Shanghai Book Fair.
He pronounced himself more than satisfied with Shanghai, saying, “In some way, this place brings me a home-like feeling and I fit right into it.”
He said the residency had given him a time and place where he could live for a while without thinking of all the things that interfered with his work in real life.
“I’ve made notes that some of the people would have told me. I’ve become very productive in the past few weeks. I hope it will lead to an interesting Shanghai book in the future,” Thayil told Shanghai Daily.
Born in Kerala, south India, and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Bombay, the 55-year-old writer said he drew inspiration from cities.
“I prefer the city where there are people, noise, coffee shops, and the subways are just five minutes away if I go outside. But once I go inside, I am isolated and absolutely cut off it. That’s the energy of a city and I love it,” Thayil said.
His debut novel “Narcopolis,” which was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, is set in 1970s Old Bombay and based on his own experiences as an opium addict, which Thayil called “the secret history”, both his own and the city’s.
The story opens in Rashid’s opium house on Shuklaji Street where the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Chinese. All have their own stories to tell.
Thayil said there was a clichéd style of Indian writing in English novels, which usually are set in a large rambling house with several generations, very loving grandparents, very lovely grandchildren, lots of spices, mangoes, saris and monsoons.
However, “that kind of view of the country is absolutely false,” Thayil said. “I wanted to tell a story that hasn’t been told, at least in terms of the language, the people and the images — a little more assured to the life of an Indian city.”
It took him about five and a half years to finish writing “Narcopolis.” By the time the book was out, many things had changed; even the city was called Mumbai instead of Bombay. The book has thus become a record of a world that no longer exists.
Thayil said the people he knew in the opium dens had either vanished or died. He too had been clean for about six years from that point and ended up being someone completely different. So, rather than merely a memorial or merely a defied take on Indian pictures, the book ended up being kind of three things in one.
He recalled the moments when he tried to immerse himself in Bombay of that time to recreate what it felt like to smoke opium. The opium state created a lot of long sentences in “Narcopolis,” in a sense that the writer didn’t know where the sentences would end. “That wasn’t a healthy state for me while writing those parts of the book,” Thayil said. “However, I wanted to put our shame on display, so people understand the lowest of the low — prostitutes and criminals and drug addicts, people with no faith in God or man, no faith in anything except the truth of their own senses.”
Currently he is working on his next novel, about which he is naturally reticent. “But I’m consciously making it very different from the language, the voice in ‘Narcopolis’, because it is completely a different story, although one of the characters goes on in this story.”
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
