Jobeth Warjri: Thank you, Janice Pariat, for being a part of this interview. I would like to talk to you about an important element in your writing—the diasporic sensibility. How has calling multiple places “home” shaped your sense of aesthetics and, also, the affective components related to your craft?
Janice Pariat: Calling multiple places “home” has indeed contributed to my “diasporic sensibility”, but I think even more than that my exceedingly mixed ethnic heritage—of Khasi, Jaintia, Portuguese, British. I grew up in pockets of Assam, where my father was transferred from one tea estate to another, but I always had Shillong to call “home”. Except, I grew up in a mixed maternal household—my grandmother was Jaintia, my grandfather Portuguese, so even if I had a place to call home, I was never quite an “insider”. And then, of course I left, to study in Delhi, in London, I lived “outside” here and there for a long while, and I think because of this, along with my mixed heritage, I have felt unmoored, unanchored. At first, in a not entirely positive way—after all, who doesn’t wish to fit in? But I’d ask myself these questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? Where is home? And be quite disquieted by not having a clear answer. Only recently have I learned to embrace this—to acknowledge that I am a child of vast historical processes, of vast movements and migrations across the globe, that my story, as all our biographies, began a long time ago. That I carry the stories of my ancestors. And this has opened me up to the world in a way that I didn’t think possible. I appreciate the abundance of “homes”, I appreciate the complicated, entangled stories that have created my ancestral history—and I think this has permeated into my fiction now. My novel, Everything the Light Touches, intertwined a quartet of stories set across geographies and across centuries. Somehow, I cannot really bring myself to only consider the miniscule anymore. All is open. All is complicated. The past very much alive in our present.
JW: I think that you, along with Anjum Hasan and Jahnavi Barua, were among the first writers from the Northeast to express a fully developed idea of the diasporic in your writings. Formalistically, such as is the case with Seahorse: A Novel and The Nine Chambered Heart, it has resulted in a style that draws from an ephemeral sense of place and the people associated with these places. Was this intentional?
JP: Perhaps it wasn’t quite intentional at the time—we also are able to draw these observations in retrospect. Seahorse, my first novel, very much followed a geographical trajectory that echoed my own—Nem moves from an unnamed small-town to Delhi University’s North Campus, and then is in London/the UK for a year or so on a fellowship. Looking back now I think this allowed, for me, some safety in the intimidating exercise of writing a first novel. These were familiar places—in fact I was living in London at the time of writing the book, and while all else felt unfamiliar, the process of working on a much vaster canvas than the stories in Boats on Land, at least there was the familiarity of these locations and settings to fall back on. In The Nine-Chambered Heart, the unnamed protagonist also follows a geographical trajectory similar to mine, but this was more so I could explore love, desire, relationships, in a variety of settings. To see how we leave stories of ourselves wherever we go—and in a book like this we are able to gather them and place them together.
JW: Contrary to popular understanding of the diasporic as something associated with drifting and wandering, the term also touches upon a sense of a symbolic belonging to place. I think we see this in The Nine Chambered Heart where objects, such as paintings and sculptures, mark the character’s belonging to a certain place in time. What is your understanding of place as a symbolic feature in your writing?
JP: I think we carry home with us wherever we go—be it in the form of a coffee press, a dried flower, a pine cone, food stuff, a pendant, a photo. No matter how nomadic we might be, I suppose we are also only able to appreciate that movement, that journeying, if we are able to recognise some fixities, some anchors. And those anchors can themselves be movable—but they carry meaning within them—a particular place, a particular room or home—that becomes embedded in that object. It’s in the nature of the social lives of things to carry meaning in this way…
JW: In relation to the question above, in Everything the Light Touches, you ground the nomadic experience with the idea of the Nongïaïd. What made you think of connecting the travel and the diasporic experience to one of the cultures you’ve inherited?
JP: Travel in Everything the Light Touches is used as a vehicle to explore the tussle between worldviews—those that hold on to fixity and those that call for fluidity. My characters are travellers caught in movement, just as the novel leans strongly towards supporting a worldview that acknowledges the constant motion of life and the universe. Travel also serves as a useful tool to “unlock” characters—they are placed in unfamiliar settings, dealing with unexpected occurrences, and we see the decisions they make in those situations. Just as in life—I think how people travel is very revealing of their characters. The Nongïaïd as you know are a fictional community—but they play an incredibly important part in the novel as a whole. They symbolise everything that the nation-building project, or any project that seeks to fix and calcify, cannot control. The inclusion of the Nongiaid speaks very directly to the tussle between fixity and fluidity. They are the unsettled, wayward, wild, unruly and untamed that the Linnaean way of seeing is constantly trying to suppress, isolate, manipulate, tame, and eliminate.
JW: Do you see yourself continuing with exploring the diasporic theme in your writing? What’s next for Janice Pariat?
JP: To be honest, I’ve never quite imagined it as the “diasporic theme” until you mentioned so! I am looking to tell more stories that acknowledge these vast timelines and storylines we all belong to—the immense sweeps of history that go into me, my characters experiencing certain things and seeing life, the world in a certain way. I cannot undo this “long perspective”; it will continue to inform my writing from now on.
