Preti Taneja teaches writing in prisons and universities. She is the 2019 UNESCO Fellow in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, a Leverhulme Research Fellow in writing and cultural rights at Warwick University and an honorary Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University. Her novel We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press/ AA Knopf/ Vintage) won the 2018 Desmond Elliot Prize for the UK’s best debut of the year, and was listed for awards including the Folio Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, and Europe’s premier award for a work of world literature: the Prix Jan Michalski. It was a book of the month for Amazon, and book of the year in the Guardian, The Sunday Times and the Spectator, and in India’s The Hindu newspaper. It achieved starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal, where it was also a top 10 literary fiction pick of the year for 2018. We That Are Young has been translated into several languages and is currently in development as a major international TV series with Gaumont US.
Misha Rai: Thanks so much for doing this interview with me. I am such a massive fan of your novel, We That Are Young. I remember vividly finishing the book, sitting still to catch my breath, putting the book on the bookshelf, going out for a walk, and then coming right back to re-read it and discovering anew the world and characters and language and story structure in a way I hadn’t on my first read. This sort of unearthing a reader does each time they re-read a book is the joy of a really good book, so thank you for that. Also, congratulations on winning the Desmond Elliot Prize! So well deserved. Another thing to celebrate is the paperback edition of the novel, which is out now!
Preti Taneja: Thank you for reading the book so deeply. I’ll never know that feeling of reading it for the first time, so I am fascinated by that experience. And by how the materiality of the book changes it: whether you read in hardback or paperback, online or listen as audiobook is all so differently intimate, and affects the reader’s relationship with the story. I love books as physical objects. While the hardback design felt elegiac and powerful to me, aware of tyranny, artifice and beauty, the paperback is a fantastical three-headed tiger. It reminds me both of the epic Indian animal myths in The Panchatantra, (The Five Treatises) and of a line from Shakespeare’s play King Lear, ‘Tigers, not daughters, what have you perform’d?’ It’s perfect to bring those together because they are the part of the DNA of the novel. And it’s told from the perspectives of the five wild young people in the play – three of whom are daughters. Perry de la Vega, the designer has perfectly captured the essence of duality, the absurdity, myth, and feral energy I’m working with.
MR: I have seen the cover for the paperback edition and the three-headed tiger is magnificent! It captures the majesty of the story, which begs the question: why were you interested in retelling King Lear? What about that specific Shakespearean play, did you think, would make for a compelling adaptation set in India?
PT: First and most simply, it was the basics of the plot – King Lear begins with the division of a kingdom and ends with civil war: that’s the bones of contemporary Indian history – from Empire and colonisation, to the formation of the contemporary nation state with Partition in 1947, to the ongoing conflict in Kashmir which was a result of that. British Empire history and the impact of colonialism was not in the UK school curriculum, and there’s still a lack of education about that now. But if you have Indian parents, you grow up hearing about it at home. It’s the reason why you are ‘British Asian’ in the first place. When I studied King Lear at 17, I immediately saw the story my parents and aunts had been telling me. Lines on a map. Divide and Rule. Partition. Accession. It was all there in a kind of reverse 17th Century image. The question of the daughters also struck me. I didn’t see two evil sisters and a good one, or a crone, a whore and a saint. I saw three women doing their best to obey their god-like father, until one chooses not to – not in order to save him from himself, but as a form of resistance and escape. The rules and social codes of honour, shame and duty to father and family that the women are bound by in the play are very much still alive in Indian culture, including in the diaspora where daughters must be perfect in the home and the world, where we represent our families and communities as well. The connection of women’s bodies to the land via dowry also resonated, and where Indian women are considered synecdoche for the purity of the nation state. This to the extent that in 1947, many were killed by their own families to prevent them being abducted or raped by men of the ‘other’ side during Partition.
Finally, the politics of social justice, and the polythesism of Lear spoke to me. It’s a play with strongly Christian themes; that was written in response to an England in the process of becoming a united kingdom. But the play is set in a pagan universe because there were strict laws circumscribing the representation of Christianity on the stage. There are references to the play being set ‘before Merlin’s time:’ this frees Shakespeare to question religion, nature, faith in many forms – appeal to the sky, to Hecate – it’s a whirling mass of searching for something to believe in and coming up with ‘nothing.’ The myriad forms of Hinduism exist alongside Islam and Christianity and Jainism and Sikhism and so on in India, and this correlates so well with Shakespeare’s questioning in King Lear. To really explore that, We That Are Young plays with narrative form: there’s a linear and a circular chronology to it that speaks both to Christian eschatology and to Hinduism’s emphasis on the circularity of dharma.
So obviously, Lear not a realist play: it is based on myths, legends and history that Shakespeare took inspiration from, and made into something new. We That Are Young follows that; it’s is hyper-real, and draws on many sources including Lear and Hindu epic texts and it’s ‘time is out of joint.’
MR: I can see exactly what you’re saying and how all of this complexity plays out in your novel. I am fascinated by the title of the novel, We That Are Young, and the epigraph from Songs of Kabir at the beginning of the book. How did you come up with the title, and how do it and the epigraph lead the reader into the book?
PT: Its themes of tyranny and corruption, its vicious and violent tyrant’s anti-women rhetoric, the wealth gap – all have correlations in many parts of the world – but India is the country of my parents’ homeland, the place which existed in me via their language, stories and songs, in home food and family life, before I learned to speak. The book expresses what coming from two cultures – India and the UK – gives me: the confidence of many different stories, idea-systems and tongues, of being a citizen of the world, with an array of literary traditions to work with when I write.
So the whole novel is woven with threads of quotations and misquotations from different texts, and Shakespeare’s language in Lear, as well as the poetic syntax, has formed each line. The last lines of the play are:
The weight of these sad times we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath born most, we that are young,
Shall never see so much nor live so long.
My first draft began with Jivan coming home. I had about 10 pages when an early reader asked if I had a title – I didn’t – he suggested it might help me focus the form and voice of the book. And straight away, that line, ‘We that are young’ came to me. The structure of the whole thing fell into place. It would be told from the perspective of the five young people in the play, and follow the linear trajectory of the plot, which is a Western narrative form. But as I’ve mentioned, those end lines also have a circularity to them – more in keeping with the Hindu concept of time, and dharma – or right action – as circular; and so there would also be sections with the Lear character, Devraj, speaking from a different time code – in retrospect almost. I realised that doing this would allow me to tell the story of Lear but in my own way. I wanted it to speak with, but also be different enough to the ways in which other writers including Jane Smiley have approached the play – A Thousand Acres is told by Lear’s oldest daughter, looking back – re-visioning as a feminist project – which I admire a lot, but didn’t want to copy; and one voice just wasn’t right for a book like this.
I think the times call for a more multivocal approach – and the beauty of novels is that they allow for overlapping stories, the creation of doubt, switching allegiances – and those are the times we are in. India’s population is so young – 50 per cent are under 25 – that’s millions of people. So it fit both the Lear aspect and the Indian aspect of the book, and it has both an epic sweep and an elegiac intimacy that responds to the tone of Shakespeare’s play.
Kabir is the soul of the novel. I was looking for Indian poems and sayings that could stand for the curses and prophecies in King Lear. I had Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s sublime translation, and he was kind enough to let me quote it through the book. That one poem, with its dispassionate, prophetic chaos, its reference to an animalistic ‘family of five’ was exactly right for the epigraph. In Lear Shakespeare thinks about similar themes: nature, animal and human, and ecological, with an approach that is prophetic, serious and absurd at once. But what I also love about Kabir is that he predates Shakespeare, and wrote in a hybrid vernacular, he was critical of both Hinduism and Islam and both of those have reviled him, and have claimed him too. There are lots of little snipits from Kabir’s own history that got twisted into the construction of the Devraj family in the novel.
MR: I’m going to have to go back and read the book again because I feel as though I’ve missed so many references and snippets but again, as I said earlier, the joy of a really good book is making all sorts of discoveries when you re-read it. And after the first couple of readings of your book, I couldn’t stop thinking of the violence I encountered in the pages. I was born and brought up in India, so I understand the nature of the subcontinent and its relationship with violence, thus none of it felt gratuitous to me. And King Lear, like all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, is very dark and pretty gruesome and yet, having read Lear and reading your novel, I wondered about the nature of violence in different countries/continents: how your book builds on the violence in Lear, making it bleaker and more terrifying. I’m thinking about Radha’s sexual history and Sita/Cordelia’s twisted, horrifying end. (When her father peers down at her broken body lying on the floorboards, I couldn’t help thinking about Sita from Ramayana and how she gives herself to the earth, to be subsumed by it). Could you speak about the violence in the book a little and how the politics and nature of the Indian subcontinent demand certain narrative choices?
PT: : I was genuinely surprised that some readers in the West found the violence in the book exaggerated. There is so much violence, hidden in plain sight: in families, on the street, there’s a culture of impunity for police and the state and for those attacking minorities on the grounds of race and religion: the media has a role to play in this – it’s true in India and America, and it’s true in the UK, which outsources its violence to other places as well as it happening at home. I’m not saying anything very controversial in the book. In fact some of my Indian readers in India felt I didn’t go far enough. For women: there’s a violent gaze we become subject to very young – and that’s just in the looking. The curses in Lear are so deeply woman-hating; so full of self disgust, so shaming and ashamed of the female body – as if that gaze is articulated there. This is daily life in India and in the world. In fact a lot of the most misogynistic curses in the novel are taken from translations of the Laws of Manu, one of Hinduism’s foundational texts. I didn’t have to look too far or deeply for them.
Sexual abuse is endemic; the flip side of woman-worship. Both deny genuine agency. In the scene where Sita dies, that all just comes to a head. And the connection you made is what I was hinting towards.
MR: What I found heartening, and clung to as I read We That Are Young, was the love the three sisters felt for each other. Through the interiority of the sisters, more so in the case of the older two sisters, the reader watches them grapple with their love for each other and the complexity of the brutal struggle that ensues once their father, Devraj, disinherits the youngest sister, Sita. I thought this was a smart narrative choice: a beam of light in an otherwise corrupt, bleak world. You’ve made Lear’s daughters more three-dimensional and the story richer.
What propelled you to make this choice?
PT: There’s no separation for me in the feminism of my work and my life. The story is not me revelling in setting women against each other: it’s about slamming the ways in which patriarchy causes that to happen – and one would have to be a special kind of sadist to misunderstand that. I love my female characters for their flaws and for their ability to transcend, to hope for the better things they could make happen. I couldn’t write them otherwise.
The absolute horror of Lear occurs at the beginning of the play, when a father sets his own daughters against each other for his own pleasure and the pleasure of the court of men watching: he’s already decided which pieces of land his daughters are each going to get after all. It’s a disgusting form of divide and rule that affects all three women differently. As to their worse natures versus their yearning for solidarity – I don’t think I did anything that isn’t already in the play – I’ve just excavated meaning in a different way to how those women have traditionally been understood. When Regan mimics her sister in the love test, it feels to me like she’s internalised the message that she is worthless – and so says ‘prize me at her worth.’ When the lid comes off – when Lear abdicates, everything he’s set in motion over years runs its course. I think about the women in my novel, I feel love, and sorrow – because they are, first and foremost, sisters who love one another against huge odds. That’s the real tragedy of this play, for me: that patriarchy wins out because here it’s too strong for three women, individually, to resist.
MR: I have, not exaggerating even a little bit, with friends who have read your book, ad nauseum discussed the ending — Jeet coming back and Surendra saying, “You and I will always speak truth to each other, no?” The times charge us to do so — and not come up with an answer that satisfies us. Could you unpack the end for us and what Jeet means when he says, “It is time to begin.”
PT: The final lines of the play are ambiguous. The character who speaks them in the Folio edition of King Lear is Edgar. Though the received wisdom is that he is a bookish boy, forced to grow up through violence to usher in a new, more ethical form of leadership, I think of him as the slipperiest of them all – able to hide his identity convincingly, to punish his father in his worst hour, to kill when under threat. Jeet, his equivalent in We That Are Young, is the same. Like Surendra, and like all men in this novel/ and in Shakespeare’s play – they know what to say to get people on their side. Jeet knows how to use rhetoric to hide his real motives, and to convince anyone listening of what they want the truth to be. And he’s talking to someone he doesn’t like or trust, but considers ‘family’ and has to keep on his side. That’s why he says they should always speak truth to each other. It’s a right-wing manueuvre, to always say what you want others to believe of you, and actually mean the opposite. We see it in our world every day.
The final lines in the novel – the end, where Jeet says, ‘let’s go down’ signal a descent further into depravity, dressed as civilisation. To create the thing he was practicing for in the basti: a social world he is going to divide and rule along the lines of misogyny, culture, race, religion, caste, language: all the things we’ve seen accelerate to the surface in the last five years in the UK and India, and America. He says ‘it’s time to begin,’ as a signal that he is ready, as a Devraj-elect – to take control of the Company and by definition, the country. It seems despairing. But as in King Lear, hope in the book lies in the reader’s hands – it’s in the equality of high and low culture and mixing of different languages in the book; its in the challenge to cultural ‘purity’ and elitism the book represents. There’s a step beyond tragedy that we can take when we read – otherwise we are colluding with and enabling the Jeets of this world.
MR: I see what you mean. Wow. I’m going to be mulling that for a while. Oh Jeet!
You have worked as a human rights reporter and teach writing in prisons and I wondered if any aspect of that part of your life helped you in writing We That Are Young? And how so?
PT: Much of my emotional experiences in those places find its way into my fiction – it might not be obvious, but it’s always there. I’ve worked in some of the toughest places, where people who genuinely have nothing, and have little hope of anything materially changing, find ways to make a life. They fall in and out of love, look after their children, struggle for their homes and jobs and so on. My experiences also fed into the decisions I was making about how to tell my story. Shakespeare looks at England through the prism of elites who have taken too little care of those they feed on. That gave me a model to work with. I didn’t want to appropriate from those who have less access to being heard than I do: I’d rather use my words in other ways, and use the rest of my time teaching and working in places where I can help those people to tell their own stories. Then I can use whatever means I have to get them out.
MR: The French studio Gaumont (“Narcos”) is collaborating with Indian producer Dina Dattani (“The Ashram”) on a series adaptation of your novel and I couldn’t help thinking that it is the right time for this televised adaptation, considering the political climate in India. Would you agree with that?
PT: I researched the book in India from 2010-2013. I could see the rise of populism on the ground; there was a change coming and it was going to be based on religious fundamentalism and nationalism couched in the argument of economic development. I was also always aware that in the UK, Kashmir was not talked about enough at all. The reality of abuse that women face in middle and upper class families is common knowledge and it’s rife: most of us grow up knowing someone affected by that and by a culture of silence. The book went on submission before Modi was elected, before Trump, before the MeToo movement in India: before Brexit, before water shortages became so talked about, before the death of Jyoti Singh and other rapes became high profile; before India’s demonitisation and cow vigilantism was widely reported. When the book went on submission in 2013, editors didn’t fall in love with it; maybe some found the world it showed difficult to buy into, others didn’t see someone from my background taking on Lear or writing India. There was nothing like it on the market. Then it got to the tiny independent Galley Beggar Press in 2017, and by then, the world had changed. I’m sure this happens to all writers but I often see things in the news coming out of India now and I put them in the novel as I drafted over a the years, around my regular jobs. Is this book going to be made into a TV series? We’ll see – I’m not sure TV is ready to go as wild on Indian corruption as it has on other places, including in Narcos. But it should. The people want to see the world as it is now, I believe in that.
MR: Are you working on any new prose right now? Could you talk about your future projects?
PT: I’ve been experimenting and testing out some new ideas through a few short writing commissions while I research my next book. I’m working with prose poetry a lot and I’ve done some new work for The Onassis Foundation and Public Theatre in New York’s Democracy is Coming Festival, and I recently wrote a piece for the UK’s Royal Society of Arts, in response to a report they put out. It’s researching the future of work in an economy where tech has stalled, and people are leaving cities for new life with less capital. I thought about who gets to leave, and who gets to stay. About how technology is slowly training humans to speak its language – it’s a kind of colonisation of the tongue, like a standard form of English once was. A lot of this new short work is me, thinking through my job teaching writing in prison. I don’t want to write about that directly yet but it affects me a lot, and that’s coming out in my new stories. I also can’t talk about the new book yet – I will soon – when it’s ready. It’s wild, and it’s a wild experience writing it because the subject matter is so intense – if anything even more so than We That Are Young. That deep dive into something new: it’s a sensation writers crave, and I’m in it right now.