Author Kunal Basu looked back at his literary career of 25 years at the Kolkata Literary Meet on Monday, using the occasion to announce two forthcoming books, both revolving around love.
In a session titled ‘Books: Past, Present and Future’, Basu was in conversation with Rituparna Roy and Pinaki De. “Twenty-five years have gone by in the blink of an eye,” Basu said, recalling the beginnings of his career. “But I’m happier looking ahead rather than taking a glance backwards over my shoulders”.
Basu announced a new novel, Self-Portrait, and a collection of long stories titled Vintage Love, both due later this year.
Self-Portrait, he said, is set “in the high Himalayas” and is “a novel about love, about betrayal, about shame, about nostalgia, and violence.”
Vintage Love will comprise five stories set in Kolkata. “They are all love stories, set in different parts of this city that you will recognise as soon as you read them,” he said.
Explaining his renewed focus on love, Basu read from the prologue to Vintage Love. “Writing love stories is a risky business,” he said. “One could be called a sentimental fool or a hopeless romantic.” Yet, he added, love remained “an open territory that withstood and even encouraged risky manoeuvres.” If people could be “foolish enough to fall in love,” he concluded, “it would be no more foolish to write love stories.”
Basu’s upcoming ‘Vintage Love’ will comprise five stories set in Kolkata
Roy observed that romantic love had not been central to much of Basu’s earlier work. Basu agreed, adding that compassion and surrogate families had featured more prominently in his fiction so far.
Much of the discussion focussed on Basu’s long association with historical fiction. Basu traced this impulse to his childhood reading. “I grew up reading historical fiction in Bangla,” he said. “The historian was weeping inside me all these years and found an outlet through historical fiction.”
Responding to questions about writing beyond his own cultural identity, Basu recalled an exchange with an interviewer in the United States. “He said, ‘You’ve written about opium, but you’re not Chinese. You’ve written about Mughal India, but you’re not a Muslim… Do you think you own this world?’” Basu said. “And the answer came instantly. I said, ‘Yes, I do own this world. I own this world by my imagination.’”
Pinaki De pointed to the influence of Latin American writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez. Basu acknowledged this, saying, “Latin America has been an enduring influence,” shaped by travel, music, cuisine, art and history, as much as by literature itself.
A major shift in Basu’s career came with the contemporary novel Kalkatta. “When will you write your Calcutta novel?” his agent and editor had asked him repeatedly. Basu said the difficulty was familiarity. “I’m a thoroughbred Kolkatan,” he said. “I can find my way blindfolded in any alley of this city. And that has its risks if you’re a fiction writer — there’s no strangeness.”
That strangeness appeared one night on Sudder Street. “I saw a bunch of young men on motorcycles, smelling of expensive perfume, wearing fake Rolex watches,” he said. After questioning a juice-bar owner, Basu realised they were tour guides who also provided drugs and sexual services. “He said one phrase — ‘aur doosra kuch seva lage toh’ — and I said, ‘Ah. This is strangeness. I have my story.’”
Basu said he spent nearly two years researching gigolos, meeting police, NGOs and the men themselves. The novel, he said, “completely redefined my relationship with this city.”
“We middle-class Bengalis believe we are the centre of this city. But 57 per cent of Calcutta’s population is non-Bengali. We are like planets circling each other, passing silently without knowing each other,” he added.
The conversation also turned to Basu’s Bengali novels, beginning with Rabi-Shankar, set in the Naxalite-era Calcutta of the 1970s. Basu spoke of his upbringing in a household steeped in Bengali literature and culture. “I never felt I needed permission to jump from one language to the other,” he said. “They were both mine.”
“Bilingualism does not mean writing grammatically correct sentences,” he said. “It means being comfortable in the literary traditions of two languages.”
Basu, however, admitted that while his recent work has moved towards contemporary settings and love stories, historical fiction still beckons him. “There’s a thought circulating in my mind,” he said. “The next one might just be another piece of historical fiction.”