In Anuradha Roy’s life, the protagonists are her little pups or an ‘amiable army of complete anarchy in the house’, as she likes to call them, who rule her days and nights. Thus, it was inevitable that the stately character who holds together the narrative of her recently published novel The Earthspinner (Hachette India; Rs 599) is Chinna, a dog found on the side of the road by Elango, a man who was born to be a potter.
That this book saw the meeting of two worlds that Roy adores –– pottery and dogs –– only brought about a warm sense of familiarity with the soft-spoken author whose previous novels include All the Lives We Never Lived, An Atlas Of Impossible Longing and Sleeping on Jupiter.
Chinna’s ‘coat is black and brown and his eyebrows chestnut’ and he belongs to everybody in the village while never really belonging to anyone. With an unfortunate change of hands between masters, he only musters up more and more love with time. His beloved friend Elango, with whom he spends most of his years, is consumed by the creation of the ultimate clay horse that appears in his subconscious straight from the annals of Trojan history and the Mahabharata.
The shaping of Elango’s art also shapes his love for the effervescent village belle Zohra, tying together a tale of fiery love and passionate reverberations. The tale is told mostly through the eyes of a little girl, Elango’s student of pottery, as the story spans from Kumurrapet to the streets of London.
Roy’s new novel The Earthspinner
Shortly after we got off the phone with Roy, she calls us back on video to introduce us to Jerry, a puppy who came into her life in the same way Chinna came to Elango’s. There is no denying how similar they look and one wonders about the cosmic connections that form in the creation of art, much like the love forged between Elango and Zohra –– slowly and then in a sudden burst!
Set in the ’80s, communal strife is found to be dominating class structures and seeping through the chambers of art spaces in this grittily paced novel. Her narrative is unhurried. Roy speaks of connections that are beyond social definitions and reminds readers what they love about fiction in The Earthspinner. A conversation with Roy, the reading of her book, the shaping of wet clay on a wheel, and the warmth of a dog’s hug all start feeling similar.
At the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2019, Roy spoke of her writing process and how it begins with a character coming to her. That’s how her stories begin. The Earthspinner journey started through shorter pieces — some were published while the others became ‘notes’.
Says Roy: “I was probably taking small, experimental steps because I wanted to knit together several themes that meant a great deal to me: How does great loss, such as that of a parent, affect a young person? What is our relationship with animals? What does it mean, practically and intellectually speaking, to live by making art? How do malice and hatred destroy communities?”
It was in her potter’s life that a dog emerged, which wasn’t a concept novel to her novels, which all have the important presence of a four-legged friend. However, before Chinna, no fictional dog had managed to occupy the space of a major character in her books.
“In this book, the dog more or less walked in and settled down, not in a corner, but right at the centre of the book, and that was that,” Roy says. “Once the dog was there, a student of the potter came into the dog’s life. This student grew more prominent, sometimes taking over as the narrator. Ultimately, this became a book about the potter’s life, the girl’s life, and their dog’s life,” she says with a flourish.
However, it all started with the horse that Elango makes.
A particular fascination for clay horses of gigantic proportions made by groups of potters in South India led Roy to a deep-dive into Hindu mythology, which is rich in equestrian history. Horses have been pawned in political alliances and she refers to Wendy Doniger’s paper on horse mythology where Lord Shiva’s rage is transferred to a horse’s mouth and the horse is submerged in water, where it is supposed to remain and walk on the ocean bed till apocalypse submerges the Earth under water someday.
“So, in some senses, it made me think of climate change and all that. But that has nothing to do with the book. I’m just digressing,” she smiles. Doniger, who is an American Indologist, in her book Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History, writes about horses being symbols of fertility for kings. It is thus an unconsciously suitable parallel that convinces her protagonist Elango to believe his created horse to be the only worthy gift for his beloved Zohra.
There is a strange restraint in Roy’s writing style, especially in moments of exaltation or cinematic climaxes. It is perhaps this choice of prose that makes author Kamila Shamsie describe her writing as ‘subtle’. “I think that restraint and silence often work much better than saying too much, or saying out too loud. You don’t have to shout to be heard. You can say a lot without saying anything,” she says about her knack for creating silent spaces, where a lot can be understood or assumed or wondered about, long after one has finished the book.
Roy claims to edit and re-edit her manuscripts for years, which justifies the meandering emotions felt by the author and the readers alike. Strictly belonging to the school of authors who start off and wind and discover their way to the end of the book, one can sense her trepidations, joy, sorrow and shock unfolding parallel with each chapter and word. In The Earthspinner, the characters, the reader and the author travel together through the pages.
“I really lose interest in the book if I know what’s going to happen. I need to be interested in it myself when I start writing. I need to feel possessed by myself in the way that any reader would be later once it’s done, though, of course, I have a general sense of structure and narrative in my head. Otherwise, it would be far too chaotic,” she adds.
Her actual writing and editing process, however, is meticulous and disciplined, accommodating few other activities during its peaks. “When I am writing a novel, I only do that. I will not do any pottery or anything else because it’s very distracting for me. Both are kind of obsessions with me, and you can’t accommodate two obsessions in one head,” she says.
It is the mornings that she relies on to shape the rest of her day’s worth of written work and she depends on her meticulously collected notes to churn out a very quick first draft. Then, just like her potter Elango, she starts shaping, adding, subtracting, revising, editing and rewriting till she finds herself “putting back sentences that were taken out the day before”! And that is her cue to stop because it’s done.
However, there is deep apprehension at every step of this process, we found out, which also doubles as the driving force behind her writing choices. Surprisingly, it doesn’t get easier with each new novel. “I think that sense of fear is what gives the excitement, an edge to the writing. Because if I can do something really easy, I don’t think I would do it at all. It’s partly that fear of falling that causes you to get to the edge of the cliff. You want to lean over and see what’s below and feel that sense of vertigo. And that’s what the whole excitement comes from,” she says.
Research for this book was derived from her usual practice of seeking out potters wherever she would travel and try and accommodate her passion by learning new methods and techniques. An avid potter herself, Roy fondly speaks of a studio she has managed to build in her home in Ranikhet, which she shares with her dog army and her partner.
Potters are generous people, claims Roy, and their joy of sharing their knowledge helped build the framework of The Earthspinner. Her experience says that potters from the villages of Rajasthan and lanes of Kumartuli who grow up with clay, don’t grudge an “urbanite looking to further her amateurish skill just as a hobby and not as a way of sustenance”.
“They never ask you to pay for their one hour of teaching. You do that in the end because you feel very grateful and they are unfortunately extremely badly paid. We know that our traditional craftspeople are extremely impoverished and on the edge, but yet their stores of knowledge are huge,” she says with ubiquitous awe.
There is communal discord pulsating through a certain portion of her novel that speaks volumes about an aware writer who firmly belongs to the school of thought that demands fiction be respectful and socially responsible like one is in life.
“You will not, through your fiction, harm anybody or spread hatred. All those things are a given for me, but I don’t think that fiction has a responsibility to change society or to set out with any kind of social agenda or ought to be didactic in any way,” she nods firmly.
The simple agenda of her beloved potter Elango is that he wants to marry the woman he loves and make her the horse of his dreams. The horse, which in mythology is religious and sacred, is secular in the novel — it is sacred to only one person, and exists for his private meaning.
“The whole novel is actually about the sort of resistance that creativity faces. It’s really the destruction of these kinds of art, by a society that is bent on making you conform to whatever the majority demands you worship. So, in that sense, although this is set in the ’80s and ’70s, contemporary times come very deeply and immediately into it,” she says.
In the last two or three years of writing this book, Roy has put aside everything, especially pottery, for the fear of depleting her mental space. It’s time to return to what she calls ‘an all-consuming cycle’, which she needs to focus on before she can think of another book.
“I swear each time this is the last book that I will ever do. But, so far, that hasn’t happened. I haven’t succeeded,” she jokes.
‘Last book’ soon has us talking about books that we are currently reading and absolutely loving. She speaks of Canadian author Carol Shield’s Unless that is a wonderful book about a writer whose daughter has decided to drop out of society and live off begging on the streets of Toronto while living in a shelter.
“This triggers a crisis in this writer not only about her daughter, but also about her work and how she is often trivialised as a writer because women writers tend to be trivialised very often. All of that comes into it in just a thoughtful, beautiful and yet really funny and witty way,” says Roy.
Another book she mentions on her currently reading pile is by a French author from Guadeloupe called Maryse Condé –– Of Morsels and Marvels, published by Seagull. She is a writer now in her 80s, who studied in France, worked in Ghana and Guadeloupe and taught at Columbia University and this is her memoir which is structured a bit around food, but also around her travels, while being very perceptive about race and being colonised.
We briefly discuss the longlisted books of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021 and inevitably land up in the world of literary awards and their significance to authors. Roy —whose works have been nominated for awards like Hindu Literary Prize, The Man Booker prize, DSC prize for South Asian Literature, JCB Prize for Fiction, Walter Scott Prize and International Dublin Literary Award, winning some to name a few — says awards that are won continue to delight her, especially since they act as an affirmation from peers, who are usually the ones who happen to judge these literary events.
However, she is wary of the amount of attention and prominence bestowed upon certain books while there is so much more out there. She quips about judges who confirm having arrived at a single winning book from a well-designed shortlist solely because the judging panel couldn’t unanimously make a choice! “I felt this way whether I won or not won, that prizes should be given to the whole shortlist. How do you arrive at such a kind of victory podium of a second and third when it’s literature? It’s very difficult,” she signs off as Jerry tugs at a toy in her hand, demanding a little more attention.
