Anindita Ghose on her debut novel The Illuminated: 'It is essentially a novel about shifts in perspective'

Anindita Ghose on The Illuminated: ‘It is a story about women coming into their own, how they dazzle when they choose to shine together’

Anindita Ghose, who is known for her stupendous work as a journalist and editor specialising in arts and culture, released her debut novel The Illuminated during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a remarkable study of grief and ambition, desire and deception, relationships that change as people mature, and people who dream up alternatives to the old and oppressive order. The book has been published by HarperCollins. Ghose is already working on her next one. We caught up with Ghose at the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, and followed up with an email interview around topics as diverse as her writing process, her characters, and feminism. Debut novels are often seen as extremely personal, if not semi-autobiographical. Did the process of writing your novel bring you fulfilment, closure or healing? Were you able to express or resolve what you needed to through fiction? A novelist I admire very much said in his rules for novelists that fiction which isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money. Submitting yourself to the process of writing a novel comes with some degree of relinquishing control. I came to terms with the fact that fictional characters have free will; they come to us fully formed. But perhaps equally, we project parts of ourselves onto them. I wrote The Illuminated over five years, and I now see that I got progressively angrier as I did. I think that is apparent in the book. The events around us had a role to play but it was also me excavating buried trauma. I’m not personally a fan of novels that are fully resolved so I could not write one that had a neat ending but I do believe that the act of excavation itself is healing, whether through psychoanalysis, travel, dance, art or writing. Until I started writing this novel, I did not know I had this anger buried inside me. I do feel I have done a duty to myself and the women around me in the act of writing and publishing this book. How have readers responded to Shashi and Tara, the mother-daughter duo whose relationship is at the heart of your novel? Tell us about some of the affirming and shocking responses you’ve got, and those that helped you look at your own work anew. Readers’ responses to characters and situations have so much to do with their own age and station that I find these responses revealing. A lot of women told me they gifted the novel to their mothers. Several readers told me it addressed feelings of loss. I knew Shashi would be loved by all, and I was right about this. I was worried about Tara—her contradictions, her selfishness, I attribute these to her age and intelligence. I have always believed that it is more important to be understood than be loved, and I worried that most readers would not understand Tara. I was wrong about this. Women, and not just women in their twenties, seem to largely identify with Tara and what she’s up against. An actress friend, Sobhita Dhulipala, gave me one of the most interesting responses. She did not have a forgiving view of Shashi’s character. She said that people like Shashi choose to take the easier path; they choose to suffer passively and make a martyr of themselves, and the onus they place on their partners is too heavy to bear. I had never seen Shashi and Robi’s dynamic that way.

Shashi’s life is marked by loneliness in marriage and liberation in widowhood. Do you think of her as a cautionary tale for women who put their partners before their own creative and intellectual pursuits? Her husband Robi fills so much of her life that she has hardly any space or time to nurture her own interests… I find that in books that seek to foreground women, the men are often made out to be two-dimensional villains. I was interested in the quieter struggle of women like Shashi; women who have apparently happy lives but still find that they’ve lost a part of themselves in playing the roles expected of them. It would be preposterous of me to think of my novel as a cautionary tale but I hope it sheds light on women like her. Men like Robi Mallick are not inherently evil; they are products of a society that has taught them to place themselves at the centre of any family unit. They take up all the air in a room, leaving everyone who is not male and heterosexual in a state of suffocation. There is a big shift in the relationship between Tara and Shashi after Robi’s death. Apart from the grief in their heart, what else makes them soften their approach to each other? Is it age, or newfound respect for each other’s choices and desires? Orhan Pamuk spoke about a novel’s ‘centre’. For me, the centre of this novel is the line: ‘When the light shifts, you see the world differently’. The Illuminated is essentially a novel about shifts in perspective. There is a lunar scheme in the book: the chapters are named after moon phases, the women are named after the moon, the men are named after the sun. I wanted to challenge the perception of the moon as the lesser light. I wanted the women in the book to find their own light, independent of the sun’s reflected light. When Robi Mallick—the sun that Shashi and Tara’s lives revolve around—dies in the novel’s early pages, the women are forced to confront their own independent identities. This is the first step that they take towards understanding each other as women. Tara is the kind of hypocritical young feminist we see all around us—she has an Anais Nin poster in her hostel room and voraciously reads feminist theory but she is unsympathetic to her own mother. This changes when she herself has to navigate patriarchal systems without her father’s support. Respecting each other comes from first respecting their own self. What aspects of Robi do you see in Tashi and Amitabh, the men that Tara is interested in? Robi and Amitabh are very much men of the same species: upper class, upper caste, professionally successful, fond of wielding their power at work and at home. Robi is his daughter’s idea of an ideal male, and so it is not surprising that she is attracted to a man similar to him. I don’t see Tashi as similar to Robi. For me, he is a minor character, really more a foil to Amitabh in the way he approaches ideas of consent. He shows us how a good man, not necessarily considered a success in society, can behave in ways that are morally and ethically sound.

Tashi seems aware of his charm, and the effect that it has on women. He is also a responsible man, so he sets up boundaries to ensure that nobody in the equation gets hurt. Amitabh likes feeling powerful and uses his sexual energy to humiliate. He seems to know that he can get away this. How do they come to be the way they are? Yes, Tashi shows us earlier in the novel that it is possible to behave in ways other than Amitabh does. The partial answer to how they come to be the way they are is in how the world around them — their specific biographic details — have shaped them. But it is a hard question to answer. How do any of us come to be the way we are? It’s a mix of genes and environment, of education and exposure, but also the elements that make us, the alignment of stars, and so much else that is unknown. Even twins with all these variables constant can grow up to be entirely different human beings. Amitabh, who is initially depicted as Tara’s conquest, is later portrayed as a predator. How does this switch happen? What challenges did you face while writing about their relationship? She is in her twenties. He is in his fifties. Were you informed by the stories that surfaced in Raya Sarkar’s List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA)? This takes me to what I mentioned earlier about a shift in perspective. In Buddhism, there is this idea of absolute truth and relative truth. A person’s relative truth can change. Tara wanted to believe that Amitabh was her conquest; she built an elaborate narrative to convince herself of that. Because she has a sense of self in which she is a strong and opinionated woman and any other narrative would make her feel weak, right? These are indeed questions that were brought up by the stories shared by Raya Sarkar and later by all the courageous women who spoke up at great cost to themselves. As we have seen in the many #MeToo stories shared in the last few years, these lines of appropriateness in academic institutions and workplaces have been so tentative that women—intelligent, sharp, intuitive women—often couldn’t articulate the transgressions. That was the challenge for me, to keep things grey; to write a scene that is icky but does not appear to be a scene about assault to everyone who reads it. One of the functions of art is to challenge limitations, whether moral or societal. I want readers to think deeply about what is right and wrong and think about why they think the way they think. This is why I even wrote a few pages from Amitabh’s point of view. His view of their relationship is different from Tara’s view. And in his view, he has done no wrong. It’s no surprise that there are many readers who share his view. Two of my favourite characters in your novel are Noor and Poornima. The trajectories of their lives, unlike Tara and Shashi, do not seem heavily determined by men. Did you set out to write them as foils?

The Illuminated, for me, is not a story about a mother and daughter. It is a story about women coming into their own, how they dazzle when they choose to shine together.

That is why the cover has many moons, in various stages of illumination. I don’t see Noor and Poornima as foils but rather as women in different stages of illumination. But they do hold up mirrors to Tara and Shashi. Noor does not enjoy the privileges that Tara does and yet she has forged a life in which she is independent and fulfilled. Poornima is my favourite too… I know women like her. In the scheme of privilege in the book, she is the least privileged, a foil to Robi Mallick actually. She is an uneducated Adivasi girl from the Sunderbans and yet she is the book’s most empowered character. More than anyone else, I wanted Poornima to tell her story in her own voice, which is why she has an entire epilogue to herself. You were reading Simone de Beauvoir’s non-fiction book The Second Sex while writing your novel. When did you first encounter this book? How has it shaped your thinking about gender, patriarchy, and the so-called battle of the sexes? I first encountered Simone de Beauvoir in my early twenties when I was having my mind blown by Erica Jong, Anais Nin and others. But it was superficial reading to be able to keep up with my writers’ circle, which had extremely articulate humanities students. I never studied English literature or gender or sociology formally because my father believed that everyone should have a grounding in science (I was a terrible science student). I re-read The Second Sex while writing The Illuminated and the Meenakshi parts of the book – about a newly carved state with an all-women cabinet – quote what she said about the need for women to come together to form colonies, and to have the solidarity of labour interests, almost verbatim. There have been so many feminist texts after this but I believe Beauvoir is essential reading. The contemporary view is that she was not intersectional but I disagree. I find all the later iterations of feminism make a cursory appearance in The Second Sex to the extent that it was possible in 1949. Could you please leave us with a glimpse of your next book? Answer: I’m afraid of sharing too much about it this early because it is bound to change. But all I can say is that it is set in Bombay—a city I know most intimately—and the protagonist is a 40-year-old woman. The Illuminated is set across five cities but not Bombay and I think it was partially because I was terrified of leaking biographical detail into the book. I feel more at ease about that now. Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist, commentator, and book reviewer. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .

Anindita Ghose on her debut novel The Illuminated: 'It is essentially a novel about shifts in perspective'

Anindita Ghose on The Illuminated: ‘It is a story about women coming into their own, how they dazzle when they choose to shine together’

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