Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has juggled several genres — poetry, short stories, essays and fiction. In fiction, her narratives have taken multiple forms — realistic, historical, magical realism, myth and fantasy. Set in the US and India, they often deal with the experiences of the South Asian immigrants. What’s more, she has even written for children and young adults.
Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won the American Book Award in 1995. Two of her novels (The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart) as well as a short story “The Word Love” were adapted into films. Mistress of Spices was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Currently, Sister of My Heart, Oleander Girl, Palace of Illusions, and One Amazing Thing have all been optioned to be made into movies or TV serials. Divakaruni’s latest novel, Before We Visit The Goddess was published by Simon & Schuster in 2016. A story of three women across generations, it explores the complex relationships between mothers and daughters and the different kinds of love that bind them.
She is the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Divakaruni, who was in New Delhi recently, spoke to The Punch about her journey as a writer. Excerpts from an interview:
THE PUNCH: It has been such a long journey as a writer for you. And, in all these years, you have been so prolific. When you look back, do you see any specific trigger to be a writer? How much did your own experiences as an immigrant shape your writing?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: I started writing after some years of having migrated to the US. When I was growing up in India and even when I went to the US and started studying, I was not ever thinking of becoming a writer. But as I went through the immigration experience, it was a very powerful and transformative experience for me because I had come from a very sheltered background and it was for the first time I was living alone and living a whole other culture. To top it off, my grandfather in India passed away at that time. That was very traumatic for me. I had been very close to him. I couldn’t even go back for the funeral because everything happened so quickly and so I thought that I must start writing things down or else I’ll forget. Also, I felt like I was forgetting my grandfather. That was one part of what I was writing — about things that I remembered about India. On the other hand, the immigration experience was so different, not just for me, but for other people in my community. I remember this is in the 1970s. There is not a large Indian community. We are isolated. There is no Internet. There is very little connection. It’s much harder to be an immigrant in such isolation, but it’s still a very transformative experience, but it was more so then than now, when people who are going there already know so much about America and still stay very much in touch with their Indian families. We couldn’t even call our families. It was so expensive to call in those times. As a student, I didn’t have enough money. I could only call my family once in a few months. I wanted to write about that experience. So, those are the things that made me want to start writing. When I started writing, I wasn’t very good because I had not had any training. I really had to learn how to become a writer. I started with poetry. It took several years of writing, re-writing and sending out things, and getting rejected. Pretty much all my writing happened after I went to America.
THE PUNCH: Even though your books straddle similar worlds, they are, at the same time, very different from each other. How do you approach a story?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: When I sit down to write, I generally have a story in my mind. I have characters in my mind. Movement across continents is something that is exciting and interesting to me. It could be immigration or, like in Oleander Girl, it could be a journey in search of something. Then, she (Korobi Roy, Oleander Girl’s protagonist) would come back to India. So, it’s a different kind of movement. With each story, the movement will be somewhat different. Before We Visit The Goddess has a different movement because there is grandmother, mother and daughter. Once you are in another country, how do you connect back, if at all, to your culture? Do you have to break away from it before you connect back with it? So, with this novel, I had some different questions. Perhaps the thread that runs through all my books is the importance of women making choices for themselves about their own lives, whether in India or in America, and how such choices can enable us to grow even if they lead to problems. So, even if it leads to some complications in between, ultimately, there are ways in which a woman grows through these experiences that is of interest to me. Often, immigration is one way of doing it. But in a novel like Palace of Illusions (a reimagining of the Mahabharat), Panchaali (the narrator modelled on the wife of the Pandavas) is making her choices herself. It’s a very different kind of environment, but that element is still there, she is making choices....because I feel that it is very important as, in so many ways, society kind of blocks women from that. Society, especially traditional society, is not very encouraging of women making their own choices. They would rather say this is the path you should take. I think women in India would find a resonance with this. I think they are realising how important it is to make choices and also how important it is to break down something the society has always said that women should not do. After the Nirbhaya episode, one part of the society was saying she shouldn’t have gone out so late. That was a problem. Why was she out there? It's not okay to say women cannot do something. And, if you do something, you are going to be punished. Those are some of the taboos or boundaries I want my women to break. When we venture into new territory, there might be problems, but it’s still important to venture out and it’s still important for the society to say, ‘We’ll support you as you venture out there.’ So, in literature, it’s important to start such conversations ...Literature goes side by side with what is happening in real life.
THE PUNCH: You’re also an activist. Is your activism integral to your role as a writer?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: You are right in pointing out that there is a real connection between my activist work and my writing. The attitude is a little different because when I’m doing my activist work, I will go out there and say that this is wrong and women must be allowed to live life of dignity. They must be allowed to do their own changes and that is there in the back of my mind when I’m writing, but I understand that books, especially fiction, would not work very well if I allow the characters to bring that out this way. I cannot have an agenda upfront. I can only say that as a writer, I’m going to display or develop the lives of women and their own reader. We can make the reader sympathetic, make the reader think in slightly different ways. Also, for my male readers, it will create empathy for my female readers. I hope it will give them some inspiration and strength.
THE PUNCH: In Before We Visit The Goddess, you have three generations of women: Sabitri, Bela and Tara — grandmother, mother and daughter. How difficult was it to delve into the different mindscapes of three women from three generations?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: That was a challenge. I really wanted to show how each generation is very different and yet how each generation affects the next one. Even when Bela (one of the three protagonists) doesn't want to be influenced by her mother, but in her own life she is going to repeat some of her own mother’s mistakes. Ultimately, she is more like her mother than she'd like to think. So, the complexities of heritage was something I wanted to point to. But it was a challenge to create each woman and make her very different, yet show the complexities of heritage, show the connections and to show that although they have complicated relationships, there is love and care at the end and that is what heals them at the end and brings them together and hopefully, in a way, that surprises the readers.
THE PUNCH: As a writer, you’re also someone incredibly fascinated by the idea of impossible love, and love and loss. Do you have to conceive your narrative arc in a particular way so that all this could fall into place — women making different choices, embarking on different journeys, searching for something or the other, with some of them also being buffeted by the impossibility of love and loss.
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: In each of these novels, women live as they push forward, breaking taboos, entering new territory. They will lose something. In Before We Visit The Goddess, one of the things I’m trying to say is that if we are too afraid of losing what we have now, we’ll never be able to move ahead and grow and gain other kinds of things. So, in the novel, the inheritance of loss begins with Sabitri, who is willing to leave her village behind and to come and live in the city in a rich woman’s household where she is not going to be treated well and she really misses the familiar environment, but she pushes ahead because she wants education, because she has a dream. It’s not going to work out like she thinks, but she will grow and become a much stronger individual and then when she stands on her own, several possibilities open up. She becomes a female entrepreneur and she has gained many other things. So, in some ways, that is the complicated nature of life where each gain will come with some loss and with each loss will come some gain, but we can’t be afraid of that process of life. And, in some ways, all these three women push forward and change.
THE PUNCH: There is something remarkable about your characters. They are so well-etched out, some of them travel with you long after you have read about them. How do you work on characters? In Before We Visit The Goddess, while the other two women (grandmother and mother) would have been relatively easier to create, Tara comes from another generation and thinks and acts differently. How do you work on creating characters that are removed from your own experience?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: Tara was a real challenge to write. I did a lot of research. I spoke to a lot of younger generation people and I observed a lot of younger generation people. Even among the younger generation, she is unusual because of the pain of the divorce. She has cut herself off from her family and from her culture. I had to research and think about her, but I’m very sympathetic to her because I understand how she is trying to find herself. She has decided that the old rules didn't work for my mother and so I cannot follow those old rules. She thinks that her mother did everything she thought was right and still her marriage didn’t work out. She is still in a bad place. So, Tara thinks she is not going to do that. She thinks she has to find her own way. She gets into lot of trouble, but ultimately things work. But she had to go through a lot of self-questioning self-doubt. She has cut herself out from her heritage, and yet she will discover at some point that cutting oneself off from one’s heritage is not the right answer. She has to discover it for herself. And that’s one of the things that I say over and over in different ways and different books — the woman has to discover for herself even if she has to discover it through a mistake because otherwise we don’t grow. People could tell us all the wisdom about life but that doesn’t make sense. It won't help us. We have to experience at least some of it ourselves. As a mother, I see the paradox in that because as a parent you really want to protect your child from all of life’s problems, all the things you face, the mistakes you’ve made, you want to tell the kid, ‘Hey, don't do that.’ So, in Before We Visit The Goddess, Sabitri tells Bela not to make the same mistake of dropping out of college, ‘I did it, you don't do it,’ but each woman has to find her own path.
THE PUNCH: Some of your minor characters are very interesting too. How do you work on them?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: That’s a challenge. I worked a lot on the minor characters in Before We Visit the Goddess because the minor characters are very important. In some ways, they are transformational devices for the women. They allow the women to transform their lives and sometimes they come into the women’s lives and help them at crucial moments, like Ken or Bipin Bihari (the manager of Sabitri’s sweet shop) or Dr V whom Tara would only meet for one day. Sometimes, our lives are transformed by strangers and they are not necessarily one’s family. And that help comes from many different places. That is what I wanted to really point to. Also, I wanted some positive male characters. I was fond of these characters as I was writing them. Now, my literary agenda, as it were, is to write women protagonists because I want to tell the stories of women. I want to put women in the centre of my book because for so many centuries that has not been there. So, it’s really important for us to hear women telling their own stories in their own voices. So, I’m going to do that. But I also wanted to show a very positive kind of relationship with these male characters and their importance in the lives of these women. So, I’m glad that it came through.
THE PUNCH: In India, we have had a clutch of women writers who have been writing about women protagonists.
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: In India, writers like Shashi Deshpande have been doing that for some time. When people talk about issues and problems, they see them like statistics or events that happened on a particular day. But unless we feel the human being who is going through these problems, their pain and their hopes, we’re not going to really be sympathetic to those issues or feel the need for change. So, literature brings alive those issues on a very human level and that’s what these writers are doing. And I really commend them for doing that. I think it’s important in every culture to address social problems through literature. There are writers in America who are also doing that. A lot of immigrant writers are addressing problems that minority communities are facing. Some of my writings also focus on that. For example, Mistress of Spices focuses on the problems of the immigrant community. So, literature transforms those problems into something alive so that when a sensitive reader reads this, they really feel what is going on and then they go back to live their lives and when they come across those issues, they understand much more. If there are restrictions and prejudice, how does it feel like from the woman’s point of view? Once you feel that compassion, once you feel that empathy, we ourselves as readers are changed. We are transformed. I was reading an article which said that people who read fiction regularly are more empathetic and compassionate. That has always been my belief. It’s great to see the science that corresponds with it. They also said that people who read fiction live longer.
THE PUNCH: I’m wondering what writing fiction does to people.
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: I have been trying to write complex characters, showing that each person has a good side and a bad side. One thing that writing fiction has changed me is that I have noticed that when I approach people, now I don’t think of them in absolute terms — a bad person or a terrible person. I try to see the complexity in their life. I tell myself that they are okay in these aspects and problematic in certain other aspects. I realise that just as in good fictional characters, it’s a blend of black and white — it’s not just black or just white — in real life too people are like that. So, I have become much less judgmental.
THE PUNCH: How often do you write poetry these days?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: I do not write poetry anymore, but I hope that what I learnt as a poet, I have put it now in my fiction in terms of images and colours. For the feel of the world I’m creating, I have tried to put all the attention to language into my fiction. The kind of things that I'm interested in writing now — about lives, characters and change — I think I can do best through fiction.
THE PUNCH: Your sentences are so immaculately structured. Do you have to work on getting the right structure and imagery?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: I’m very conscious about sentence structures. Sometimes, I have to spend a lot of time on a sentence because I want just the right structure. I want the image to be vivid and original. My training and experience as a poet has affected it. As my mother tongue is not English, it has really helped me. That might sound strange. In the back of my mind, I have Bengali sentences and sounds, especially because many of my characters are Bengali. So, that lends certain richness. Sometimes, I will think of saying things in a slightly different way, the way may be I would hear them in Bengali. So, I’m putting together the two languages and the two images from different languages together. I think it’s a great benefit and I’m very happy that I have another
language.
THE PUNCH: To write fiction, especially to write the novels you write, is imagination everything? Or do you need other stuff like research, experience, etc.
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: I have to think about the characters. I have to do proper research. I have to observe people in life. Ultimately, I have to really be able to imagine the life of that character inside me. I have to really live that character imaginatively. For instance, in The Palace of Illusions, I’m writing about Draupadi. She is in a completely different world. I have no experience of anything like that. So, imaginatively I must experience that.
Before I start writing, I think very deeply about the character. I visualise the character and make notes about the
character I’m researching. That prepares me and then I can start writing. And then I’m writing about that character as though from the inside of that character. That’s how I go about preparing to write characters whose experiences are very different from mine. When I was writing One Amazing Thing, I had to do a lot of that because it’s a novel about nine people of different backgrounds and age. I really had to research them and get into their mindscape. It was a challenging novel and I wanted to make sure that each had a different voice, a very distinct
voice.
THE PUNCH: Do you have several drafts? How often do you have to re-write certain fractions?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: A lot of times, when I’m writing the first chapters, I have to rewrite a lot. I remember when I was writing these chapters (Before We Visit The Goddess), I really had to work hard to get that individual voice and that individual consciousness. So, to just get into Sabitri's way of looking at life, I had to rewrite the beginning a lot number of times. And when Bela is first in Assam, I had to re-write it because I wanted to make sure that the voices are not getting blended. While writing Palace of Illusions, I re-wrote that beginning so many times before I was satisfied. But, in my experience, once you get the voice, you have got it. That’s why it’s worth it for me to take a lot of time to establish that voice.
THE PUNCH: What do you mostly do when you’re working on a novel?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: When I’m in the middle of the novel, I’m thinking about it all the time, and my family is used to it. I might be doing other things, like cooking etc, but I’m thinking about the work-in-progress. I’m sure it’s very annoying for my family because they’ll be talking and, suddenly, I’ll have this glazed look in my eyes: I’m thinking of my novel and I have kind of gone into that fictional world. So, that happens. I think it’s probably quite difficult living with a writer. When the writing is just going well, I just want to write.
THE PUNCH: How and when do you write?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: I have a definite writing schedule. I teach for about three days a week. Every week day, when I’m not teaching, I put aside about three hours in the morning to write and, hopefully in the night, if things are going well and I’m not busy with other responsibility.
Every two or three years, I’ve had a book. That’s really because writing is very, very important to me. I prioritise that and have just cut out a lot of other things from my life. I do some socialising, but not a lot. I don't watch TV unless I’m watching something to help me in my writing. So, it’s very focused. I am on social media, but I use it only to connect with my readers. It can be extremely distracting. So, I have this amount of time for social media only to respond to my readers. I feel very blessed that over the years, it has become clear to me what my priorities are — my writing, my family, my activism, my spiritual life and physical activities to keep in good health. Some amount of friendship is important, but just socialising for the sake of socialising or travelling for the sake of travelling, for me, these are not priorities. I tell my students the same thing: You have to look at your life diligently and decide what your priorities are. If you're going to be a writer, writing has to be one of your first priorities. So, when you are fixing your daily schedule, you have to just say that this is my writing time and unless there is an emergency, I’m not going to shift away from this. So, I think those things have helped me write more. But ultimately I just feel blessed and I'm so appreciative that I’m able to write because there is one factor that we don’t control — inspiration. When I get an idea for a novel, that’s when I feel the inspiration the most. It’s magical. I don’t know where these ideas come from. I don’t know where those stories come from. I’m just thankful that they come to me.
THE PUNCH: Tell us something about the spiritual dimension of your works.
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: I hope to have a spiritual dimension in every book. We are not always in touch with the spiritual aspect, but there is a very important spiritual dimension in every life. In Before We Visit the Goddess, particularly, I think spirituality and creativity are very close together. I’m a believer of spiritual or magical dimension to one’s life and that's why in my novels I go back into a kind of magical space where you can’t explain things logically. We have all gone through experiences like that where things happen, but we can’t explain them. They are magical. They are spiritual. They touched us, changed us they and transformed us. The purpose of human life is to be transformed. Some of us are fighting and kicking against transformation because transformation isn’t necessarily a fun experience. Sometimes, it’s a painful experience. Even in my life, I have resisted transformation. I don’t want them. I want an easy life, but that’s the paradox of magically transformative experiences. Out of pain comes something that’s very valuable.
THE PUNCH: Is it easy or difficult to write in contemporary global political climate?
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: All over the world, there is nationalistic movement, a kind of right- wing movement. It’s happening and it’s happening in large segments. I think we have to see what is it that each of us can do. And as a writer, I must think of how to counter that thinking. One of the problems of nationalistic thinking is that there’s got to be one central way and that way has to be right. Anyone who doesn’t agree with it is either enemy or should be silenced or brought in line. I think the enterprise of many writers and certainly of me is to give voice to those who are at the edges, who really are a part of society and whose presence enriches society. I’m a greater believer in diversity. One of the wonderful things about America is how much diversity there is and how in general the American people have embraced diversity and recognised in themselves that they too are diverse. Their ancestors have come from many places and in many cases they have come away because the original culture did not value diversity anddid not give them their independence to do what they wanted to do. So, my enterprise as a writer is to promote diversity. Therefore, I believe that immigrant stories have always been important. But, right now in America, there is a particular importance to tell the immigrant story and to assert that this immigrant story is out of the American experience and enriches the American experience. So, I feel very strongly about that in my writing.
9/11 was disturbing at so many levels. Out of the destruction came so much hatred, fear and anxiety. Whenever there is so much fear, people are looking for scapegoats, to blame people to be prejudiced against. So, at that time also, telling an immigrant story was very important for people to understand that Indian-Americans among other minorities also went through the tragedy of 9/11. They also lost people and additionally they were targeted afterwards.
THE PUNCH: Tell us something about your books that have been auctioned for film adaptations.
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: Palace of illusions and One Amazing Thing have been auctioned. They are all going to be feature films. Palace of Illusions will be directed by Aparna Sen. I’m very pleased. I love her work. One Amazing Things is in the early stages of creation. I understand that the movie can be different from the book and I don’t expect them to have exactly the same emphasis. But if it’s true to the spirit of the book, that’s all I would want. I’m only an informal consultant. I feel that I have to leave that to them. I can’t be interfering.
