“A love of reading led to a love of the English language – an admiration for how it could transport me into a different time and place, and into different ways of seeing and feeling. I like the element of escape in both reading and writing. I started off as a journalist, then worked as an environmental researcher and writer, and then started writing fiction,” reveals Tejaswini Apte-Rahm of the journey that led her to writer her short story collection, These Circuses That Sweep Through the Landscape (Aleph Book Company), which was shortlisted for two awards. This gave her the confidence to write her novel of historical fiction, The Secret of More, set in early 20th century Bombay. “The novel combined my love of research and writing fiction, and so it was a wonderful creative journey,” she adds.
Below, we are in conversation with the writer about her fascinating debut novel.
What inspired the writing of The Secret of More?
I had been researching the life and times of my great-grandfather, and had already done a huge amount of research for this. Arriving as a migrant in Bombay, he made a success of his textile business in the early 20th century, and then became a film producer, founding the Hindustan Film Company which produced many of Dadasaheb Phalke’s silent films. He also founded a successful sugar factory. It struck me that he had made his career in three of Maharashtra’s signature industries – textiles, films and sugar – entering them just as they were taking off. So in a way the story of his success was the story of the city’s and the state’s success. There was a neat parallel between the two trajectories — the microcosm mirroring the macrocosm. In addition, Bombay was an incredibly dynamic city in the early 20th century, rapidly transitioning from tradition to modernity.
All this was fertile ground for a fictional story about a migrant to Bombay who makes his fortune in the textile and silent film industries – there was scope for expansive world building, with a story that takes place with three generations of his family. In my novel, fictional characters with diverse agendas and beliefs navigate the world of business, marriage, child-rearing and social customs in a landscape which is changing at an unprecedented speed. The story of the women characters was a particularly fascinating thread to explore because they were navigating a rather precarious transition to modernity.
What was your creative process like behind writing it?
A structured schedule is essential to my creative process. I don’t wait for inspiration to strike in order to start writing. When I am working on a project, I sit down to write for a set number of hours every morning, break for lunch, and then start working again. My editing and creative writing are done in the morning, when I am fresh, and the afternoons are for answering emails, reading, research, et cetera. This all seems rather cut and dry, but in fact the rigid structure gives me a wonderful freedom – I place myself within a box for three to four hours every morning, but once I am inside that box it is as if the walls have fallen away and my mind and my words are free to go where they will. When working from home it is easy to get distracted by domestic responsibilities, so you need a kind of dogged persistence to stick with your own working schedule, to fence off a mental and physical space for your creative process to flourish.
Were there any influences, literary or otherwise, that guided your creation of this narrative?
Two novels that inspired me were Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser and Goodbye Mr Chips by James Hilton. Martin Dressler is about a young man who finds success in the hotel industry in the heady days of 19th century New York when the city was a commercial dynamo, when fortunes could be made in all kinds of novel industries, and where the excesses of Dressler’s money and imagination combine to tip into a crazy surrealism. The novel gives you the distinct impression that the life of Dressler is mirroring the life of the United States on the brink of a new age where the sky is the limit. Conversely, Mr Chips is a retired school master on his death bed, looking back at a life lived within the confines of an English boarding school, through the pre-war and war years. Both novels encompass the sweep of history within the life story of a single man.
I wanted to take a similar approach in The Secret of More, where Tatya’s life reflects the sweeping changes in the life of the city and the nation. I was very clear that, like these two novels, I would refer to wider historical events only when they directly impacted on the life of my main characters. In this way the focus remains on the human story within the wider historical context, and the saga of history becomes all the more powerful because it is viewed not as an abstract set of events but as a visceral part of small, individual lives.
How have your own roots influenced this story?
Tatya and his family are Koknastha Brahmins – which is the community in which I have my roots. Social customs, cuisine, and even general expectations of life were so unique and circumscribed in that era, and so dependent on the specific community you came from, that it was essential to dive into the nitty-gritties of the everyday life of Koknastha Brahmins, in order to bring that world alive in my novel.
My own upbringing has been very unconventional, so a lot of the information came as a surprise. I didn’t know, for example, about the custom of sohle, where only a woman who had bathed and worn a sari which she had washed herself was allowed into the kitchen. I didn’t realise that something as commonplace as a batata wada would have been alien in a traditional kitchen. Things which we take completely for granted today, like salt, had to be made at home, by grinding and cleaning it.
As my research progressed, it became more and more personal because a mosaic built up in my mind about how my own family would have lived a hundred years ago, in all its fascinating detail. I think it was this element of the personal which led me to dig really deep into the research, and allowed an authentic portrayal of my characters. It also became a way of finding out what my own roots were, even when the research led me to elements which are distasteful and are fortunately a thing of the past, such as notions of caste purity, or the custom of withdrawing girls from education and marrying them off at the age of twelve.
What kind of challenges did you face with this debut venture?
The timeline of my novel jumps back and forth between 1951 and previous years, starting from 1899. This often made it difficult to remember what had happened when, and to whom. So I wrote out a timeline of the novel for each year over fifty years, including the ages of the various characters, important events in their lives, and significant historical events, including in the textile and film industries. This helped to create plot points which would be well-paced and realistic within the fictional and historical framework.
Secondly, a danger for a historical novel of this length is that it becomes too unwieldy and bulky, that your historical world sprawls out unchecked. It was essential to focus firmly on the plot and character arcs without letting the big historical events of the time overwhelm the stories of my characters. One narrative of history is to see it as a grand, sprawling landscape viewed from a hilltop – but far more interesting for me is a narrative which plays out on a more human scale, where the lives of my characters take centerstage, and the jigsaw of the historical context falls into place around them and assumes clarity within their lives, decisions and motivations.
What do you hope the readers take away from the book?
I really enjoyed writing about the pioneering days of the silent film industry. I hope that readers too will find it fascinating to immerse themselves in those scrappy, early days of an industry that went on to become a cultural behemoth. The early filmmakers were really flying by the seat of their pants — they were discovering the basics of the technology, experimenting with lighting techniques, exploring make-up and set design. For example, in a context where electricity was scarce and all shooting took place in bright sunshine, filmmaker Baburao Painter had used fireworks to light up a battle scene shot at night. Filmmakers also experimented with painting sets in different shades of green to achieve gradations in grey tone, since early film was not sensitive to a wide spectrum of colour. Those early heady days of Indian filmmaking are central to the world of my novel, and I hope that is something which stays with my readers.
Lastly, what are you working on next?
I’d like to write something set in contemporary times, which does not require the kind of intensive research that went into The Secret of More. I’d love to write more historical fiction in the future, but for now I need to work on something that brings me back to the present for a while!
Words Nidhi Verma
Date 16-03-2023