“I grew up in a drowsy suburb of Pune, and while my parents encouraged my early poems, these were firmly expected to remain a hobby. By my early twenties, I was working a corporate sales job in Mumbai, and spent my days flying between markets in fifteen Indian states. This gave me a sense of the wider country, its lived reality and aspirations. I was reading writers like Naipaul, Coetzee, and Roy on these flights, and a desire to write about my times took hold. I applied for a masters to study writing in the States and got a scholarship. When I left India in 2011, I had sensed a change in the country’s air, and though I did not know to what end, some of the characters and themes in Quarterlife started to appear in short stories and early attempts at a novel. After my degree, I deleted these works, and returned home determined to grasp what was eluding me. Within a year, the 2014 election played out. All the pieces fell into place. I knew that I had found my subject,” acquaints us Devika Rege to the inception of her debut novel, Quarterlife. As the author spent the next several years trying to understand how young Indians were driving and navigating the rise of Hindu nationalism, hence Quarterlife became akin to the study of a twenty-first century democratic consciousness.
Learn more about the creation of the book below:
The Author
As a child, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, and except for poetry, I did not read much for pleasure. I painted, and wanted to become a painter. I wrote poems, and wanted to become a singer-songwriter. My first love for fiction grew out of discovering, at the age of fifteen, a small collection of novels that my father had acquired during his student days. There was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Camus’s The Stranger, and the one I admired most: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I was a slow reader and laboured over it for months, but my absorption was complete. It was not until a decade later that I began to think of writing a novel myself, but these early reads established the terrain for me with their allegorical realism, philosophical concerns, and in the case of the Russians, the capacity to depict, at such a granular level, the social fabric and political debates of their time, while never losing sight of what is most profoundly human.
That said, what leads a writer to writing as an artform is a far more complex question than my answer. The roots of any sustained creative endeavour are inevitably nebulous. Innumerable forces, literary or otherwise, tease out the desire to write, and to pick a handful involves a strange kind of self-mythologizing. When I think of the source of the desire itself, and not just in me but other writers I know, including children, I suspect it is a very primal and irrepressible urge to play with the materials at hand and generate new forms.
The Context
The story is set in Maharashtra, a state that I was familiar with, and a potent case study for the rise of Hindu nationalism. This is not only because it is the ideological headquarters of the Hindu right, but also because it is a wealthy state, far away from the Hindi-speaking heartland, and with a strong regional identity of its own.
My research took me from corporate high-rises in Mumbai to historical sites in Pune, open-cast mines in the Konkan, and dusty political offices in small-town Satara. Besides this, simply living in India as a citizen, by which I mean, every headline and family debate I encountered, every office I worked in or volunteered at, and every public event I witnessed, recalibrated what I made of 2014. If I think of where the truth lies in fiction as an artform, at least for me, it is in this process of obsessive and protracted abstraction. One keeps studying events or images in the real world, and labours to find a composite that cuts away whatever parts of these events or images does not hold true for the rest, in the hope of arriving at something fundamental about reality.
The Influences
There were many, but let me focus on one. In the States, I encountered the Modernists, which led to an aesthetic interest in form and consciousness. I returned home eager to apply these to India, but as the novel progressed, its social canvas and ethical concerns challenged my formal techniques. For instance, chapters that map onto a series of points of view is a long-established literary mode, but what ramifications does this have for capturing a twenty-first century democratic consciousness? It means that you are self-aware about who is given a perspective and who is silenced. How should the novel respond to this anxiety? Should it present a liberal utopia where everyone gets an equal voice and the reader is comforted by a fiction that is far from the reality of our public discourse? Or would failing to do so generate yet another novel that deepens our existing erasures? Such preoccupations were central to the narrative’s unfolding.
The Challenges
Though Quarterlife remains a study of an educated middle-class consciousness, a significant challenge was grasping the complexity of the much wider milieu in which the story is set. As compared to some recent novels about Indian politics, I did not want to depict the country in binaries like Hindu and Muslim, Dalit and Brahmin, Liberal and Right. Rather, I wanted to explore the fault lines within a liberal living room, or how Hindu nationalism manifests differently across right-wing parties, or how an individual from a marginalised community might be empowered and vulnerable at once.
But how does one not lose sight of the universal in the particular, or the ways in which macro forces impact micro environments and vice-versa? Is it possible to be local, regional, national, and transnational at once, without reducing any of these dimensions in the service of another? To hold in focus, to the extent of my abilities, both the drop of water in the ocean and the ocean in the drop, not to mention all the currents in between, remained one of the tougher aspects of the work.
The Hope
The novel is completed by the creative imagination of the reader, and not the writer. To betray my hopes in this regard would be to mediate, or at the very least, mistrust the vast intelligence that the reader brings to the text. All I can say is that Quarterlife was born out of a prolific number of conversations, and it would bring me a deep sense of fruition should it find its way back into them.
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Words Nidhi Verma