AG: I want to start with your third and recent-most novel Ghost in the Tamarind, a particularly important work for the times we live in. For our readers who have not read it yet, it is a story framed around caste difference and a “forbidden” relationship between a Brahmin man and a Dalit woman. After its publication in 2017, you said, “it is an unlikely but not an impossible story”—would you elaborate on the two tropes here, when increasingly present-day India has shown how deep the caste boundaries run, and how impossible it is to forge relationships across religious and caste divides?

SS: Fiction should have the courage to occupy that terrain between the unlikely and the impossible. The unlikely—that a story is unlikely—gives us the world as it is; the not impossible—that a story could happen—tells us about how the world could be, if only we tried. Realistic fiction with a conscience of the kind I try to write (political fiction, if you like) looks for grand against-the-grain possibilities within the world as it is currently constituted. V. S. Naipaul begins one of his novels (I think it is Bend in the River) with the words “The world is what it is.” That’s a conservative mantra befitting a writer eager to accommodate himself to the world. For me, the governing sentence for Ghost in the Tamarind is: “The world need not be what it is.”

You are quite right of course about present-day India and its deep divisions, religious as well as casteist. All the talk about love jihad, all those atrocious honor killings, should trouble right-minded people. They are symptoms of a social sickness. In this regard, I feel India has regressed. There has been a deliberate forgetting of a different and more tolerant India with the rise of Hindutva. I should also say that this new mood is not just about religion and caste—it is deeply misogynistic and patriarchal. It’s about gender policing, first and foremost with the bodies of women, but then also with those of men.

AG: I was particularly amazed with the historical arc and framing of Ghost in the Tamarind—it begins in British India in 1939, with India moving towards Independence, with WWII in the air, Quit India movement led by Gandhi, Partition, then moves through anti-caste politics, to the Emergency in the seventies. How difficult was it to navigate a story that spans through generations and to build rich and complex characters amidst this vast history that is the backdrop of the work?

SS: Nice to see you found the characters rich and complex! Ghost in the Tamarind is first and foremost a novel. In it, even as I explored a series of submerged histories and political possibilities, I felt it important to honor the things that novels do well—that is, create a compelling storyworld that could sustain what you call rich and complex characters.

How difficult was it to navigate? It wasn’t easy, believe me. I worked on the novel on and off for ten years. All those years probably helped—I like to think so—to thicken the novel, create layers. Other things helped too. Each of the three parts of the novel adopts a different perspectival stance. As the novel progresses, the canvas narrows in terms of the number of characters who are at the center of the narrative even as the historical references remain broad. I feel this helps in keeping the narrative from becoming overwhelming for the reader. Another thing that helped was my reading in Indian literature not in English. There is a kind of self-assurance and autonomy in the description of an Indian reality in this literature that I really admire. I strove for the same qualities in Ghost in the Tamarind, though in English, and that too maybe helped me navigate the world of the novel.

AG: This question is about the space and setting of the novel in South India, specifically Madras. One doesn’t find the focus on caste and South India in works too often, let alone the immense historical backdrop through a South Indian narrative—how are narratives of caste in South India shaped differently from other parts of India?

SS: I think what you say is more true of works in English that are set in South India than works in other languages. Caste has been a major theme of many works by both savarna and Dalit writers going back decades. Think of U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara, Perumal Murugan’s Koola Madari (Seasons of the Palm), Bama’s Karukku and Poomani’s Vekkai (Heat).

The politics of caste in South India, and more specifically Tamil India, are different than elsewhere. Some of it can be traced back to traditions of landholding and the relative power of so-called upper castes, including Brahmins. As is well known, there was a tremendous anti-Brahminical movement in South India which utterly transformed that part of the world. The decisiveness of this transformation is significant but so is the incompleteness of the struggle. Much has been done, and much remains to be done. I think to be overly optimistic on political issues is a mistake because that often underestimates the work that remains to be done. But to be overly pessimistic is also a mistake because that underestimates the courage of those who went before. I wanted a balance between optimism and pessimism in Ghost in the Tamarind.

AG: I want to turn to the Self-Respect movement and Periyar’s politics that are intricately embedded in and inform the relationship between the Brahmin and Dalit protagonists in the novel. How much of Periyar’s anti-caste, even feminist politics pervades South India now, when critique of religion and casteism are such charged topics in present day India? And with that, if you could also elaborate on the Self-Respect movement itself a bit.

SS: Periyar was and is a towering figure in the politics of both South India and India in general. Like Ambedkar, he was a fierce critic of Gandhi and the Congress party. He was a rationalist, even perhaps a rationalist fundamentalist, which is to say very extreme and perhaps not very reasonable in his advocacy of reason. He was an iconoclast and a polemicist, eager to make change by shocking convention. The Self-Respect Movement manifests most of these qualities and was intended as its name suggests to undo the social stigmatization of non-Brahmins, to bring them self-respect. Despite these achievements, Periyar’s legacy today is complicated. There have been Dalit critiques of Periyar for not sufficiently attending to Dalit oppression at the hands of the “middle castes” rather than Brahmins. His rationalism too has its limits. Controversial or not, I think his legacy remains relevant. Which is why it plays the role that it does in the novel.

AG: In 2018, you wrote a fascinating essay titled “Does America Have a Caste System?” in which you state that “you see America’s stratified society through a different lens: caste.” Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) also comes to mind in this context, and some of the recent critiques it had. Can caste explain racism?

SS: This is a huge question and the subject of an essay I am working on. Caste, race and class are categories that overlap when it comes to explaining social reality. To what extent is each one of these found in different parts of the world? And to what extent are discourses about them found? The two questions are not the same—I hope the difference is self-evident. Wilkerson’s book re-initiates an important conversation about the relevance of caste to the United States, something I tried to do in a much briefer way in the essay you mention. Wilkerson’s book is sloppy in many respects but it has helped in re-injecting an important question: what are the uses of caste in explaining the social reality of the United States? Can caste explain race? Maybe. It certainly has been used to, while the converse too has been done (using race to explain caste). I think a more interesting question to ask is: what can caste explain that race can’t (and vice versa)? I’m going to leave it there because I think to go further wouldn’t be possible in an interview.

AG: This question interestingly brings back the pandemic into our conversation. I recently read your new short story titled, “Chennai Block South: Intrusion of Untouchables” (2020). It is a fascinating work set in a dystopian Chennai and a “poisoned world,” with people hierarchised and a world that maintains segregation and purity. It was almost foretelling to read the MSC, or “mutated super coronavirus,” spreading in this dystopia. The story ends with the male protagonist perhaps going to die but he is initiated into the “Resistance.” Of course, the story is apropos to us with themes of contagion, class, race, caste, but what caught my attention also is the idea of resistance weaved in. As we wade through this pandemic now in its third wave, steeped in inequality in different structures of ableism, class, race, gender identities, do you see resistance as the only means towards hope in the dystopia we are in? Also, why specifically Chennai as the setting of this story?

SS: Resistance is crucial! Resistance is never futile because it is in one sense an act of liberation in itself. Resistance confers freedom on the resistor regardless of whether a particular outcome is achieved or not. Both African American and Dalit literatures are full of examples of (doomed) acts of resistance that are celebrated. I don’t want to overstate this point because of course we want “real,” tangible victories. But it would equally be a mistake to overstate the obverse of this point—that resistance is useless if it does not result in a concrete “victory.” Even failed acts of resistance leave their trace in the world. By the way, that’s what happens toward the end of Ghost in the Tamarind when a new school is set up by a student of the old destroyed school.

“Chennai Block South” is a return to short fiction for me after years of concentrating my energies on book-length works. I find the short form newly liberating. I appreciate your question because you are picking up I think on something crucial in the story: the relationship between the oppressive Block and the resistance to the Block. I was so focused on exploring the social oppressiveness coded into certain forms of environmental action that it took me a while to understand that the resistance to the oppression also needed narrative space. The Resistance part actually emerged slowly during revisions. It didn’t really exist in earlier drafts. Writing this story was a way of rediscovering for myself that Resistance is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

As for Chennai—it’s a fascinating city with a complex past and present that provides endlessly rich material for my fiction. I guess I am becoming a kind of writer of Chennai!

AG: I want to ask a final question on the current debates happening on post-critique in the field of literary studies. As a professor of postcolonial studies, scholar and literary critic, and a creative writer and novelist, what do you make of this old debate resurging, some even calling it “post” postcritique? What is at stake in such debates and method wars in literary studies?

SS: You are asking me a really great question about something I haven’t pondered much. But I am intrigued by your question, so here is an explanation of how I approach my work as a critic and a novelist that I hope amounts to a kind of answer. When I write, I am first and foremost a student of genre. I am fascinated by what different genres—the theoretical essay, the critical book, the novel, the short story—allow us to do. When I write, I am partly exploring and learning for myself the possibilities and limits of the genre I am working in. I might have—no, I do have—goals that are outside of the genre (let’s say anti-caste politics) but I am keen to understand how the particular genre that I am working in right then allows me to express what I am trying to express (anti-caste politics, in this example).

What does this have to do with your question? I proceed as I do because I don’t privilege one genre—critique, literature—over another. What the novel can do the critical work cannot (and vice versa). The debates about post-critique and methods are great as long as we don’t forget the real stakes of writing, outside of academic careers and institutions.
Thank you for your great questions!