Writing the village, becoming the nation: The work of Manoj Das

Abstract

Manoj Das is a leading senior writer within Indian literature, with his novels, short stories, and poems centring on village and rural life, mingling realism and everyday experiences with elements of mystery, mysticism, and the supernatural as he explores the vicissitudes and aspirations of the human condition. As he describes here, Das has been “greatly influenced” by the transition and transformation of India from colonialism to postcolonialism. His writings — with dramatic suspense, magical realism, and a style that with a minimal touch can convey nuances of character, motivation, and emotion — evocatively capture some of the most distinctive aspects of Indian culture, spirituality, arts, and history. His work has been compared with other famed Indian authors, particularly those writing in English (Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao). In this interview, Das reflects on his life work, including the role of translation (in an Indian context of “transcreation”). Das also shares his candid views on the poetics and politics of “regional language literature” (RLL) and “Indian writing in English” (IWE), an opposition relevant to postcolonial studies in the context of the (national and international) distribution and reception of literature and the wider politics of language. Conducted in the southern Indian city of Puducherry, home to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, this interview presents the influence of philosopher and guru Sri Aurobindo on Das and his work, including Das’s most recent scholarship on Sri Aurobindo. Das also discusses the influences on him by the well-known Indian writers Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Fakir Mohan Senapati, and Rabindranath Tagore. This is the first interview with Das published outside of India and in the West.