Tishani Doshi

I think I'm obsessed with the idea of hybridity in a way.

I'm somebody who carries, I suppose, this bi culture, bi influence inside me.

And so my relationship to writing about India

has always been as this hybrid person.

And so it just emerged that from The Pleasure Seekers, my first novel, which had a half Welsh, half Indian protagonist, I moved on to a half Indian, half Italian.

And somehow, I guess I'm interested in that feeling of being in and out at the same time.

It's really interesting.

I remember interviewing Anita Desai many, many years ago and asking her how she felt about it because she was half German and half Indian.

And, you know, she grew up way before me in India.

And she said, you know, that it is the that the position of the outsider is the correct position for a writer because you never you always want to look at things aslant.

You always want to be standing straight.

behind the glass looking in.

And I really thought about that in all of her books.

There is that real sense of asking about home and belonging and what it means and identity in really subtle, nuanced ways.

And I've sort of carried that advice with me, that sense that the writer's role, whether or not you carry that hybridity in you, is to stand at the periphery.

Yeah, I love A Clear Light of Day, Baumgartner's Bombay, A Village by the Sea, all of them's a zigzag way.

I mean, she, she's really a sort of writer who, when I think of what a writer should be, is somebody who steadily creates a shelf of books.

You know, that's what she's done.

And I don't know that she's given enough credit as one of our great writers of India who writes in English, you know.

But I think she really captures a part of India that I feel is somehow now you don't see so much because it's sort of disappearing.