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Chapter 1: What themes does Tishani Doshi explore in her novel Small Days and Nights?
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and welcome to The Bookshelf, where we'll meet a reader whose career has taken him from America to Russia, Poland, Japan and Australia, and whose bookshelf reflects that history. That's the filmmaker and writer Roger Pulvers. We'll travel to India with Tishani Doshi, check out the bookshelves of young adult writer David Nicholls, and into the Amazon and onto an English page with Catherine Rundle.
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Let's start with Tishani Doshi, novelist, dancer and poet from India, whose books include The Pleasure Seekers and Small Days and Nights. Cassie and I read and reviewed Small Days and Nights earlier in the year here on the bookshelf, and I had the great pleasure of meeting Toshani Doshi when she was in Australia a few months ago. So let's meet her together.
Toshani Doshi, thank you so much for joining us on The Bookshelf. Thank you for having me.
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Chapter 2: How does Tishani Doshi's background influence her writing?
And of course, I've recently read your novel, Small Days and Nights, which is about a character, Grace, whose mother is Indian. Her father is Italian. Why did you choose to give her this type of background?
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.
What does that mean for the books that have shaped you?
Chapter 3: What impact did Midnight's Children have on Indian literature?
How much do they reflect that idea of being both inside and outside?
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.
Chapter 4: Which authors does Tishani Doshi consider influential?
Do you have favourite books of hers that you come, return to?
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.
What other great writers of India, and perhaps if we start writing in English, would you add to your own bookshelf?
I think Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie was such an important book because something was happening there with language, with a kind of exuberance that no one had seen before. It was saying that these stories are so numerous, they cannot be contained with this realist box that it has to jump out.
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Chapter 5: What unique perspectives does Catherine Rundell bring to children's literature?
It's many limbed. It's it's sort of, you know, it's it's such a extravagance of ideas and thoughts and play. And I think that that book really was a sort of turning point in the way that stories about India began to be written.
And for people who don't know, Midnight's Children were born at partition in 1947. Yes. Are there other novels that have, perhaps under the influence of Midnight's Children, have dealt with Indian identity and nationhood in other sort of innovative ways since Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was written?
Oh, yeah, lots. I mean, look, I think there's so many stories about India and that whole idea of avoiding the single story. Do you know, there are writers who I read who write and in a way what I've done with Small Days and Nights is to take a very small story about a small town and try to insist that that is also an Indian story.
Chapter 6: How does David Nicholls describe the writing process for Sweet Sorrow?
And it's not just the large urban sprawling Indian story that even from a quiet corner of this great big country, there are remarkable stories that add to the tapestry and the layer, you know, of novels. One recent one I read was, it's called Gacchar Gochar, and it's by Vivek Shenbag, and it's translated. And it's really this quiet, almost Chekhovian novel about this family.
And it's just simply told and very beautiful. And I thought there is an Indian story as well.
Now, by chance, I have actually read that one as well. And one of the things that that does is it really plays around with language. So although it has been translated into English, it includes, if I remember it rightly, a sort of family-created language. So how important is it when we think about the writing that's coming out of India to think about the different languages in which it exists?
Chapter 7: What insights does Roger Pulvers share about multilingualism in literature?
Yeah.
That what you said about the family created language is so interesting because I think that all of us who have grown up in families know that we have certain code words that we use, which we understand because we've shared this together. In The Pleasure Seekers, I did that a lot. You know, I had all this play with language and make-believe words.
And I think that essentially the idea of language in India, of course, is such a political one because, you know, which language do you choose to write in? Who gets to represent? What's authentic? These are all questions, particularly as someone who writes in English, that we get asked. But again, to return to Rushdie, who said, you know, the empire strikes back.
I think English has become a very Indian language and that Indian writers who write in English use the English language in a different way.
Chapter 8: How do the guests reflect on the role of storytelling in shaping identity?
It has a different elasticity. We include words that are mangled with Hindi. So we have Hinglish, we have Tanglish, which is mixed with Tamil. And I think that languages are actually far more porous and malleable than we give them credit for. And that even though English, you know, has a particular structure and foundation, we can push it in many different ways.
But as well as the question of which language stories are told in India, the other thing that I think you do so powerfully in this novel, Small Days and Nights, is raise the question of whose story we know, whose stories are told. And so your central character, Grace, has an older sister, Lucia or Lucy, who she didn't know about, who she then discovers after her mother has died.
What's so special about Lucy?
So Lucy had been institutionalised and was born with Down syndrome and has some autistic tendencies. And when... Grace discovers that she has a sister. She decides to change her life. And she's really a character who's in a kind of crisis. She's in an unhappy marriage. She decides that she's going to look after her sister. And for her, it's a bit of a moral question.
But it's also a difficulty between the idea of freedom and duty. And so I think a lot of the novel was to try and write about what a relationship is can be between sisters and siblings, but also what it can mean to be a caregiver. So not to sentimentalize that experience, because I have my brother has Down syndrome and is autistic. And so I write very close to the bone in that sense.
It's very unsentimental.
Yeah. And at the same time, I want to talk about how it enlarges one's life. It enlarges the way that you move through the world, the way that you see the world. It increases your generosity if you are able to have relationships such as the one that I try to write about.
Tashani, just thinking of that character Lucy in your book, Small Days and Nights, I'm wondering if there are other books that deal with either disability or caregiving that you were either thinking about as an influence or writing against as you were writing this novel of yours?
The one book that I think was remarkable is this book called Agathe, written by Marlene van Nijkerk. And I remember listening to Toni Morrison in conversation with her about that book. And I had gone to listen to Toni Morrison, but Toni Morrison was talking to her about this book because it's set in South Africa and it's about a woman who...
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