Zee Jaipur Literature festival: 'Mythologies were not afraid of eroticism'

There’s much to be said about an author when people come out of her session at the Zee Jaipur Literature festival saying, “That was an amazing talk”. More so when the said author is better known in the Mauritian and French literary circuits and not Indian ones. Ananda Devi is that rare author. 

Devi was born in Mauritius, which forms the basis for most of her works. She is considered to be one of the best writers from the country, even though she largely writes in French. She wrote her first story at 13. “My mother was a great storyteller. Not only did she have a story for almost every situation in life, but she also added her own comments and observations to these stories, thus imbuing her daughters with a world view that was always perceptive and questioning,” she says.

Devi has read Hindu mythology, folktales, and sacred texts in her childhood; she uses a lot of these memories and influences in her work. “My mother did not like us to believe without first questioning the belief. She also had a feminist take on stories like the Ramayana, for example, where she felt that Sita was the real heroine of the epic and that Rama’s submitting her to the Agni Pariksha was a political choice that did not do justice to the supposed great love between them,” she says. Those stories proved to be a treasure trove for her imagination and they reflected in her writing. “I do not use myths to convey a religious message, but to throw light on human nature and on some archetypes of humanity. I feel that this link to myths does give the stories a universal feel, however much they are rooted in a specific place and time. Also, mythologies were never afraid of eroticism and sexuality. Gods and goddesses were not described as sexless beings. On the contrary, they used their sexuality for various purposes, including to tempt and to deviate,” she adds.

Devi’s books deal with dark subjects; reviewers are known to call the worlds she creates in them “depressing and forbidding”. Her characters are usually victims, often of religious and societal convention, who have no voice. “I believe there was something about the significance of silence, or, more precisely, of voiceless-ness, that compelled me from my very beginnings as a writer,” she says. “I realised later on that most of my central characters had some kind of defect that prevented them from expressing themselves. Being a writer, I had, de facto, a voice,” she says.

“There is a cost to inhabiting some of my characters,” she says. She worked on her novel Le Sari Vert (The green sari) for several years, writing different versions from different points of view but discarding the results. It was only after 10 years that she realised who should be telling the story.

After that, the novel got completed in six months. “The narrator is the 80-year-old man. His voice — full of hate, of mockery, of a grim humour, of contempt for women — inhabited me for these six months and I didn’t realise how hard this had been until I had finished the novel and felt completely drained and exhausted,” she says. But mostly, it appears that she enjoys playing the part of someone else. It is this voice, she believes, that defines the tone of the novel, how it is told, what devices will be used to reveal the story.