‘We’re still hypocritical about sexuality’

Neel Mukherjee talks to DNA  about his debut novel, book awards and homophobia.

It’s often said that writers are like vultures since they feed off people around them for their characters. For your first novel, how much did you draw from those around you?
What gets overlooked often in this search for ‘autobiographical’ resonances is that most writers, most of the time, actually IMAGINE other lives, other incidents. The Calcutta sections of Past Continuous are written out of life; I was born and brought up in that city and I used to know parts of it well. Similarly, I have lived in Oxford, and I live in London now, so the settings are not purely ‘researched’; I have first-hand experience of those places. But searching for one-to-one correspondences between a writer’s life and his work is a cul-de-sac, and a dangerous one at that.

You recently won the Crossword Award along with Amitav Ghosh. How much importance should writers give to book awards? Do you think winning major awards like the Booker can sometimes signal the death knell for a writer due to the expectations thereafter?
Book awards are good things in that they get a book noticed and read. Too many good books have died premature and cruel, unfair deaths because they didn’t make it on to the awards carousel for one reason or the other. So I see awards as a net benefit. The Booker, which is a Very Big Award, is both a hit-and-miss prize, with a hit rate of 3 out of 10 — this is, of course, a very subjective opinion — and also too big for some authors, or has the dangerous potential to be that. It has been known to ring the death knell for some. But the immediate publicity surrounding a Booker winner makes his/her reputation, certainly temporarily. As for permanence, let me hide behind Milton: ‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.’

Did you face any homophobic reactions after publication because of your open exploration of homosexuality in the book?
No, no homophobic reactions at any point, although I was slightly repulsed by a particularly stupid review in an Indian blog, which interpreted the homosexuality of Ritwik (one of the protagonists) as a kind of pathology.

Are we still a largely hypocritical country when it comes to issues of sexuality?
A big, glowing, neon, radioactive YES. But we needn’t go as far as homosexuality to isolate and identify hypocrisy. Look at the very deeply problematic and discriminatory history of gender relations and heterosexuality in India.

Are you working on a new novel?
Yes, I’m working on a new novel, but I hate talking about my work-in-progress. There’s a graphic novel I’ve finished, which is in the process of being drawn by a young Bengali artist, but it may be a while.