Diya Sarkar - Some Thoughts with ... Indra Das
25 Jul 2024The Author/s
![Indrapramit Das](https://cdn.jamreads.com/images/84437863-8746-49f0-8bc7-9a3cf5ab2962.jpg)
Indrapramit Das
Indrapramit Das (also known as Indra Das) is an Indian science fiction, fantasy and cross-genre writer, critic and editor from Kolkata. His fiction has appeared in several publications including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar is a novella about a boy and his family in Kolkata who straddle two different realities.
The Interview
1. Your literary inspiration when it comes to fantasy shines
brightly in The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar. How did you get introduced
to the world of fantasy?
Speaking of ‘fantasy’ as a specific literary genre, the
first fantasy novel for adults I ever read as a child was The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks. Of course, there’s
little of that novel in Dragoners,
though Brooks’ primary inspiration The
Lord of the Rings (which I read some years later as a teenager) obviously
does play a significant part in my novella because Ru’s a fan of it. But I
don’t really see the Shannara books
as an introduction to fantasy, because no single thing is. Fantasy is a part of
human storytelling in all its forms, and always has been, as is clear from every
culture’s religions and mythologies and folklore. It’s also just a part of
human thought and life—we spent inordinate amounts of time imagining things
that don’t exist, that haven’t happened, that never will happen. We
‘fantasize’, and our brains literally dream. Fantasy was just a part of life
since childhood, in the imaginative play, in my mental reactions from
children’s books and fairy tales and TV and movies and the real world.
2. How did you come up with the idea for The Last Dragoners?
Walk me through your process.
I had a dream that I was in a beautiful,
dawn-lit garden, and my grandmother (I don’t remember if it was one of my
actual late grandmothers or a fictional one) showed me a pod on a tree or plant
that she unfurled, and I realized the pod was made of the wings of a creature
inside—and it was an infant dragon, with a mane of dandelion fluff wet with
dew. I thought to myself, I can’t believe it but it’s true, it’s true, dragons are real. There’s one right in
front of me. I was euphoric. I woke up, and I was sad to lose that reality.
Much later, I wrote out the dream, and followed where it took me, and it took
me into the story told in this novella.
3. Kolkata plays a major part in Ru's life and relationships. Your
first book, The Devourers is also set in Kolkata. Is there a reason why
you set your books in Kolkata?
It’s my hometown, and I’ve spent most of my life
here. It’s only natural that I gravitate towards the city. It’s rich in
psychohistorical potential too, for stories. It’s dense with narratives and
sights and sounds.
4. The themes of identity, home and belonging are the keystone of
the novella. What inspired you to explore such themes?
I don’t usually set out to explore specific
themes when I start writing, unless I’m writing for a themed anthology. All of
that happens organically while writing the story. What inspired me was just the
image from the dream—putting it on paper (on screen, rather) and growing it led
to everything else. That it turned into a story about refugees in a host
culture, about preserving cultural legacies, about identity etc. was partly due
to the ever-growing atmosphere of intolerance and bigotry toward anyone outside
the hegemonic, constructed identity of the ‘real’ ‘Indian’, i.e. upper caste
Hindu.
5. The magic in the book is very dreamlike and mystical. What kind
of magic do you prefer in your books and why?
Honestly, I don’t have any preferences—it’s all
down to the book, the writing, the execution. Generally speaking, I do enjoy it
more when magic is wild and terrifying, since it is an expression of humanity’s
desire to harness the essential mystery
of the universe, everything about this unimaginable vastness that we exist in
that we don’t and cannot ever know. That’s where gods come from too. So
channeling that mystery is most impactful to me in literature or other art when
it actually seems mysterious, instead of laboriously explained and codified.
But that said, there are artworks with elaborate magic systems that I have
enjoyed, that can be great—videogames are an example of an art form where that
kind systematization of magic can be beneficial for the narrative framework. As
mentioned—it’s all in the execution. But I do lean more toward mystery,
wildness, the dream element of magical thinking.
6. The book is steeped in 90s Kolkata nostalgia. What do you think
makes The Last Dragoners universally appealing while focusing on such a
specific experience?
I don’t know that it is universally
appealing—that’s for readers to decide. I wasn’t trying to make it universally
appealing. It’s not something I look for in art myself—I love specificity
(though once again—it’s down to craft and execution, as there are plenty
stories without specificity that can work very well). Specificity of setting,
culture, etc. is what grounds me in a story, no matter how unfamiliar or
fantastical. It’s what gives form and flesh to a story, and ideally gives the
reader or viewer or listener something to hold on to, like a sensory memory
that imprints on to their lives. Specificity is universality, to me, because
we’re all sensory creatures existing within cultures and subcultures and
situations that are unique to our singular selves, we each have lives that,
similar or not, are not like any other lives on the entire planet. If used
well, specificity can make the unfamiliar familiar in the way of a dream, and
that’s what I was aiming for. Of course, in this case, I also wanted to convey
the culturally liminal area of growing up Anglophone Indian, where you’re
exposed to art from other lands and then begin to see it as ‘familiar’
alongside your native culture/s, leading to a politically tangled hybrid of
un/familiarity, wherein the history of colonialism and imperialism leads to an enforced notion of ‘universality’ based
on, let’s be honest, white and western supremacy. I think readers should
question what ‘universality’ means narratively speaking.
7. What's your favourite coming of age story?
I’m far too indecisive and enamoured with art to
choose any favourites for anything, really. But to go with the Dragoners parallels, two cinematic
parallels—Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday and
Yoshifumi Kondo’s Whisper of the Heart,
two Studio Ghibli animes that exemplify the kind of narrative texture,
translated into prose, that I wanted to achieve with this novella, that
exquisite evocation of the mundane as thoroughly interwoven with the magical,
because we as humans are creatures drawn to magical thinking, even as the wider
systems we’ve created around us seem determined to stamp that out. I watched Whisper of the Heart right after I
finished writing the first draft of Dragoners,
and it reminded me so much of my own novella that it felt like being
retroactively inspired. Ray’s Pather
Panchali and the rest of the Apu trilogy are also among my ‘coming-of-age’ favourites,
unsurprisingly—despite their staunch realism, they carry that enchanted,
detail-oriented poeticism and interest in the way the human world interacts
with nature, both rurally and in urban spaces, that I associate with those
animes. Coming of age stories are great for that, because children are closer
to magical thinking, see the world differently.
Recently—well, some years ago now I guess—I
liked Sally Rooney’s Normal People
very much, and I think a little bit of that made its way into Dragoners too. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines is another one, very
impactful to me when I read it as a teen—might have been the first English
novel I’d read that conveyed a coming of age narrative set in my home city.
Stephen King’s It was another
monumental coming of age milestone in my own literary coming of age.
8. What are you currently working on?
I don’t talk about things I’m working on until
they’re done, generally. But I do have my first edited anthology, the 2024
volume of MIT Press’ Twelve Tomorrows science fiction series, Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the
Future of Art, coming out October 8. I’m very proud of the work all the
writers and artists in that book have done to imagine art forms and artists
across different futures near and far across spacetime. The book can be
pre-ordered here (pre-orders help, thank you in advance to those who click
through): https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549080/deep-dream/
Thank you so much for your response!
Thank
you for taking the time to interview me, and for your thoughtful questions!
About Diya Sarkar
Follow her on Twitter
Diya is a generic nerdy girl from India whose gateway to fantasy was ASOIAF. Fantasy is her go-to genre but she loves Historical Fiction and Horror too. The way to her heart is having a character killed in horrific ways in your book. May or may not believe in the existence of bears.