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

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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.