"We are treating fiction too much as something that we can like or dislike in a personal way": In Conversation with Anjum Hasan

15 October, 2015

On 6 October 2015, The Caravan and Penguin India launched Anjum Hasan’s fourth novel, The Cosmopolitans at the Oxford Bookstore in Connaught Place, Delhi. In an interview that took place a little before the launch, Hasan, the books editor at The Caravan spoke about the setting of her novel and the protagonist, Qayenaat. During the course of this conversation, Hasan elaborated on her choice to use the art world as a backdrop for the story, her decision to place the second-half of the narrative in a fictional small town and why empathising with Qayenaat is more important than liking her.

The genesis of “The Cosmopolitans” and the protagonist of the book, Qayenaat

Anjum Hasan: Well, there were three or four strands that I was working with. One was this image of an older single woman who’s made very unconventional choices, lives on her own, and belongs to a generation that is sort of in between the Nehruvian nation-building generation and the MTV—more blasé, much more self confident—generation. And that was very clear to me, that she would be her own person and have her own distinctive trajectory, but she would also belong to a larger generational narrative. I really wanted to address that.

The second thing was the arts—and I’m not talking about a particular art world, this is not a novel about the Bangalore art world about which I know very little. But it is about art in general. It is about what do you feel when you enter a gallery and look at something hanging on the wall. What is the conversation you have with yourself? What do you feel when you see something that moves you so much you want to try and find a way to get closer to it? So that was the second thing.

The third thing was Bangalore as a city and how it’s changed. And how does it feel to somebody who has lived there long enough to feel betrayed by those changes and feel a certain nostalgia for an older Bangalore, without necessarily being a rooted native who has a kind of cantonment history and has lived in a grand bungalow and has that kind of sentimental semi-colonial nostalgia. Just someone in an ordinary way, who’s an immigrant but still has that relationship to the city.

The fourth thing I think was the small town in contrast to the big city and how does it work for a English-speaking, very-westernised Indian to find her way through this other reality that you kind of idealise but you also exaggerate in your mind. You exaggerate the fears; you exaggerate the horrors of that reality. Would it help for you to actually experience it, and would it be interesting to the reader to actually be there first hand through Qayenaat?

On the art world as the setting of the novel

AH:  I think the first reason that I chose the art world is because I like art and I wanted to write a novel about people connected with art in different ways. As lovers of art, people who just view art, people who are making art, people who collect art, people who write about art, but also in the figure of Sathi, who is Qayenaat’s friend, the figure of the doubting Thomas, the one who feels that art is a waste of money, its self indulgent. So you have this whole constellation of figures, at the center of which is Qayenaat, who has a series of different relationships with art. She is in some ways like the ideal “rasika” [an aesthete]; she is the lover of art, but she’s also conflicted by a lot of things she sees. In her past was an aspiration to be an artist herself. So I just thought there’s so much rich, human comedy and human tragedy in the field of art, but having said that, it’s not an insider view of art, because I’m not an artist, I’ve never made art, and I’ve never written about it either; this was the first time.

On whether Qayenaat is a likeable character

AH: I certainly like her and I think that [it] would have been difficult to stay with a character for so many years if I didn’t like her at all, which is not to say that I agree with everything that she thinks or does, and neither it is to say that she is me, except in the very broad sense in which [Gustave] Flaubert said, “I am Madame Bovary,” so in that sense I am Qayenaat.

But I think likeability is overrated. Because as fiction readers increasingly you see comments on Goodreads or Amazon saying, “I didn’t like this character”, “I didn’t agree with this point of view.” And why is that a pre-condition for liking a book? I don’t…I think we are treating fiction too much as something that we can like or dislike in a personal way. Whereas I think what is more important is curiosity and empathy. Can you empathise with Qayenaat, or are you curious about the life of a woman like her in a city like Bangalore? To me that’s more important because you may not like n number of characters in fiction but they could still be characters in very, very moving, grand books. So I think it would be great if the reader likes her but it would be even greater if they can empathise with her.

On Simhal, a fictional town, that serves a backdrop for the second half of the novel

AH: Well partly the comedy. What happens if you take a woman, who has never really visited, within quotes, “the real India,” and just put her out of her element? And the people that she is surrounded by, her friends, there are some who know that India and some who don’t. Like I say for instance, about one of the characters, this art collector called Sara Mir, that she could move between the big cities with the ease of a native but she would be horrified at anything 100 kilometers outside Bangalore. And so I was just fascinated by the idea that our cities are like mirages, these giant mirages where these freaks live, who engage in these conversations and live these lives that are charmed lives but are also unreal lives, which is not to say that there is a hierarchy of reality and the small town is more real, but it’s definitely very, very different. So the potential comedy and the sense of alienation to me was very interesting and I based Simhal on a lot of small towns I visited in that part of the country and elsewhere.

On Simhal’s relationship with its folk dance

AH: The residents have a curious almost forgetful relationship to the dance and it’s really, when the dance travels, that it acquires a certain potency. When the dance maestro or the impresario takes the dance out, takes it out of the little town or takes it abroad, that he gets a certain position in that society, right? And then there is this king figure who also has a peculiarly possessive relationship to the dance but it turns out it also has its regressive elements. So yeah, there were all these thoughts in my mind, in putting Qayanaat in Simhal and seeing if she would survive it.