In a Mumbai maelstrom

Short-story writer, novelist, and founder-editor of The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM) Tanuj Solanki’s latest novel Manjhi’s Mayhem not only tells the story of a Dalit security guard working at an elite café in Mumbai, but it’s also a work where nuanced political issues are addressed subliminally.

The book is on the longlist of this year’s JCB Prize for Literature. In a conversation with DHoS conducted earlier, Solanki discussed what went into building a character like Sewaram Manjhi and the world where he creates ‘mayhem’. Excerpts

The very first paragraph of your book establishes that everything in this story didn’t and more importantly couldn’t have happened in English. Why was this necessary?

When accessing characters who do their business in a language other than English, we can usually rely on the reader’s understanding of an implicit translation. Here, the language should not draw attention to itself in the way of puns, wordplay, very peculiarly Englishy turns of phrases, etc. (Some Indian English writers ignore this; I can’t). For Manjhi’s Mayhem, I felt the translation needed to be made explicit because its hardboiled flavour was going to be completely dependent on the language. I needed freedom and sanction.

Manjhi and Ali combine to give me that freedom, but when they articulate the point, it inevitably becomes a statement about the perceived hierarchy of languages in India or some such. It’s a case of the novelist trying to solve a technical problem, but having to make a wee political point to do that.

The book does not explain Manjhi’s traumatic past. Was this deliberate?

Yes. The practical reason was that I wanted to write a slim action novel, and there were already some backstories that the plot couldn’t do without. For Manjhi, I felt that distilled post-oppression rage was a viable starting point, and I trusted the reader to automatically grasp the reasons for Manjhi’s mindset. 

What skills must a writer possess to flesh out a marginalised character like Manjhi?

That fiction writers have to access characters who are not them is axiomatic. The good thing is that the overwhelming majority of the work is done by the reader. The writer’s job is to maintain illusions. Therefore, ethical concerns — whose story, told by whom — become concerns of aesthetics too. What the writer does have to be careful about is aesthetic overreach, which, in the ethical sense, would be read as appropriation. So, you limit yourself: you don’t go all essayistic on the matter, and neither do you think of it as reportage. One way to do that is to stick to universal motives — money, sex, having a definition as an individual — and to choose wisely as to which particular component shall be rendered with the polish or abrasion of operative identity. 

Why is Manjhi called an anti-hero?

The blurb calls him that. I hope the blurb doesn’t become the final word on the matter.

The reader doesn’t get enough of the queer journalist — the scribe of the novel. While you did clearly establish his role and got that part out of the way in the first chapter itself, were you anxious about (not) keeping him in the narrative?

A recent review of the novel (in Hindi) addressed this well. It sees in the novel’s opening a declaration that the subjectivities of Manjhi the tale-teller and Ali the scribe have merged. So, Ali, in that sense, is always present. He also plays a very important role in the plot, but he chooses not to give us all his contributions. He will be there in future novels if there are any, and he might be more prominent. I’m dabbling with the idea of polyphony, where Ali speaks every now and then.

Sometimes writers tend to keep a few books with them during the literary world-building of the novel they are working on. Did you have any?

Yes, I had crime novels from James Sallis, Chester Himes, and others on my desk when I was writing Manjhi’s Mayhem. I’m working on a novella now, and I have Naipaul and Nabokov on my desk. I keep the books there to open any page at random and draw inspiration, or just as a sort of benchmark.

Manjhi’s Mayhem, immediately said ‘movie’ to me. Can we expect a screen adaptation soon?

There are some conversations taking place. There is good reason for hope, I think.