The importance of being wry

A chat with well-known columnist and novelist Manu Joseph who tells him how stories emerge from a mess of intoxicating ideas and emotions.

Novelist and screenplay writer Manu Joseph, the author of three widely acclaimed novels is among the new voices in contemporary Indian writing in English. The former journalist, now a full-time writer and columnist, published his debut novel, Serious Men, in 2010 when he was 36.

Witty, propulsive, irreverent, with an intelligent narrative style, Serious Men tackles issues of Dalits, caste and inequalities in contemporary India as it tells the story of a Dalit man’s angst and anger against his upper caste boss and colleagues. His second, The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012), is a darkly comic and poignant human novel that revolves around the alcoholic patriarch of a Christian family who embarks on a quest to solve the mystery surrounding his teenage son’s death and in the process, the reader learns of the family’s story, the society they live in and the mystery of life itself.

Racy, bold, satirical and hard-hitting, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous (2017), his third book takes off as a thriller that unfolds during the course of a day from a building collapse to a real-life police encounter case and broadening into the current social and political scenario of India with some easily recognisable characters.

Joseph’s Serious Men was made into a Hindi film of the same name and released on a popular OTT platform in October 2020. Excerpts from an interview

Journalism to novels to screenplay. Did the transition happen naturally?

I think I was lucky because I didn’t have too many options; I had to go with the flow. And the flow can do you some good. As a teenager, my primary interest was to make films and write short fiction. A few years later, I got obsessed with literary style, a sort of flamboyant playful English literary style. My early 20s were an intellectually destructive period because if you were not writing anything remarkable or funny, I thought you were a sham. In the middle of all this, for a 20-year-old writer who needed a salary, journalism and advertising were the only professions that paid. Culturally, between the two, I belonged to journalism because I was not upscale; I was too provincial.

And novels and screenplay?

I wrote many screenplays that never became films. I figured that most filmmakers were just lazy, unequipped to endure the physically laborious part of writing. They merely wanted to enjoy their own thoughts and wanted someone they can exploit to do the actual writing. I realised that writing a film made me dependent on too many sub-standard people, while writing a novel required only me. So I gave up all the lures of cinema and focused on writing a novel. When I was 26, I began Serious Men.

‘Serious Men’ dealt with the touchy issue of caste and inequalities. How do you think it would be received in today’s polarised India and a free-for-all social media?

There would now be more questions about the authenticity of my portrayal, more questions about whether a guy who is not a Dalit can “get” a Dalit man; just because I was once poor, am I qualified to write about a caste underdog, and so on. All reasonable, good questions but uninteresting.

Generally, the most important talent in any sphere is not your identity but your intuition, which includes your ability to make paranormally accurate conjectures about experiences you have never had. A talented writer who appropriates someone’s culture is any day more useful and interesting than a no-talent guy lamenting his real life in an authentic but insipid way.

Your novels seem tailor-made for films/television. Is that intentional?

The most important part of the birth of a novel is the mess of intoxicating ideas and emotions and some small actions of real people. But I never start writing until I have got the scaffolding, a structure that signals that the novel is ready to be written. My lifelong respect for structure has greatly helped in my transition to screen.

I wasn’t much involved in the script of Serious Men. But since then I have written and created an original series for an OTT platform that will release this month. It is an epilogue of a marriage — about a married couple who have separated but decide to live together because they don’t want the child to know.

How committed and responsive should writers be to society and contemporary events shaping it?

This social-angle business of writing fiction is a big bore and half-nonsense. This has come about because of an over-articulation and over-analysis of books and stories by intellectuals who don’t get writing as much as they think they do.

How do you see the publishing scene in India?

Publishers are valiant. I like them. But they don’t have enough support. This is the only industry in the world that does not know how to sell its own products.

Your next novel?

No matter what I do, I think I am essentially a novelist. Something is forming and it has reached the scaffolding stage. I hope to finish it next year. One good thing about being 47 is that I write much faster. I don’t need a decade to finish a novel anymore.