I recently sat down with Richa Burman, my editor at Penguin India, to discuss my new novel, The Legend of Virinara. We discussed the setting, themes, and characters in the book, as well as a bit about my own life. Watch the video, below [30 minutes].
For those who would rather read, I've transcribed our conversation. However, it's not a verbatim transcript; I've taken the liberty of editing the conversation slightly, so it's easier to read, and adding a bit more depth.
Richa Burman: The Legend of Virinara is an epic saga of war and peace, which draws on the history, legends and myths of India to create a thrilling adventure full of political intrigue and unexpected turns of plot. We’ll talk to Usha today about her travels through India that inspired her to write this book, her creative process and how her earlier avatar as an Apple employee influenced her writing.
You spent your early years and the better part of your working life in the US. Early on in the story, there’s a description of the young Shanti, the princess who’s the protagonist of the book, travelling to a sea port away from her kingdom’s capital. She’s wonderstruck by the kind of sights she sees there. Was it like that for you when you travelled to certain places in India for the first time?
Usha Alexander: Yes and no. Shanti grew up in a much more limited world than I did. She had no television or magazines. No photographs of distant places and things. So when Shanti travels to the port city of Dindora, at 13, she encounters vistas and people and animals unlike anything she had ever imagined, from parts of the world she didn’t even know existed. It was a sudden and profound enlargement of her world, her sense of what was possible in the world. Shanti remembers it mostly as a discovery of beauty and adventure.
It was different for me. For one thing, I was much younger the first time I remember visiting India, in 1972; I was eight years old. I was growing up in an Indian family and in a world already enlarged by ubiquitous media, so many aspects of India were not unknown or foreign to me. I’d already heard about the temples and artwork; I’d seen pictures. We did at that time visit many amazing sites, like Sravanabelagola, Halebid, Belur, and all the great Mughal sights. When I saw these things in real life for the first time, they were certainly impressive, but they were not entirely unimagined.
As you might expect, the things that did surprise me and change my sense of the world were the aspects of Indian life that no one really talked about. Sometimes these were even small things that were unremarked upon because they were too mundane, like the presence of monkeys living in the town. In the small towns we visited, they were everywhere in the trees and coming onto the rooftops, stealing fruit. That was something I’d never imagined. Compared to American towns, Indian urban spaces seemed livelier; their different way of accommodating the presence of nature seemed 'healthier' to me.
And there were other aspects that nobody ever talked about. There was the hunger, the presence of other animals freely roaming the towns, and the obvious waste management problem. I encountered those things for the first time in my life and they were wholly unexpected. The man who lay dying of starvation in the street; the desperate, stringy people who knocked on our door, begging for food; the huge, wild boars rooting around in the town gutter; the mysterious young woman who appeared in the toilet and carried away the waste in a basket, whom no one ever spoke to—who she was and how did she get that job? I wondered. When I asked the grownups about her, that was the first time I heard the word ‘untouchable’ and the concept of it blew me away, the outrageous cruelty of it, which even the ‘respected elders’ couldn’t explain away. Those images and experiences were the ones that were beyond my imagination and they did engender a life-altering sense of wonder at the larger world, including a profound erosion of my trust in the wisdom of the elders.
RB: What made you pick an ancient period in India to base the story in, rather than the present?
UA: I wouldn’t say I ‘picked’ an ancient period in India as the setting for the novel. I feel more like it picked me. I was immersed in reading and looking at and thinking about India’s ancient history at that point in time—more than a decade ago. A story started forming in my head, while I was traveling around ancient sites and encountering details and fragments of stories from India’s past. For instance, I spent a good deal of time gazing at the carvings in ancient stelae. You begin to wonder about the people who carved them and what they were trying to depict. Why are these people rowing a boat? Where are they going? There are people looking down from a first floor balcony—what kind of people lived in two story houses two-thousand years ago? How much leisure do these people have to lounge under this chhaata? You begin to notice their clothing—the antariya, which was a cloth tied around the lower part of the body—would often be printed with lines or flowers. You can make out these details in some sculptures.
Ancient India was such a rich canvas, too. There was global trade going on, people and ideas moving through. The landscape was loaded with different societies, who each would’ve seen themselves as entirely distinct from the others, with their own languages and gods: empires and city-states and chiefdoms and nomads. So it was a large enough world for my characters and conflicts to inhabit. And my story began to inhabit ancient India. It unfolded itself in that ancient world.
But I have to add that at the same time, I was obviously also immersed in the present day and fragments of stories of the present were also surrounding me, involving my characters, and were an equal part of the development of the story. I was noticing the ways in which many modern conflicts have parallels with past human conflicts, which are so often rooted in how each side relates to the stories they tell about their own history—not only in ancient India, but even in India today and all over the world—we see it in the Middle East, in Africa, even in the United States. And I wanted to consider the the idea of myth-making, itself, and how that contributes to our sense of identity. So setting it in the ancient past made sense for the story.
RB: It would need more research to recreate a world very different from what we know today . . .
UA: Yes, I tried very hard to stay true to the material realities of the time and place. So for instance, the food would have been very different than what we think of today as Indian food. There wouldn’t have been any potatoes or tomatoes or chili peppers or half a dozen other ingredients and fruits we are familiar with in Indian food today. They of course had rice and a variety of lentils, eggplants, drumsticks, jackfruit, and spices, among other things. And for the wealthier characters in the story, their wealth is reflected in their diet, they eat ghee and fried foods. But I also had to imagine that they would’ve eaten foods that are no longer eaten today. Particularly the forest dwellers, whose diet is more based around palm piths, unfamiliar tubers, and fish.
RB: Tell us some interesting legends or characters that you drew upon.
UA: For the myths of the Virina, I wanted to capture some of the motifs that share some aspects of Indian deep tradition. So, for instance, I know that the snake recurs throughout India as a very ancient deity or mythic creature, with associations of fecundity and rootedness in the land. And of course, there have been river goddesses throughout India. So instead I took some of these elemental ideas of the snake and fused them with a river goddess that I invented for the Virina people, who is also the goddess of fish, tied to fecundity and plenty and a sense of rootedness in this place, Virinara. I invented a forest god, associated with wild game and also with cattle, with a third eye that wreaks destruction, suggestive of Siva, but not identical to Siva; perhaps a plausible proto-Siva.
More than that, though, the characters and situations that occur in the book are loosely based on fragments from Indian history. For instance, one notices several Indian rulers wanted to invent a Kshatriya lineage for themselves by tracing their ancestry back to the sun or the moon—the Chandelas are one example of this. There’s the idea of the conflict between the settled peoples who were taking over the land, and the forest people, who were still trying to live a more ancient nomadic lifestyle of gathering and hunting, and that forest dwellers were regarded by the settled people as a threatening presence. Rakshasas.
RB: When you first thought of the story, did you know the central protagonist had to be female?
UA: I think I was immediately drawn to the character who would develop into Shanti, the princess. She was someone I increasingly admired as she grew. And I wanted to tell the story from her point of view as someone who was deeply involved in the events, but not very much in control of them. She’s an onlooker, but not a bystander; she is deeply invested and even affects the course of events, but she also has a larger view to question and reflect and wonder about what’s happening.
RB: What did it bring to the story to have the narrator be a woman of ancient times?
UA: I think having Shanti as the narrator gives us a chance to consider a different form of bravery from what we normally hear about. Usually stories of conflict between nations are told from a male perspective, and they tend to celebrate brawn and battles. But Shanti’s perspective shows us a different kind of bravery. She never goes into battle or fights anyone. She confronts problems with her wits and with her heart. She also shows us her vulnerability—not only her own, but the vulnerability of all the other characters too. Even the vulnerability of the warriors: her brothers, Vijay and Adrashata, and her lover, Narun. And we see how their vulnerability has as much to do with their actions as their valour.
I was also imagining a pre-patriarchal society, which once were more commonly found in India as elsewhere in the world, particularly in pre-agricultural societies, such as the forest dwellers in the book. So in the story, the nomadic forest dwellers are a matrilineal society, and the kingdom that Shanti belongs to is a society in transition, retaining some aspects of a matrilineal social structure, but moving toward more patriarchal structures.
RB: And why did love have to be central to the story—how do you see love?
UA: For Shanti, I think falling in love with Narun, a person from such a different world from her own, is one of the life-changing things that happens to Shanti, which helps her to find her own strength in the world. Loving Narun becomes a primary motivator for Shanti to explore the world and to try to find a solution to the conflict between their peoples; it also creates conflicts and becomes one of the reasons that events unfold as they do. Not only for Shanti, but for several characters in the book. And I think I wanted to look at that, at how history is in some measure shaped by the passions of individuals, especially if those individuals happen to be in a position of power or influence. There are the famous stories, like Antony and Cleopatra. But even ordinary people kill and die for things they love.
But my interest in love is not restricted to romantic love, but also the love of family and friends. The love that creates a sense of community. Historically, soldiers have signed up in droves to fight wars for the love of their nation, their land, the families and communities they hope to protect. People regularly uproot their lives to follow a loved one across the globe or challenge themselves to understand the world in a new way from the perspective of someone they love. In this way, love, in its many forms and shades, is one of the most potent forces in the world.
RB: Tell us a bit about your writing process: do you devise a plot first, focus on the kind of characters you want, or is it hazy at the beginning and starts to develop as you start writing?
UA: I don’t know if there’s anything about the way I write that I’d call a process. It’s more like I just get deeply moved by or curious about various things around me. Something I read, or something I saw. Or I get very fascinated by a particular life choice made by someone I know that seems at first baffling to me, or some character trait that I want to understand. And all these little bits and thoughts kind of seep in and mix up and slowly start coming to life. Little by little whole characters and situations begin to form. It might take years for a bunch of these fragments of developing stories to get tangled up with each other and become a larger story with many characters and layers. And then, I might start writing. As I write, the characters change and deepen, as does their context, their relationships to each other. Its a mysterious process. And for me, at least, it’s very slow. It’s like making stew. Or rajma.
RB: You spent a decade writing this book: that’s a significant time to engage with a single story. In the meantime you also held a job at Apple. How much did the story—and you—change during this long process?
UA: The story, of course, changed more than I could begin to describe here. It went through several incarnations. The characters took their own, unforeseen directions. New characters arrived and grew prominent; others shrunk away or died. The structure of the story—an elderly sage speaking to a monk, telling the story of her youth—is very different from what I began with. If I resurrected all the words I wrote and discarded, it would surely be more than twice what you see here. I think what stayed constant was the themes, the matters I was investigating.
As for me, I also changed enormously, I think, as one will over ten years in mid-life. I wrote the first words related to this book when I was living in India in 2006. Then I went back to the States and returned to my job at Apple, which I’d left a couple years earlier. So most of the writing happened in bursts, while I was working at a fairly demanding job that took my full attention, with not much space for wonder beyond the corporate world, the world of tech, where I was ensconced. I would go for three or six months without writing a word or even looking at the manuscript. But the story did persist in the back of my mind, continually growing and filling out.
RB: What was it like working at Apple?
UA: Working at Apple added a lot to my life, as it was, in many ways, a great place to work. Life at Apple was very intense, but I actually really enjoyed my job. I enjoyed it primarily because all my co-workers were really smart, creative, interesting people. At Apple, I worked as an instructional writer and had my first experience with really sharp and thoughtful editors; I’m sure that also contributed to making me more aware of language and craft as a writer. Until I joined Apple, I’d basically been a student, more or less; so in some sense, I grew up there. Meanwhile, the world was changing around me, as were the circumstances of my own life. I quit my job at Apple for the second time. Moved back to India. I kept learning.
RB: Earlier when we were having a chat, I remember being quite fascinated by your trajectory to being a writer: the different subjects you studied and also discovering that you liked teaching.
UA: I started out as a scientist: a chemist and molecular biologist. I love science as a way of understanding the world. But as I studied, I began to realize what science could not question, that there are realms of enquiry into which science has unsatisfying insights. Like understanding life, living, meaning, the human experience. So I shifted to anthropology, which was equally absorbing and instructive. I learned a lot about human potential and what it means to be human, where we came from, how we got here. But I eventually found anthropology also kind of limiting for my purposes.
Some part of me wanted to jump off from what I knew and explore further with the imagination. I don’t mean in a nonsense way, but I wanted to take the real information we have about the world and project beyond it to imagine what we can never really know for fact. I wanted to have the scope to ask other, more slippery questions. To be a storyteller. I wanted to be able to present ideas in a way that one can encounter them not merely as knowledge, but as experience. And that’s what stories are for, when they’re at their best. Stories are a way of giving sense to our experience of existence. We are able to step into a story and experience it on many levels at once, to absorb it. It doesn’t appeal merely to our logic or reason or emotion, but to all of these parts of us at once.
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