A shuttlecock fresh off a badminton player’s hand and Babri Masjid are strategically placed on the cover of Saskya Jain’s second novel Geeta Rahman at Championship Point (Simon & Schuster, 2021). They collectively ensue a reckoning with one’s immediate and collective past.
Two years prior to the publication of Chetna Maroo’s 2023 Booker-shortlisted and 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction-longlisted debut novel Western Lane (Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, 2023), Jain, with her eloquent prose and dialogic manner, had interlaced the story of a teenager’s inspiring journey told through her love for the badminton sport and its history, as she navigates, along with her family, an irrevocable loss as India witnesses multiple shapeshifting events in the backdrop.
Jain, who divides her time between New Delhi and Berlin, was born in Ahmedabad and grew up in New Delhi. Her first novel Fire Under Ash (Random House, 2014) was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. Over an email conversation, she discussed the book and playing with language. Edited excerpts:
What inspired you to write this book?
I grew up in the same government colony in central Delhi in the 1990s as my novel’s protagonist Geeta and looking back on my childhood there, so much of our lives revolved around the badminton court. So, I wanted to write a novel about that—telling the story of a colony through the lens of badminton. It was an IAS officers’ colony. The residents were posted in Delhi from all over India, so I liked the idea of the court representing a miniature version of the country with all that was going on there at the time.
Take us through the sort of research that went into working on this book—both regarding the sport and otherwise.
In terms of the research, I soon discovered that the history of badminton is intricately tied to the history of India—right from the very beginning, as modern badminton was invented here by colonial officers stationed in Pune, and certain key moments in badminton history mirrored the history of modern India in an almost uncanny way. The part about Prakash Bhabra [a character in the book] is based on historical facts, for example. He (his real name is Prakash Nath) and Devender Mohan really did go to London to compete in the All England of 1947, and the matches unfolded the way it’s told in the novel, all while Lahore was going up in flames during pre-Partition violence. And like Vicky in the novel, I, too, was trying to piece together this unexplored and not very well-documented history. I travelled to the National Badminton Museum in Milton Keynes, for example, and to the British Library in London, to see what I could find in old newspapers. It was not much, but there were some key details, and they’ve all gone into the book.
In a way, your novel is also constructing a language of its own. It can be the language of grief that’s privately shared between the members of the Rahman household or it can be the teenagers’ slang used frequently throughout. Your thoughts on this use of language?
When writing in the first person, [the] voice becomes an important factor to allow the reader to feel close to the character. Geeta’s use—or misuse, rather!—of government diction for her own purposes is what makes her voice unique.
And as a writer you want to keep things interesting and challenging yourself, too, to try new things and make new discoveries, so I loved writing in Geeta’s voice. I remember well, for example, my sense of wonder as a child while reading my father’s files with their stiff, wordy style and fancy yet kind of outdated vocabulary. That sense of wonder stayed with me, and I tapped into that for Geeta’s voice.
Dialogue is another component that I deeply enjoy writing, and I have notebooks where I jot down phrases or words I’ve heard people use. Here in India, we all have inherent flexibility concerning the language(s) we use in different contexts—different registers that require a natural playfulness. That playfulness lends itself wonderfully to writing.
Your book features major events informing and changing the lives of its characters uniquely without being forceful in a way that would perhaps have made these events central to the narrative, which they are and not at the same time. What did you have in mind while structuring the novel? Additionally, what happens when a novel becomes overtly political—does it make a writer an activist? Should a writer aspire to become an activist in their work? In that regard, what do you think is the role of the novelist in society?
All good writing is political in some form or another without being preachy. Take [Joseph Koyippally’s English translation of] Benyamin’s Goat Days (Penguin, 2012). Nowhere does the writer make an explicitly moralistic statement in it, but by the plot and descriptions, a point is made about the socio-economic conditions of labourers in the Middle East. Or Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (Canongate, 2013), which weaves in climate change and a critique of capitalism without using any of the big words in this sentence.
Or books such as Mohammad Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Random House, 2011), Shehan Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Penguin, 2022), or [the English translation from the German by Rekha Kamath Rajan of] Christopher Kloeble’s Museum of the World (HarperCollins, 2022). All three deal with the political situations in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and India, respectively, without falling into didacticism. Humour is an important vehicle here.
In short, all good books use the narrative as a Trojan Horse to make the reader think about the larger predicaments of our society. That is the novelist’s role: to make her readers think. And that’s what I hoped to achieve with my novel, too.
Activism, however, is different. The purpose of activism is to spread awareness and the goal is to win a battle pertaining to a certain cause. So, in activism, you have to be direct and morally explicit. There is no room for ambiguity. Novels thrive on ambiguity, on the things that are left unsaid or left to the imagination of the reader. So, the answer is no, writers should not be activists, though both fulfil important roles in society.
Can you tell us what are you working on next, please?
I’m working on a new novel and a short story. I would also like to put all that badminton research into a non-fiction book, as it is such a rich but unknown aspect of Indian history. I would even argue that badminton, not cricket, is India’s true national sport, as it includes both men and women equally!
This interview was conducted when the writer was on a sponsored trip to Jaipur by the Deccan Herald to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival 2023.
Unless stated otherwise, all images belong to Saurabh Sharma.