Vikram Seth is surprised to hear that his bestseller, A Suitable Boy, is now part of the canon of postcolonial fiction taught in English graduate courses in the West. Especially as he rejects the idea of a 'canon' or a 'school' of South Asian writing.
I recently caught up with Seth during his North American tour for the release of his latest novel, An Equal Music. The 47-year-old economistturned-novelist prefers to keep his interviews brief. With a packed schedule on his month-long tour, he is clearly trying: to pace himself. "I don't read much South Asian fiction," explains Seth (he is known to enjoy detective novels and John Grisham). "In fact, I deliberately avoided reading it while I was writing A Suitable Boy. I didn't want to be too conscious of what other writers had written. I didn't want my characters to become influenced by the characters of other writers."
When pressed, however, he confesses that his favourite Indian writer is R.K. Narayan. But Seth maintains that his work and that of his contemporaries have little in common other than geographic context. "The works of South Asian writers are very different and they stand on their own. There is not much consistency even within my own writing. And I set my books in different geographies deliberately. But I set them in places where I have lived: India, China, London, San Francisco. These are places where I've had the chance to feel at home, and this allows me to write from the inside," he says.
What made an economics PhD student who comes from the Delhi elite suddenly become a writer? "I was at Stanford, analysing my data on economics from rural China. And one day while browsing in a bookstore in San Francisco, I came across a couple of translations of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin — a novel in verse form. I was fascinated by how different and beautiful the two translations were. This inspired me to write my first novel, The Golden Gate, which uses the exact same stanzaic form, iambic tetrameter, as Eugene Onegin."