Devika Rege, author, Quarterlife – “I write to make sense of the world ”
On understanding the fault lines that shape our collective identity and her novel, which won the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters Book of the Year award in early February
Ever since the novel came out, there have been discussions centred on it being “the novel of ideas”. But it is heavily character-driven as well. What was the world-building process of Quarterlife?
When I am asked about my writing process for this novel, I try to answer in terms of some aspect of the work, like my research or what I was attempting with a character. But this question of how a writer creates an entire fictional world… the truth is, I don’t know. I think that terms like “novel of ideas” or “character-driven novel” come later in the form of endorsements or critiques that point to where the novel’s emphasis lands for a reader. Just how the multiple organs of a text come alive and mature over the years is very hard to describe. I have memories of instances when a significant plane in the work suddenly opened up for me, but these were so rare and almost transcendent that they feel private. For the rest, a fictional world accrues in such innumerable increments that to suggest an overarching method feels insincere.
Naming chapters after the characters they focus on has been a literary convention since the modernists. These days you see it in novels across the Anglophone world, so I was wondering why you went with the norm, or in the case of the second section, a slight modification of it. Sometimes writers let the titles be subverted and do not make it obvious to the readers. Your thoughts on this observation?
You’re right about this title scheme becoming very popular, especially in the Global South, where the individualistic flaneur may feel out of context with our polyphonic social reality. In Quarterlife, I embraced this trope because it speaks to so much that even novels that don’t use it are preoccupied with today. I thought it might be interesting to explore its potential and blind spots through how the structure builds up and breaks down. Whether this is too obvious or obscure for the reader is of little interest to me. I write to make sense of the world to the extent of my imagination and resources. If a reader finds value in it, they will keep turning the pages, and if they don’t, they will pick up another book that resonates with where they are in their journey. That is as it should be.
Through the journeys that the cast of characters in your book undertake, were you in a way trying to investigate what helps shape the identity of a nation, how overculture — to borrow from Brandon Taylor — defeats culture in transforming a secular state into a majoritarian one?
Rather than what shapes the identity of a nation, I was curious about the ways in which such imagined communities shape our sense of self. Like with Omkar, when his pride as a Marathi son of the soil runs up against his commitment to a brand of Hindu nationalism whose heartland is in the north. I wanted to understand how he is different from Vikram or Naren, and at what points in his life or thinking he might have broken away from the Hindu Right. Among other things, the role that his caste as a Kunbi plays in this trajectory felt critical. I mean, no one gets the value of these nuances better than our politicians. To see Hindu nationalism as a monolith or as historically inevitable rather than engineered is to give its agenda power.
As writers keep a few books by their side while working on a book, I was wondering what you read. In particular, I was wondering if you’ve read Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and State? And were the jargon-filled, masculine discussions on development, economics, and growth inspired by any of the “Ground Reality Uncles” — as Shrayana Bhattacharya calls them — you met or read? By the way, the Winners Circle was fun. I won’t be able to look at those sales people the same way ever again.
I worked on Quarterlife for too long and read too omnivorously to claim any salient influences. I also apologise that I have to catch up on what Ground Reality Uncles implies, but your mention of Winners Circle tells me that you’re referring to Naren. More than social theory, works like Bernard William’s Morality and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil were significant for his character and arguments. And yes, at times I’d read a book simply because a number of people I met in Naren’s position kept quoting it to me, like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. I also had fun with some B-school texts like The McKinsey Way, a slim guide that zealously instructs consultants on the right attitudes for corporate success.
The cities where the book stays for the most part are Pune and Mumbai. Would you like to share what compelled you to stage the drama in these cities?
Familiarity, since I grew up here, but Maharashtra is also a fascinating case study. It is a wealthy state in which economic power often undermines political and religious power. It has a long history of anti-caste and women’s rights movements. It is far away from the Hindi heartland and has a strong regional identity rooted in Marathi nativism. So why is Maharashtra and not Uttar Pradesh the ideological home of the Hindu Right? And after decades of voting progressively, how did the state turn saffron? In a sense, the ideological project is simultaneously more naked and more subtle in cities like Mumbai and Pune than in Delhi or Varanasi. I know that such observations might seem parochial in a fictional context since novels attempt to distil rather than to report. But given the theme of democracy, certain kinds of particulars, to use a Joycean phrase, gained crucial significance in seeking the universal. To flatten the historical or demographic complexity of a place would have meant failing to recognise, for instance, the stealthy ways in which majoritarian nationalisms take hold.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.