Interviews

In conversation with Namrata Poddar, author of ‘Border Less’

What connects the novel’s web of border-crossing characters is their quest for belonging and a negotiation of power struggles, mediated by race, class, gender, nationality, age, or place.

With its fragmented form, staccato rhythm, repetition, and play with English language, Namrata Poddar’s Border Less questions and challenges the assumptions of the mainstream “Western novel.”

Namrata Poddar talks to HarperBroadcast about her superb, experimental novel. Read the conversation below and also an excerpt from the book:

 

Q. Border Lesshas been celebrated for its ability to perform linguistic gymnastics. The form of the book in turn ably suits the tenor and theme it attempts to engender—the immigrant person and their pastiche-like identity, for one. What would you have to say about this connection, and how did you achieve this experimental form and style?

NP: I understand pastiche to be an aesthetic that draws from the work of various artists and their style, a collage of sorts. And surely, migrants, but those colonized by European powers, are pastiche-like in their identity, in their use of language too. As a Marwari who was born in Kolkata and raised in Mumbai, and whose family migrated generations ago from their Rajasthani roots to Indian cities, I was already growing up in urban India with a pastiche-like identity. My grandparents spoke to me a combination of Marwari and Hindi; my parents spoke to me in Hindi and in English more often than in Marwari; my sister, cousins and I spoke a very-Bombay variety of Hinglish, and all of my education in India was in colonial English. I lived surrounded by neighbors in Bombay who went back and forth between their own native tongues and a Bombaiyaan Hindi and English, cadences of which are part of my identity.  Since I have now lived for half my life in the United States, I speak a hybrid English that is seen as a blend of urban Indo-British and American English. I’ve also lived in France, and Mauritius, whose multiracial population in its majority has South Asian origins.

The constant displacement between cultures, countries and languages, and consequently, a pastiche-like identity is an important part of who I am, of my personal and communal history, rooted in the migrant, Marwari community of Rajasthan. As a novelist, I didn’t decide consciously to create a pastiche-like form and use of language within Border Less; this aesthetic punctuates my fiction because it reflects the author writing it.

 

Q. You have lived in various countries over these years. How has your ‘cosmopolitan’ literary and social background featured in Border Less?

NP: As I share above, while I was born and raised in urban India, I have roots in India’s Thar Desert, and have lived in different parts of the United States, France and Mauritius too. Moreover, I have pursued my graduate and post-graduate in the United States, in Francophone and transnational literature as well as creative writing, heavily influenced by contemporary American literature. All this personal and educational history certainly percolate into Border Less, often unconsciously, because my history of navigating various languages, cultures and countries is part of that authorial self doing the writing.

When I was writing Border Less, I did not have a premeditated plan of what the book would look like. Over the 17 years that it took to write the novel, what I tried to do most is to follow the characters that came to me and transcribe their different voices on the page. Looking back at this process, I’m not surprised these characters had South Asian origins but were also border-crossers like me, in one way or another. Consider for instance,  the migrant workers talking at Bar Fancy in Mumbai slums in “9/12,” the Nepali maid locked in her rich employer’s flat in Mumbai in “Excursion,” the fourth generation Indo-African character, Noor, talking to second generation Indian Americans at a restaurant in Los Angeles in “Firang,” or the book’s main character and virtual migrant, Dia Mittal, a Marwari call center agent in Mumbai serving an American clientele, and who eventually migrates to the United States, all of whom speak an English that is mediated by their specific history of migration.

As for literary influences, Border Less belongs to several storytelling traditions. Given my personal and communal history, Border Less draws inspiration from Sanskrit literature, especially mythological stories from The Puranas, oral storytelling of Asia via The Thousand and One Nights, The Panchatantra, and The Jataka Tales, and as much, from the performative, architectural and visual storytelling traditions of Rajasthan, including dance, miniature paintings and Marwari havelis of the Thar Desert. Parts of the novel are equally influenced by the telling of a story through scenes, or cinematic storytelling that’s omnipresent in both my homes, Mumbai and Greater Los Angeles, homes to Bollywood and Hollywood. As a writer, I’m also deeply influenced by writing that tries to imagine what it means to tell one’s story from outside a colonial or hegemonic imagination. Given how Europe colonized about 90 percent of the planet by the early 20th century, this means literature produced by the global majority, although I’m most drawn here to contemporary Anglophone writing from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and stories by Black, Indigenous, and other writers of color in North America.

 

Q. One of the most interesting critiques in Border Less is about the American Dream. What are your thoughts on the socioeconomic promise and pretense/illusion of the American Dream, and how did you integrate it in the book?

NP: As I see it, the dynamics of P/power and social hierarchies work similarly in most societies, even if they do take different forms.  What is true of white supremacy or racial hegemony in the United States is often mirrored in India’s caste-based hegemony or Hindu supremacy, latter more so with the growing threat of Hindutva and Islamophobia. And yet, I say this with the vigilance of not equating histories of oppression in either of my home countries in an easy way.

The promise of the American Dream is the promise of a land hospitable to immigrants and the myth of meritocracy promising success to anyone who will just work hard enough. That said, whether it’s a white community of settler colonialists in the United States, or say, the upper caste community in India who have held historic access to resources a lot more than the “minorities” in either countries, it goes without saying that the one likely to “succeed” faster is not the one working harder but the one who is already predisposed to material success due to easier access to resources.

Border Less, with its different migrant characters in the United States and in India surely grapples with these questions. But when it comes to the American Dream, my novel grapples with these questions of who already holds access to power and who has a harder time accessing power through everyday situations too—whether it is a motel owner, an immigrant from rural India in California, trying to make it through hard work, or an Indo-African amid a group of Indian Americans who reenact the racism and xenophobia of their white colonizer toward the new immigrant or “FOB” in the room.

 

Q. There’s a delightful network of plots (and sub-plots) and characters within the book—which is also expressed in the title of the two parts: “Roots” and “Routes”. While writing the book, how did you tap into the interplay between these characters and their sociocultural anxieties to capture the pulse of a wider community of immigrants?

NP: As I’ve shared earlier, I did not have a pre-meditated plan around the book’s structure when writing my novel. Over the 17 years it took to write the novel, what I tried to do most is to follow the characters that came to me and transcribe their different voices on the page. In the intermediate stage of the writing process, I wasn’t surprised to discover that almost all my characters, in Mumbai or in Greater Los Angeles, two spaces that unconsciously dominated the novel, were migrants. Once done with their stories on the page, I did put on more consciously the critic’s hat, strengthened the details that were overlapping already among the different stories to create a higher sense of continuity and intertextual play. For instance, I’m thinking here of the ghoomar or circular dance movements that return with different characters within the book, or the recurrence of the silk stole or dialogue lines certain characters repeat, and so forth.

I also decided to place all the Mumbai stories in the book’s first section, and the Californian stories in the second one. And because place and displacement are an obsession in much of my work of 20 years—research, writing and teaching—labelling the book’s subsections as Roots and Routes made sense. That said, I don’t see Roots and Routes as mutually exclusive concepts within the book or in life at large. Dia Mittal, the novel’s protagonist for instance, is born and raised in Mumbai and hence “rooted” in the city, but her roots are theoretically in Rajasthan where she’s never lived. Dia then travels across the world and creates her home eventually in greater Los Angeles, although in the region’s coastal and desert landscape, she’s very connected with her Mumbai and Thar Desert roots.

 

Q. As we head into a more border less, digital world, where the contiguities of everyday life seem more apparent, do you think the title of the book might be a hopeful beacon? Why did you choose this title?

NP: I hope so, because I do believe the digital world has collapsed borders in our world like nothing else has. That said, we are also currently living in a world where right-wing governments across the world are upholding nationalism, borders and passport identities in unprecedented ways.

“Border Less” as a title came to me one day, and it made sense, given my obsession with migration as a defining, lived experience and through line in all of my writing and teaching. That said, it was very important for me to use the title as a verb, not as an adjective: a plea to those in power to border less, both nation states and literary forms.

 

Q. What are you working on next?

NP: I’m working on a book of creative nonfiction on motherhood, gender roles and social conditioning, concerns that prefigure in Border Less.

 

Read an excerpt from the book below:

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