The 6th Eye On India Festival under the leadership of Anuradha Behari collaborated with The Poetry Foundation and the Chicago Public Library to feature a yearly one-of-a- kind literary event “Words on Water”, a conversation with two renowned contemporary Indian writers, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri and A Man Booker Prize-nominee Anuradha Roy.
Seshadri, author of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, “3 Sections” ,and author of the “Wild Kingdom” and “The Long Meadow” ,which won the James Laughlin award, talked candidly about his identity as writer with Srikanth Reddy and associate professor of creative writing Matthew Shenoda of Columbia College.
Seshadri, who hails from a strong British-colonial writing tradition, talked about how the influence of language has carried over into his own sense of identity as a writer and poet. “The way, in which we interface with the world, is done through language and it serves as the bedrock for society, especially for poets and writers since it is the medium from which we interface with the world. I must wonder who am I more like — Yudishtira or William the Conqueror”, said Seshadri.
Seshadri, who has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation, worked as an editor at the New Yorker, and currently directs and teaches the graduate nonfiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, spoke about the ironic influence of mathematics and its influence in a polar opposite discipline like creative writing, which has revealed in the structural succinctness and clarity in his writing.
“Mathematics was something that I really liked and had a talent for at some time but it has withered, all of it has sort of fizzed away, but that idea of mathematical clarity, the structure of proof and logical order and the logic notion of the “well-formed thought formula” really carried over into me in my writing.”
Anuradha Roy, whose first book ‘An Atlas of Impossible longing’, which has been translated in 15 languages and named by World Literature Today as one of the “60 Essential English Works of Modern Indian literature, discussed the creation of her most recent book “Sleeping on Jupiter” which was released last year in India and is now in the U.S.
“The novel “Sleeping on Jupiter” actually started with a short story but I kept thinking about this young girl from my short story, and felt her past was inescapably violent” said Roy. The novel starts with brutal experience of the protagonist Nomi, evolves through the lens and observations of three older women who are on a get-a-way for the first time from their husbands and lives who seem to get in each others way as well as share their own unique and diverse perspectives on sexuality and religion.
Roy, shared several excerpts from the novel with the audience, and when she was asked about the strong feminist overtones in her novel, she replied: “When I’m writing I am not thinking about any theme, but I think obviously when you are writing you what is around you just creeps in; women are so often endangered and oppressed in India. I know this book is this feminist but as much as it is feminist, it’s more about powerlessness and that could be this dog, which is battered after death, and survival on the streets and all of these things come together. Because what is striking about India now is not only the incredible inequalities but also how hardened people have become to them and how it is not even noticed how the powerless are oppressed by the majority,” said Roy.
The novel, which takes place over 5 days in the coastal temple town of Jarmuli in India, seems to have an intentional “un-ending”, according to Roy. “Much to the dismay of many readers, what I had really wanted to do in this novel was to create the atmosphere of a short story; this novel takes place over 5 days and is intentionally fragmented and unstructured with a sense of an unending” Roy said.
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