Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai's interview in Tehelka.

For me, being Indian means being in touch with India on a day to day basis in New York — go to Indian art exhibitions, hear Asha Bhosle sing, eat in Jackson Heights, go to the houses of friends. It means the open door, the whole ease and generosity that goes with being Indian. It’s the emphasis on community and friendship, which you don’t see in the States. Everything there is so stilted. The western world is a deeply formal and lonely place. That’s the great tragedy of America. That’s what their literature is about. If you live like that, you are condemned to write that kind of literature also. (laughing) Everything is framed in deeply psychological terms, in this language of therapy. You are focussed on one individual finding meaning for themselves. But that’s not the location of our literature and our writing. We are often writing of what it means to be up against community and society. The problem is too much of the writing in the US is now coming out of writing programmes. You are taught to concentrate on small moments of yourself, blow your interior dialogue up to a huge degree (giggling). All this is quashed out if you are an Indian. You don’t loom so large; you are part of a community of many people. Even our language is different. In America, coming out of this process of group approval, everything is becoming too sanitised. All weirdness and eccentricity is ironed out. The whole New Yorker school of short story writing. Tragic. American writing used to be much more fun. But the weirdness that produced the Confederacy of Dunces or Truman Capote’s early books has been completely eroded.