Interview: Preti Taneja

Preti Taneja’s debut novel, We That Are Young has had readers, critics and prize juries in raptures. Ahead of her appearance at Spike Island she spoke to Joe Melia about the novel, the influence of King Lear, and human rights and inequality.

Did you set out to write We That Are Young as a reworking of King Lear, or did that emerge as you began the writing?

The idea had been in my mind for many years: the play always felt like a puzzle I wanted to work on. I grew up hearing about the Partition of India in 1947 from my parents and family – but never learned about it at school. When I did King Lear for A Level my brilliant English teacher opened up the world of the poetry for me, and suddenly I saw this division of a Kingdom into three parts, which King Lear begins with, as a parallel to colonial history. The women’s roles, and the way the poor are talked about also fascinated me – and made me feel as if Shakespeare had seen women’s lives in Indian culture, with a traditional emphasis on duty and obedience.

How relevant do you think Shakespeare’s works are in the 21st century?

We are living through an age of misogynist tyrants in power. Union: disunion. Corruption, fake news and dependence on rhetoric. Through their language and structure, their poetics and the politics of their dissemination – Shakespeare’s works were part of the British East India Company’s linguistic and cultural colonisation of India – have at the very least something to tell us about how our world has been formed as well, as about war, prejudice, gender and human nature. I work with people making the plays in their own languages and in different forms, in prisons, refugee camps, in war zones, in places where the impact of war is still being reckoned with. Each one has something different to say about the world through mixing Shakespeare and their own artistic traditions. So, I think very relevant.

The novel has been shortlisted for a number of prizes and won the Desmond Elliott prize. What did you think when these accolades and the great reviews started arriving? 

Relief and gratitude. Winning the Desmond Elliot Prize was a huge for me and for my publishers, Galley Beggar Press who are a tiny independent press based in Norwich. They published We That Are Young after years of me trying to find it a home. Who gets published, and accolades and reviews are, in the end highly subjective – they depend on committees, judges, editors and individuals who have biases of their own – and operate in an economic system which readers aren’t always aware of but which can be punishing on small presses and ‘outsiders’. British Asian and black women are particularly under-represented in publishing and that’s not because we aren’t writing compelling work, or running brilliant magazines, or publishing ourselves – there is a dynamic subculture – but mainstream recognition changes the picture, and helps the person it falls on kick the door down harder.

Preti Taneja will be discussing her award-winning debut novel at Spike Island on November 15

Is ‘The Company’ based on any organisation in particular?

It’s based on the name and methods of the original trade company turned Empire-builder/ coloniser: the British East India Company, plus very powerful contemporary Indian business families who have built multinational companies, for example, Tata Steel and Reliance whose billionaire owner has a 27-storey house for his family of four in Mumbai. Apparently the first six floors are for his car collection. Some of those companies started in the last decades of Empire or the early decades of post Independence India and now rule behind the scenes. Then there are companies like Facebook and Google for example – whose reach over billions of lives puts the Company in We That Are Young to shame.

You have worked in human rights, with refugees, with the disadvantaged; do you see your writing as part of that work in any way?

Yes, absolutely. It’s made me want to write about the system that causes and supports structural violence. So We That Are Young examines power and wealth and its effects from the top down. I don’t think contemporary literary fiction does that enough, unless it’s via satire. Shakespeare does it in King Lear, though. It’s not a play about the dramatic demise of a poor demented old man whose daughters were born evil. It’s not a gritty family drama where mean girls fight each other for inheritance because they are greedy. It’s a social tragedy. It reveals the true impact of a narcissistic, violent, avaricious and unaccountable patriarchy, and it ends with all the women dead. One of the strangest most slippery characters in Shakespeare inherits the Kingdom, and is very ambivalent about what he is going to do next.

Gender inequality, and the gap between rich and poor are very prominent in the novel. What role do you think writers can play in tackling these major problems?

The world I move in is fractured with despair and held together with hope. Haunted by those who have been robbed, are being robbed emotionally and financially. I’m writing this while in America where Kavanaugh has just been confirmed. In the UK, someone, somewhere thinks a Festival of Brexit Britain is a good idea when people are trying to survive desperate austerity. My writing tries to expose and explore the way patriarchal capitalism divides and rules people: in We That Are Young, particularly women and minorities. To shine light on the spaces between what we know but don’t want to admit about the world is, I think, the writer’s role. What happens after that is in the reader’s hands.

Preti Taneja will be discussing her award-winning debut novel, We That Are Young, at Spike Island on November 15. For more information, visit www.spikeisland.org.uk/events/talks/novel-writers-preti-taneja/

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