WRITING IN PAST CONTINUOUS

By his own admission, British writer Sunjeev Sahota’s novels “tend to come down to a few brown people living in north England or India”. But within this framework, Sahota wove richly detailed lives and unique voices in his first two novels: Ours are the Streets (2011) and The Year of the Runaways (2015), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

- Sonal Shah

CHINA ROOM

by Sunjeev Sahota

HAMISH HAMILTON

China Room, his third, also weaves together past and present, moving between the late ’20s and ’90s. Geography and ancestry bind the stories of a young British man spending his summer in the family village in Punjab, and his great-grandmother, one of three women married to three brothers in a country that is, as a character says, “waiting for us to raise her on to our shoulders and up to the light”. Sahota spoke with India today about the novel and more over Zoom.

Q. Did you approach the historical setting of China Room differently from the more contemporary worlds of your previous books?

It wasn’t that different. I see all my characters, regardless of gender or time period, as capable of feeling any and all emotions. Obviously, some of the women in the historical strand of China Room aren’t able to voice or act upon their feelings the way male characters might. But they can certainly feel as calculating, as wronged, as aroused, ambitious.

It’s a cliché to say that India exists in many different centuries, but in some rural places, attitudes and practices haven’t changed much in the past hundred years. Because I know rural Punjab quite well and go there often, it wasn’t difficult to draw upon that, or to ask my grandmother in India what the practicalities of life were like.