FATHER FIGURE

Brown Baby: A Memoir Of Race, Family And Home is British author Nikesh Shukla’s moving manifesto for raising children in a bipolar world. But, in it, you can also find catharsis and possibilities for a redefined masculinity, and ideas on what it means to be a feminist father, as he tells Nidhi Gupta

- Nidhi Gupta

You’d think “joyful and boundless” is a fairly basic mindset for a father to inculcate in his children. But it’s 2021; the world on most days seems to be convulsing with attacks on reason, at war with itself. British author Nikesh Shukla’s new memoir, Brown Baby, seeks to offset this anxiety right off the bat, with lines from a James Baldwin poem, and an Oscar Brown Jr song: “When out of men’s hearts all the hate is hurled / You’re gonna live in a better world.”

Brown Baby is an unusual and extraordinary memoir from the awardwinning author, screenplay writer and podcaster. In the past decade, since his fiction debut with Coconut Unlimited, Shukla has written copiously and come to be a mainstay of London’s literary circles. Prominently, he has published the groundbreaking anthology on race, The Good Immigrant, with essays by Riz Ahmed, Nish Kumar and many other artists who’ve grown famous since. Aside from being prolific, he’s also an educator, a mentor and a key voice in raising diversity in English literature.

Brown Baby, which deals with issues of race, family, loss and ideas of home, surveys the bipolar world his children have come into; but it is also a reckoning with Shukla’s own life so far. He is as intent on being brutally candid about being a “secret eater” as he is about mapping history for those like him. The result is a deeply political work that may also be his most personal yet.

What was the seed for you to start writing a memoir?