The House of Blue Mangoes
A Novel
by David Davidar
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 432
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060936789
Publisher: Perennial Press
David Davidar began his career in Journalism and now works in publishing. He is married and lives in New Delhli.
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Q: You have said that your book grew out of an image from your childhood of a young boy jumping over an enormous well. Why does this image carry such importance for you?
DD: There were actually two images that initiated the novel - the boy jumping over the well (which grew into one of the first chapters of the novel written a dozen years ago) and the fact that my grandfather started a family settlement some decades ago. The first image was among the clearest memories of my childhood when my father took me to an anonymous village in the Indian hinterland to show me a well that a local braveheart had jumped. As a lot of this novel has to do with remembering and the excavation of time past, it was a useful point to begin with. About my grandfather's founding a settlement, it seemed a splendid and adventurous thing to do. Although the book is not autobiographical, a fictional settlement and its founder do play a major part in it.
Q: To what extent did you draw from your own experiences? Can you describe your life in India, as a child and as an adult?
DD: I had to do a whole lot of research as I've been a city boy for half my life and most of the book takes place a hundred years ago. The only personal experience I drew upon was a sense of the landscape of the deep South of India where I was born and the tea country where I grew up. I was born in a small town near the southern tip of India and spent a major part of my childhood in the high tea country of Kerala state. I was educated in Madras then moved to Bombay to become a journalist at 20. In my mid-twenties I went to the U.S. to enroll in the Radcliffe/Harvard Publishing Course where I was offered a job by Peter Mayer, the then head of Penguin to help start up Penguin India.
Q: Why did you choose the first half of the twentieth century to frame your novel?
DD: I chose the first half of the twentieth century to frame the novel because it is perhaps the most tumultuous in modern Indian history--two world wars, the end of the Raj, caste conflict, the Indian independence struggle, the largest mass movement in history, and so on.
Q: Are there still remnants of the Raj in today's India? What about the caste system? Is there still prejudice?
DD: The Raj has almost disappeared in India--except for a few quaint pockets here and there, and even those are vanishing quite rapidly. The caste system however continues to exist and is one of the most pernicious influences modern day India has to contend with. The majority of India is still held fast in its toils though white-collar professionals in urban India have begun to turn their backs on it. Yes, there is still prejudice against darker-skinned Indians, especially women, not so much in daily life but when it comes to marriage, jobs in TV and the movies and so on.
Q: The Christian and Hindu religions are so intertwined in your book. Was this characteristic of the colonial period? Did Christianity fade after independence?
DD: The way I see it, Christianity and Indian tradition (which is not the same thing as Hindu tradition given that India is the confluence of several major religions) are absolutely intertwined, depending on which region in the country one is surveying. This is because Christianity came to the country very early, about the 4th century AD (the British missionaries came over much later) and over time gradually donned Indian garb. This makes Indian Christianity very distinctive. Christianity continues to thrive and there are about 20 million Christians in India today.
Q: A disturbing element of your novel concerns the treatment of women in India. Has any progress has been made?
DD: Women have come a long way in India. We've had a women prime minister, powerful women in the media and corporate India but the truth is they are still discriminated against and abused in many parts of the country. The only way in which progress will be made is if education and prosperity make inroads into every section of Indian society but this will take time.
Q: Why do you think novels about India have been so popular in the last decade? Which authors or novels do you admire most?
DD: I'd need to write an entire article to analyze why Indian literature in English has exploded on to the world scene in recent times. But if I were to pick a couple of reasons, this is what I would say accounts for it. The first is that English has been around in India for a couple of hundred years now, and so can be considered an Indian language--that is to say it is used as a first language by several million Indians who have molded it to tell stories that are uniquely Indian. Second, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children dazzled the world over 20 years ago and whetted the appetite for great Indian stories that were fresh, exciting and compelling. I like most of the Indian novelists in English, especially as I publish most of them, so it would be difficult to single out any--but there are a few outstanding achievements in each genre--Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and Allan Sealy's The Trotternama (epic family sagas), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (brilliant in its use of language), Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel (satire), Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace and Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain (historical epics), Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance (an excellent example of a contemporary Indian novel) and Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August (a hilarious coming of age novel).
Excerpted from The House of Blue Mangoes © Copyright 2008 by David Davidar. Reprinted with permission by Perennial Press. All rights reserved.
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