Women’s desire is complex, you cannot categorise it: Rupleena Bose

The writer talks about exploring class, women’s desire, and freedom in her debut novel, Summer of Then.

The writer says she wrote Summer of Then by drawing upon her experiences and the texts she read or taught. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Rupleena Bose, who teaches English literature at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, made her debut as a novelist earlier this year with Summer of Then, which is a nod to Ottessa Moshfegh, Deborah Levy, and Rachel Cusk. Written like a fictional memoir, the novel explores the decade from 2010 to 2020, as experienced by a young, unnamed woman writer. It explores the difficulties of becoming an author and an academic in India while examining the sexual and identity politics of the time.

In this interview with Frontline, Bose talked about the ideas that went into the making of the bildungsroman. Edited excerpts:

Tell us about the genesis of Summer of Then.

I started writing the novel in May 2020. Until then, I had been working on a different manuscript, which just didn’t feel right when the pandemic hit us with its full force in April. Something about the world had shifted. I felt this urge to explore intimacy, which was no longer possible. I also wanted to explore the first-person narrative as used by the likes of Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk—writers whom I like. In their fiction, there are these women going to different countries and talking in the first person about their experiences of being in those countries. Some of them are professors.

I thought, why don’t we have a novel of this kind set in India because it would be interesting to have an urban, modern woman talking about her life and the world around her. Because it was summer, this idea of the various summers of the various decades gone by, came to me and I used that in the title. It was necessary to use the first-person voice to give the novel a sense of intimacy and quietness, because the world around me was quiet at that time.

The life of the woman narrator is complex both at the personal and professional levels. While trying to come to terms with unrequited love and betrayal, she also toils to become a tenured professor and a writer. Why did you put her in this position?

I wanted to look at women’s desire because of its complex nature. You cannot categorise it. And we don’t talk about it enough. I wanted to analyse the idea of someone having to play various roles in life while wanting simultaneously to break out of those roles. She [the protagonist] is a young woman who does not comply—this makes her an interesting character for me. Her flaws make her what she is.

Literature graduates always look at the world through class. We are divided and united by class. Being privileged and not privileged, the protagonist cannot help but notice this in urban centres. Class defines her reality. As a young teacher and an aspiring writer, she is from a particular class, but she doesn’t come from a very elite space. Wanting to be an artist is to desire something more than what your destiny is. The narrator is a regular person who wants to be an artist but she can’t leave her job. She is this contemporary young woman going to pubs, having a nice time, but also suffering from a lack, stemming from where she comes from. That is the dichotomy I wanted to bring out in her character.

The book reminds one of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which you mention in the novel. Yet it is women-centric, unlike Portrait. What kind of narrative tradition did you fall back on to create Summer of Then?

I wrote drawing upon my experiences and the texts I read or teach. Portrait was a big inspiration for me. It’s one of my favourite texts: I wanted to write the bildungsroman of a woman artist who is battling a lot of things like conservatism, morality, religion, from a South Asian perspective.

I was also inspired by Elena Ferrante. Hers is a non-elite woman’s narrative of the city of Naples. That helped me understand this character at the subconscious level. There was Rachel Cusk too, whose novel, Outline, is a favourite. Cusk breaks the boundary between fact and fiction. It’s about a professor who goes to a writers’ residency and records her observations as a memoir.

I admire Sheila Heti as well. Then there are Orhan Pamuk, Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jenny Offill, and lastly, Charles Dickens, especially Great Expectations, which helped me understand class and the city.

Summer of Then is the bildungsroman of a woman artist who is battling a lot of things like conservatism, morality, and religion from a South Asian perspective.  | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

You also try to capture the divisiveness of the times with incidents like the honour killing of the narrator’s students, and so on. Were you apprehensive about tackling the issue of communal politics in your debut work?

I don’t remember being apprehensive. It is the job of the writer or the artist to look at the way in which things are getting polarised or the way in which discontentment is engendered. The writer needs to capture how bigoted realities are changing our lives. Intolerance is something that we must talk about.

I think everybody is disturbed. We all want a fair, just system. We all want to be in a place where everybody is equal. I explore the importance of freedom of speech and tolerance in the context of the university, because university is supposed to be a free space. I wanted to frame the university as a backdrop of change and then explore what happens when freedom is taken away. There was a whole lot of students’ protest between 2010 and 2020, not just in Delhi but also all over India. That was something I wanted to write about in some form.

You are a Bengali who has lived most of her life in Delhi and are married to a filmmaker. The protagonist too is a Bengali from Delhi who marries a film director and travels to Edinburgh, just like you did. How much of the novel is autobiographical?

I wouldn’t call the novel autobiographical but you write about things you know. The way a professor of literature looks at the world—that came in, naturally. The observations that a student or teacher of English literature makes about society are unique, particularly in India, because you are reading texts that are progressive and modern but grappling with a different reality at home. When I was a literature student, I would be asked often, “What are you doing? Reading texts? What does it mean? What job will you get?” That experience of being not at home with the world is schizophrenic. What you teach and what you do, what you learn in class and what your family is, what the larger world is—I wanted to capture all that in Summer of Then.

Kanika Sharma is an independent books and culture journalist. Her words are in several national publications.