In Saikat Majumdar’s fifth and latest novel, The Remains of the Body, the three primary characters — Avik, Kaustav, and Sunetra — are intertwined with each, like the notes of a symphony. Avik and Kaustav are childhood friends from Calcutta (Kolkata), who have grown up together, discovering love, lust, relationships; Sunetra is married to Avik when the novel opens. All of them live in North America: Avik and Sunetra are medical researchers in San Diego; Kaustav is a post-doctoral researcher in Sociology, in Toronto. But marriage, love, friendship, and careers in this novel are never watertight categories that they are often imagined to be.
“As a writer, I’m deeply drawn to the shapelessness of human sexuality, particularly when it changes form between family, society, and conjugal partnerships,” claims Majumdar. In his two preceding novels — The Scent of God (2019) and The Middle Finger (2021) — he has introduced queer protagonists. With The Remains of the Body, Majumdar completes an informal trilogy, creating perhaps the most sustained oeuvre of queer narratives in Indian literature in English.
Since June is celebrated as the Pride Month all over the world, commemorating the struggle for recognition of queer rights, I spoke to Majumdar over a series of emails. Our conversations focused on his new novel, published by Penguin, but also on themes of queer and diaspora literatures, love and friendship, politics and society.
Edited excerpts:
In your last three novels, a persistent theme is same-sex love. All three have been published after the Supreme Court’s historic judgement decriminalising consensual same-sex relations in 2018. Are you consciously responding to it, creating an oeuvre or archive of queer stories?
Oh no! I think it would be rather unimaginative of fiction to try to consciously assemble an archive following a law. In fact, the novel that came out soon after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India, The Scent of God, was set nearly 30 years back in the past and captured what was for me an intoxicating atmospheric union of celibacy and eroticism. That it also recalled a certain idea of Hindu monastic purity shows that novels do reveal the spirit of the age, but they do so in hidden and unpredictable ways.
While I make no conscious attempt to archive anything, disruptive desire has indeed become a persistent narrative impulse for me. I think what is usually understood as queer is what really defines us, in the range of our intimate, social, political, and professional relationships. I hope this is what The Remains of the Body is able to show.
The heteronormative ideal is an absurd and claustrophobic construction that only satisfies the needs of the state and the market. Real happiness and fulfilment comes from other places —places that can be called queer without the binarisation of straight and gay.
Does the emergence of queer characters — in your novels, but also generally in Indian culture — in some ways reflect a more openness that was denied to earlier generations?
When I read queer writers of earlier generations, I sense various visible and invisible strategies of subversion, trickery, rage, direct or muted violence. Just to take 20th century writers, there is so much joyful militancy in the poems and essays of Hoshang Merchant, guilt and eroticised violence in the fiction of R Raj Rao, playful historical awareness in the poetry and scholarship of Ruth Vanita, the bold yet guarded intimacy of the poetry of Vikram Seth.
But there have always been queer writers — or rather, writers have always been queer. Queerness is essential to the artistic and intellectual imagination. What we have now is far greater media attention on it, which, I worry, is now becoming both a token and a fetish on screen, particularly in films and OTT shows.
Academic and writer Ruth Vanita writes that Victorian colonialism and the nationalist struggle against it attempted to “rewrite multivocal traditions into a univocal, uniform tradition”. Did this also lead to a silencing of Queer voices in Indian writing in English?
Victorianism and Protestant morality did far more than muzzle queer writing — it wizened the rich, expansive, and polyvalent worldview of sexual life that had always been part of Hinduism. Traces of that un-classifiable richness is still visible in the fluid gender identities of our divinities and mythical figures.
Victorian morality stifled everything and created laws such as Section 377 [of the Indian Penal Code], seeking to clamp down on non-reproductive sexualities. Political authority in post-independence India, from the communists to the religious nationalists, have internalised this Victorian morality. The Hindu Right does not realise that it champions a Protestant-Victorian Hinduism in its narrow vision of Hindutva.
How would you locate your novels within this somewhat uneven tradition?
I never thought of aligning myself with a tradition of queer writing. I’ve been inspired by certain kinds of eroticised imagination, but they came from places that felt natural, and I never thought of them as transgressive in any way.
But yes, now I see the touch of incest in the boy’s obsession with his mother’s life as an actor in The Firebird. The eroticised celibacy of The Scent of God was also real and tangible for me. In that novel, the boys make an actual departure from the heteronormative world. The reception of this novel first made me aware of my location with a tradition of queer writing, perhaps also because this was the new, post-377 India.
When I tried to capture the place of the erotic in pedagogy, particularly artistic pedagogy in The Middle Finger, I was conscious of a long tradition that extended from Plato’s Symposium to the academic #MeToo movement. But the intense and undeniable queerness that lives in the nooks and crannies of supposedly heterosexual lives in The Remains of the Body feels like new terrain again.
In The Remains of the Body, there is a focus on the physicality of homoerotic attraction. In some ways, it reminded me of André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. Especially the scene where Elio masturbates into a peach. There is a sort of celebration of the more distasteful aspects of physical love. In your novel, you do something similar through the use of the metaphor of an animal, especially in the first chapter. Is this inspired by a sort of nature/culture binary?
That’s a lovely observation!
Characters, even when they are fictional, have ancestry in real life. I think this kind of boorishness is often the foundation of certain instances of male bonding. Particularly those that start very young, as here, or those which share living space, such as in hostels. That living like a pig, it’s a guy thing, all that.
Body odour, scatological jokes — there’s also a literary lineage of that going back to Joyce and Rabelais. I tried to place it in other perspectives too — in the eyes of a woman, particularly one’s partner, or even that of the male protagonist whose worldview is gendered in a more uneven and unpredictable way than his more “masculine” friend.
In this novel, queerness is also like a subterranean force. I feel it is your attempt to problematise the very nature of love.
I sometimes imagine Kaustav as a gay man trapped in a straight body — much the way we are occasionally trapped in a birth-assigned gender that doesn’t feel right for us. He is intensely aware of the primitive ways his body has lived close to Avik’s — growing up together, sharing the experiences of puberty and the arrival of sexual desire (though around women). Kaustav wonders why that intense physical awareness does not become eroticised, given the depth of their mutual connection. The defining heterosexual relationship he has in this novel is driven by this weird awareness.
I guess the question this novel asks is whether our actual sexual intimacies can be conduits for desire for people we cannot have in reality.
Friendship, especially between men, is also a persistent thematic concern in your novels. Are you exploring the radical possibilities of friendship in your fiction?
The simplest things of life sometimes become hard to attain, or retain, when people grow older and successful. I was struck by something Ram Guha said in a recent Wire interview with Karan Thapar — that compared to Jawaharlal Nehru, who had many memorable and lasting friendships, Narendra Modi has no friends. Friendship, when it’s a true personal bond beyond the transactional, becomes rare with power and success. That’s probably why I keep going back to the childhood of characters, when deep and primitive friendships are formed that can outlast career and personality differences.
This is the nature of the friendship between Avik and Kaustav — there is something deep and irrational about it, which remains unaffected by their ideological opposition to each other’s worldviews.
I guess the irrational friendship between opposites keeps drawing me as a writer, though in The Scent of God this friendship was also romantic and sexual in nature. Friendship between women of radically unequal classes is the subject of The Middle Finger.
I think friendship is one of the powerful realities of life, and I’m fascinated by how it is affected (or unaffected) by other forces, say those of ideology, politics, and sexual interest.
Another key theme in almost all your novels is Calcutta (Kolkata), the city in which you grew up. Though The Remains of the Body is set mostly in North America, Calcutta travels with your characters. The novel, however, provincializes Calcutta. This is a very interesting choice.
Given the evocative way you’ve evoked cities in your own writing, I was expecting this question. Particularly Calcutta.
I think I chose to set this novel in California and the Canadian provinces because suburban life in North America offered a certain quietness which allowed me to explore the interiority of the characters. But these characters are diasporic Bengalis who grew up in Calcutta, and they carry the rough bustle of that city in their souls in the silence of affluent San Diego neighbourhoods and Quebec cottages.
The paralysis and provincialism of the city they left behind is the subject of humour between them. But it is also the provincial city where they grew up and found each other, so that humour is underlined with deep affection that, however, never quite becomes romantic.
As Indian writers, we are often translating what our characters are saying from the source language to English. How do you negotiate this highly charged area of writing?
Different books require different languages. My first three novels — Silverfish, The Firebird, and The Scent of God — were vernacular in spirit, situated in Calcutta and its surroundings. There the challenge was not only about translating local terms and practices, but values and sensibilities that felt rooted in place — and articulating them in English-language novels.
The Middle Finger and The Remains of the Body are contemporary and cosmopolitan in spirit. The latter lives entirely in North America. English speech and American idiom are more natural parts of this novel, but as you’ve noticed, the memory of Calcutta is a primitive yet humorous part of these diasporic sensibilities.
Translation plays and hides in their relationship, particularly their private conversation, inside jokes and songs.
This is your shortest novel, about 35,000 words. Are your novels increasingly becoming shorter? Is there a conscious aesthetic strategy at play here?
I’ve always been a writer of the shorter form. I’m not that interested in grand and public stories, or multi-generational sagas, though I enjoy and admire writers who do these well. I’m more interested in private stories rooted in place, and the intense play of a few characters.
Such things are deeply political, but the politics is always refracted through private life, whether it is gender or sexuality, religion or education, rather than showing through issues that make newspaper headlines. This novel — some might call it a novella — came out in a kind of a burst, an intense study of three characters held in a strange sexual and relational tension with one another. The bare and swift form of a short novel felt like its natural shape.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat.
