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The Power of Storytelling: An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Article  in  Contemporary Women s Writing · July 2012

DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpr023

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The Power of Storytelling: An Interview with
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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M E T K A Z U P A N Č I Č

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, born in India in 1956, is a prominent writer and poet who
currently lives in Houston, Texas, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program
at the University of Houston. Divakaruni’s writing is fueled by her own experiences as
a first-generation immigrant and a woman between cultures and traditions. Her
concern for women of her own heritage is transmitted not only through her award-
winning short stories and novels but also her involvement with organizations that aim

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to help South Asian or South Asian American women in distress and in situations of
domestic abuse, in the San Francisco Bay area and Houston. Children’s education in
India is another important interest of hers.
As a writer and a scholar, Divakaruni has been invited to judge notable
competitions such as the National Book Award and the PEN Faulkner Award. She is
a regular guest of literary festivals and conferences, mostly in the United States and in
her home country. In her essays, she has explained the stimuli behind her novels,
some of which are related to her own life-changing experiences in North America,
while others are more closely linked to her memories of India and the tradition of
myths and folk tales passed on from generation to generation. As an engaging lecturer,
she has often analyzed her own writing in the context of contemporary literature.
Students at a number of universities both in the United States and abroad continue to
examine her works within the framework of American Literature, South Asian
studies, postcolonial theories, women’s studies, and other interdisciplinary

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approaches.
Divakaruni arrived in the United States in 1976 to pursue her advanced studies in
English. She earned her master’s degree from Wright State University in Dayton,
Ohio, and a PhD with a dissertation on Christopher Marlowe, in 1985, from the
University of California, Berkeley. Her literary pursuits progressively took over her
scholarly activities. Poems from her 1997 collection, Leaving Yuba City, won
a Pushcart Prize, an Allen Ginsberg Prize, and a Gerbode Foundation award. In
April 2011, recognition of her work came from Remit2India, a corporation that
recognizes the achievements of nonresident Indian artists, scholars, and public
personalities. Divakaruni was the jury’s choice in the ‘‘journalism and literature’’
category of ‘‘Light of India Awards 2011.’’ That Divakaruni’s achievements were
recognized alongside those of Salman Rushdie and Mira Nair seems to cement her
status as an important figure in Indian culture.
Divakaruni’s short stories and poems have been featured in magazines such as the
Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, included in over fifty anthologies, and translated
into twenty languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, and Japanese. Two of her novels
have been adapted to cinema. Filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges created
their rendition of The Mistress of Spices in English (2007). Suhasini Mani Ratnam
adapted Sister of My Heart as a television serial in Tamil (2001), for Sun TV in South
India, under the title Anbulla Snegithiye (Mahesh 2001).
In the realm of criticism, Divakaruni’s work has drawn significant commentary in
anthologies where it has been featured. In general, she is linked to other contemporary
writers of Asian heritage, especially women, and subsequently to those who left India
and chose to write in English. In this regard, an increasing number of critics and
scholars position her writing within the framework of transnational criticism. Rajini
Srikanth, for instance, is interested in defining the novelty and specificity of
contemporary women writers of Indian descent. Nalini Iyer insists on ‘‘new narrative
modes for diasporic subjects’’ (15). Ketu H. Katrak contends that ‘‘categories of race,
ethnicity and nation, along with gender, class, religion and language’’ (5) are at stake

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when ‘‘diasporic identities and communities’’ are being created. In consideration of
Divakaruni’s short stories, Sau-ling C. Wong’s study examines the impossibility of total
‘‘Americanization,’’ in opposition to the strong desire of protagonists to free
themselves from the patriarchal and stifling Asian background. Regarding the fate of
immigrant women, Susan Mollar Okin has been interested in the conjunction between
feminism, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and postcolonialism.
The combination of social concerns, hybridity, multiculturalism, immigration, racial
intolerance, and ‘‘mystical realism,’’ as examined by Gita Rajan in her study of
Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, has defined the way in which some of Divakaruni’s
novels have been perceived and also criticized for appealing to Western desires for
exoticism (Rajan 227; Shankar 36). For her part, as she explains in her essay
‘‘Dissolving Boundaries,’’ Divakaruni perceives The Mistress of Spices as a new phase in
her writing. In the first place, she felt compelled to combine poetry with prose.
Second, in an ‘‘attempt to create a new fable,’’ she wished to bridge the division

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between contemporary American realism and the transformative power of myths
from her heritage (‘‘Dissolving Boundaries’’). A similar synthesis of ethical and
ecological concerns embedded in myth and magic is present in Divakaruni’s trilogy
The Brotherhood of the Conch (2003–09). Set in India, the three novels were primarily
written for children of Indian descent who reside far away from their tradition, such
as Divakaruni’s two sons. They combine ‘‘reality’’ and ‘‘supernatural’’ adventures in
the manner of ancient Hindu myths and legends aimed at teaching valuable ethical
notions to their readers. The Palace of Illusions (2008) is yet another combination of
contemporary concerns with the legacy of the home country. This bold rewrite of the
most sacred Hindu epic, Mahabharata, from a woman’s perspective, is yet another
example of how Divakaruni’s heritage has had a major impact on her aesthetics and
her worldview. Her most recent novel, One Amazing Thing (2009), features
remodeled paradigms of hybridity and cross-pollination strongly embedded in the
spiritual realm. Here again, as it has been observed in her earlier novels, Divakaruni’s
characters rise above divisions between religions and beliefs so as to overcome
separation and differences among people and cultures.
Q: When you first arrived in the United States as a young student, you
intended to complete your education in English studies. Then you started
to write poetry and prose, and their close links to your Bengali and general
Indian heritage came to light, with English as your chosen language of
expression. As a socially concerned intellectual who has lived in different
parts of the United States, mainly in California and Texas, who were your
models, among women writers of a background similar to yours? I am
thinking of the role Bharati Mukherjee or other novelists originally from
Asia may have played in your decision to trade your research in
Renaissance English literature for a more personal, narrative type of
writing. How do you position yourself with regard to those other writers,
linked either directly to Bengal or to India in general, for example Jhumpa
Lahiri?

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 A: My first model and influence, from when I was in graduate school, was Maxine
Hong Kingston. I was much taken by her text The Woman Warrior. The themes of
recreating identity, immigration, family stories, changing roles of women, racial
conflict, and myth all resonated with me. I wanted to apply them to my background
and the stories I had grown up with, as well as the stories I came across, living in
America. I was also influenced by Bharati Mukherjee, especially her exploration of
race and multicultural relationships in books such as The Middleman and Other Stories.
Novels such as Jasmine and Desirable Daughters, which explore the changing identities
of immigrant women, though in the context of a more violent world, intrigued me. All
of these would become important themes in my own work. Jhumpa Lahiri and I share
an interest in the lives of the second generation – the children of Indian ancestry who
are born in America. How do they relate to India? How are they different from their
parents? What happens when they make the reverse journey back to the country of
their origin? This is the focus of several of my stories in The Unknown Errors of Our

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Lives and parts of my novel One Amazing Thing. Perhaps one area in which I am doing
something different from the writers I mention here is in my exploration of magical
realism in novels such as The Mistress of Spices and of fantasy in my children’s trilogy,
The Brotherhood of the Conch.
Q: After your very successful book tour in India in early 2011, how would
you define the similarities and differences between your writing and
general trends in contemporary Indian literature?
A: The Jaipur Literature Festival was huge, with over 60,000 attendees. I felt very
fortunate to meet many Indian women writers of different generations. As might be
expected, there was a great deal of interest in women’s issues, particularly the
changing roles of women, which are also a major interest of mine. Women writers
(and their characters) seemed very interested in capturing the rapid changes in India,
with their pluses and minuses. Thus, Shashi Deshpande’s novel Small Remedies has
a character who writes about the lives of two unconventional women who lived fifty
years ago – one who eloped with a lover from a different caste, and the other who left
her family to join the communist party. She tries to make sense of them – and through
them, of her own contemporary tragedy. Githa Hariharan’s novel Fugitive Histories
traces the lives of Hindu and Muslim women in the wake of communal violence in
Ahmedabad. Spanning generations, it is very interested in how politics or national
events affect the lives of women. I hope to explore this theme more centrally in my
own work. To some extent, my novels such as Queen of Dreams and One Amazing
Thing already examine the effect of 9/11 on the lives of South Asian Americans,
especially those who are of Muslim origin, or ‘‘look’’ Muslim. But I would like to do
more. In nonfiction, Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, about ‘‘marginalized’’ women,
generated a lot of buzz at the festival. It explores the lives of the women who work in
Mumbai’s dance bars – and what happens to dancers when these bars are suddenly
declared immoral and shut down.

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 One aspect that did not seem very prevalent is spiritual writing – the connection
between the human and the divine. This dimension has become more and more
important for me as I continue to write. It is a major theme in my novel The Palace of
Illusions, which is a retelling of the Mahabharata from a woman’s point of view. But it
seems it is not an angle too many Indian writers wish to explore, at least not in fiction.
Q: In your latest published novel, One Amazing Thing, you explore a new
type of writing. Set in the post-9/11 United States, it brings together nine
characters with nine different perspectives and backgrounds. They have
never met before; yet they find a space of community and deep interaction
in a very difficult situation. The storytelling in this book, a trademark of
your writing, takes you back to your heritage, to your grandfather that you
so often mention in various interviews (for example with Rasia, Seaman,
and Swamidos), as one of the main resources for your own development
of storytelling in your writing. In One Amazing Thing, how have these

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stories emerged? How is your grandfather’s storytelling linked to the
values he gave you, in terms of cultural and spiritual upbringing and its
effect on your writing?
A: In One Amazing Thing, as in many of my works, I am trying to bring together
things out of my heritage and actually going back deep into the ancient heritage of
Indian literature, as well as the very global and multicultural society in which we live
here in America and all over the world. The world has always been global, but more
so now, it has also become multicultural. In One Amazing Thing, the nine characters
are all protagonists. In the beginning of the novel they are trapped by a major
earthquake in an Indian visa office in the United States, in the basement of a high-rise
building. There is no way to escape and so they must make the best of their
circumstances. That is when one of the characters, Uma, requests that each of them
tell a story out of their past, something that they have never been able to tell anyone.
As they are waiting in hope of rescue, they will tell these stories. In terms of the
structure of the book, where everyone is equally important, I am going back to
ancient storytelling forms, like the Panchatantra, the wise animal tales, where all of the
animals are telling stories from which everyone in the company can learn.
The characters in the novel all intend a journey to India, for very different reasons.
That is why they are in the consular office getting their visas. Only two of them are of
Indian origin. The others are of many different races, ages, and of truly different
socioeconomic backgrounds. With the use of a very ancient storytelling technique,
stories lead to more stories. One story sets the listeners to musing about how it
applies to their lives, and to ultimately come up with their own story, the choice of
which is influenced by the previous story. Thus, while the characters are in dialogue
with each other, the stories are also in dialogue with one another. We witness this
approach in the Panchatantra, to some extent in The Arabian Nights, and in epics such
as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. I wanted to combine it with what I considered
a very contemporary cast of characters, to see what would happen.

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 Some issues in this book are related to my own experience in 2005, when
Hurricane Rita was coming through. Since Houston had to be evacuated, we were
stuck on the freeway. What happens when you evacuate such a large city all at once is
that nobody gets to go anywhere. We were on Interstate 10 for many hours, and
there was a lot of panic. Out of that panic, bad behavior arose, together with amazing,
compassionate attitudes. In the book One Amazing Thing, I wanted to explore the
spiritual question of what we do in such circumstances, a question for each of the
characters and hopefully for the readers. If I am in a situation of true danger where
the primal urge for survival kicks in, would I be able to rise to a level of compassion?
Or would I say ‘‘Survival at any cost’’? How do we learn to move from one end of the
spectrum to the other?
Q: Each of these main characters is retelling something so amazing that
it can amaze the others and help them survive. The stories of their

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innermost, deepest secrets are the ones that will help them connect with
one another.
A: Indeed. This has been an important theme in my writing right from the
beginning. I have always believed that storytelling itself is very powerful. It transforms
us, the teller as well as the listener. This perhaps comes out of my own personal
background, where my grandfather was a great oral storyteller. In my childhood, I
would go spend my summer holidays with him in a little village, where at that time
there was no electricity and no running water. I thought it was quite a magical place.
Every evening he would light a kerosene lamp, and he would bring all of us cousins
together. He told us stories out of our epics and out of our fairytales and folktales. I
think I have thus developed a great love for the epic stories and the folktale tradition. I
have tried to interweave much of it into my work, often in a modern context.
Q: With literature as a major tool for changes to come, the transformation
in One Amazing Thing stems from the fact that the nine characters face
the biggest trial of all, their own mortality.
A: In this sense, the title One Amazing Thing exists on various levels. One is related
to Uma inviting others to ‘‘tell a story.’’ Some of the people, in their panic and in their
dismay, are afraid they have nothing to tell. Yet Uma persists, ‘‘everyone has a story of
at least one amazing thing that has happened to them.’’ It is my belief that we all have
these stories, but we have never been taught to value them or to even look for them
and recognize them. Actually, I could only become a writer when I began to believe
that I had a story that was worth telling – when I trusted that people would be
interested in listening to it. As the characters start telling their stories, it begins to
change something in them and definitely in the others. The final amazing thing of the
book is that it brings together strangers, who in the beginning are very upset and
panicked, especially at being shut in with people so different from them.
Q: As you position your characters at a horizontal level, with no
hierarchy involved, you bring about a new paradigm of equally important

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fates, races, and cultures that cannot be uprooted by somebody else’s
supremacy.
A: I really wanted that to happen. In the beginning, there is much agitation in the
minds of the characters, because they wonder who is better, who is in charge. But as
the stories go on, they begin to realize that perhaps there can be another paradigm,
where no one needs to take control of the group. We are each good at something,
and we use it to help the community. This is very much a community-based ensemble
novel, similar to tales within tales in ancient Indian culture and also in many other
ancient cultures.
Q: You use a similar approach in your previous novel, The Palace of
Illusions. Your rewriting of the Mahabharata takes us back from today’s
life to a time that seems remote but actually speaks to us of our
contemporary quest for truth and understanding of life. The women in

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your narratives have a particular place and role to play. The central figure
in The Palace of Illusions is Panchaali, named after the country, whereas
in the traditional epic she is called Draupadi, after her father, a change in
perspective in its own right.
A: That is another example of my grandfather’s big influence, because I heard the
story of the Mahabharata and of Panchaali all the time when I was growing up. But
Panchaali was never at the center of the story. As in many epics, the central position
was reserved for men, with wars, weapons, strategy, and court maneuvers.
I remember from quite a young age, even before I could have articulated the idea,
how I was always concerned about the women. What was the story of all these
interesting and complex characters, all these strong women who are never at the
center of the narrative? What were they feeling? What were they thinking?
It appears that writing with the intent to place women at the center of my work has
been another one of my enterprises. Sometimes I feel that is enough work in itself.
There may be critics who feel that my work is not what they would consider radical.
But if we look at the world as it is, placing a woman in the center of your work is
radical enough, giving her the humanity, allowing her to tell her story. It makes her
into a hero because she is interpreting the world for us through her eyes. The story of
Panchaali in The Palace of Illusions begins with her birth and ends with her death. She is
the teller of everything, and everything in the book is what she has seen, heard, and
interpreted, sometimes on a literal level, but sometimes through dream visions, which
is also a part of the mythic tradition.
Q: As during the war at Kurukshetra, where she can only be an indirect
observer of the tragedy she caused by her pride and offended dignity? In
your writing, you do not plead for one gender against the other. Rather,
through Panchaali’s experiences, you show that she needs to understand
how to grow beyond her own pride and her own ego, although she wants
to become a subject and wants to have power in society and in relationship
with her five husbands.

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 A: If we are to put the woman in the center of the work, we have to show her in all
her complexity. She is not the perfect gender, as we all know, but she is worth
celebrating – with her flaws, as long as there is some kind of growth, as long as she is
aware of the ways in which she can become not only a better woman by her own
definition, but a better human being, ultimately a better spiritual being. In some way,
that is Panchaali’s journey in The Palace of Illusions. From a position of little power, she
wishes to move to autonomy, but autonomy brings its own challenges, with negative
aspects that she has to recognize.
Q: The Mahabharata, with the Bhagavad Gita at its center, is
considered to be the epic most closely linked to Hinduism, in all its
syncretism. Lord Krishna stops the battle in order for Arjuna to
understand that beyond life, and even the slaughter of the enemies or
cousins, there are other dimensions, and then he shows himself in his
fullness of being. I guess you could not deal with the Bhagavad Gita in the

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500 pages of The Palace of Illusions in a similar manner, but you place
Krishna as Panchaali’s companion, supporter, and guide from the very
beginning of her existence to her exit from this life. In your approach, we
see the move from a traditional religious view to a much vaster spiritual
perspective. How do you define spirituality in this novel, and maybe also in
your other works?
A: I wanted to explore how the spiritual dimension is equally available to men and
women, a fact that religions do not often accept . On the mystical level of spirituality,
it is always very clear that gender is not an issue. Spirituality transcends gender. At
some point when her husbands are having several spiritual experiences and
encounters with gods, Panchaali wonders, ‘‘Why is it I never meet a god? Is it because
I am a woman?’’
Q: Yes, but she has Krishna at her side all the time, and she does not
know who he really is. At the end, she asks, ‘‘Are you really divine?’’ He
answers, ‘‘You are divine too,’’ which may be the strongest affirmation
women readers can get from your novels. We are all divine and a part of
the big whole.
A: In my writing, I have been inclining more and more toward presenting a spiritual
vision of the world, or a spiritual understanding of the world. Often, it is a very
complex and difficult process because so much of it is subtle. Also, when you try to
hold onto it, it is nebulous or it comes across in wooden terms. In fact, Krishna gives
Panchaali messages from the Bhagavad Gita throughout the text, but he works it into
daily conversation. She is very resistant to it because it is anti-ego oriented. In trying
to become as powerful as the males, she wishes to assert her ego and needs to do so.
She does not want to listen to what Krishna is saying until much later.
Q: How does Panchaali move from the traditional position of women to
another perception of how she is supposed to live and what she might

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achieve during her earthly existence? In other words, what modes of
existence and revisited mythical paradigms does her character suggest?
A: Panchaali may serve as a model of how a woman progresses as a being in the
world and then moves into the spiritual, the subtler realm. At first, she is scorned, or
she is put down as a woman. Even though she is a princess, we know right from the
beginning of Panchaali’s life that the world where she exists is very limited. She cannot
leave the palace. She cannot learn the things that her brother is learning. Our
Panchaali, being very resourceful, will get around those things and will not follow the
social rules by which her role as a princess is very circumscribed.
Q: In following with the original setting in the Mahabharata, Panchaali
was not expected to be born; yet she was thrown into this life. Her coming
out of the fire next to her brother Dhri was a big shock for her father.
A: Regardless of such a start, there was a prophecy that she would change the

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course of history.
Q: How does a woman carry that prophecy on her shoulders when she
does not have any structural power in the society?
A: Panchaali, in the beginning stages of her life, has to find ways around this male
dominated society. She has to trick men into allowing her to do things that are
important. She has to find ways to be powerful over her husbands, or at least to
become part of their decision making process. As a result of her success also comes
pride that she has to deal with. Along with pride, when she is humiliated in open
court, comes the desire for revenge. Interestingly, in the mythic and epic tradition,
pride and the desire for revenge are qualities of the male hero, which Panchaali takes
on willingly. I mean, on some level, she wants to be the cause for the Great War.
In some ways I feel that a woman has to go through that process: until she becomes
equal and powerful, she cannot begin to see the downside of power. As William Blake
says, we have innocence, but once we lose it, we have to go through experience to
emerge on the other side. In some ways, that is Panchaali’s journey.
Q: Panchaali’s path through all these stages is an initiation. Besides the
desire for power, there is another desire, the desire for love.
A: Indeed, the desire for love has also been denied to her. She was clearly told
whom she should marry and why this marriage needed to take place, namely for
political reasons. But, then, what do you do with your inner desires?
Q: It seems to me that craving for the perfect love remains until we
really start dealing with our wishes and desires. Until we understand that
love is not what Panchaali may develop with regard to her five husbands,
not what she feels for Karna, the prohibited one, but what Krishna unveils
to her.
A: Exactly. But she has to go through those stages and recognize the prohibited
love she feels. She has to learn how to deal with it in a way that is acceptable to her

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values and her ethics. Only then can she go beyond, into that other dimension where
love becomes a universal theme.
Q: The notion of impossible love is also present in Sister of My Heart
and The Vine of Desire.
A: Such love, an all-time literary theme, is present in many of my works. Each of my
characters deals with it differently, making choices that are sometimes positive and
sometimes flawed, leading to many problems, not only for themselves but also for
people around them. In The Vine of Desire, Sudha has to make a very complicated
choice, because her dearest cousin, sister of her heart, is married to the man who
loves her and has this great desire for her.
Q: In your novels, yearning is also presented through men, not just
women, as in all those characters in Arranged Marriage, who deal with
their own hopes and desires.

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A: Indeed, starting from Arranged Marriage, this has been a really important topic. It
is related to the frequent theme of immigration in my stories and how it changes us,
particularly women. My characters are mostly Indian women growing up in India in
a very traditional family. In Arranged Marriage, many come from a background similar
to my own. I grew up with very definite notions of womanhood, of who is considered
a good woman and how she is to behave, especially within the family context. Much of
that was based on the notion that a good woman makes sacrifices. As a result of
immigration, when we find ourselves in the West, there is quite a different notion of
what a good woman is and what she is expected to do.
Many characters in Arranged Marriage are dealing with this sudden change in
worldview, at once exhilarating and also terrifying. They have to make sense of the
new situation, which begins to transform them as women. It begins to change their
relationships with the people in their family – their husbands, who are with them in
the new country, and their parents, who usually are back in India. There are children
who are now born in the new environment, still caught between two cultures, yet
with a completely different worldview. This is also a very important theme in my
stories The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, with movements back and forth between the
two worlds.
Q: We find similar situations in The Mistress of Spices, with battered
women who need to find their own way, a new reaction to the imposition
of subservience. They have been moved into a new space, a new time, and
new dimensions of living, where they have to stand up for themselves.
A: The theme of battered women, as you know, is important and comes back in
a number of my books, partly because of the work I have done in the community with
domestic violence. In my writing, domestic violence is explored from many different
angles. In one of the early stories in Arranged Marriage, set completely in India,
a battered woman makes a decision to go back to her abuser. In The Mistress of Spices,
a woman in a similar situation, brought about partly by her immigration, is cut off at

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once from her entire support system of family and other women who might help her,
and she has to make a decision. At the end of much painful thinking and trying out
different things, she decides to leave the relationship.
Q: But she would not leave her husband without the help of Tilo, the
‘‘Mistress of Spices,’’ an eternal archetype of female inner power who also
represents the complexity of human nature incarnated in women.
A: With The Mistress of Spices, I wanted to bring in another facet of what I was
growing up with: the elements of the folktales, the tales of magic, and mythical tales.
They contain important and powerful women figures, usually older wise women, who
have learned the secrets of the natural world and can use those secrets to help
others. In the process, they become very powerful. They become leaders of their
community. Such stories from my culture relate to those from many other traditions,
with wise women in other Eastern contexts or maybe in Eastern Europe, sometimes

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considered as witches.
Q: They are relegated to other spheres, so that they do not have too
much power. Not so in your writing: you act in a very subversive way with
the character of Tilo. On the outside, she looks like an old recluse, yet in
reality, she is a young woman with her own desires and her own hopes.
A: This is how the desire is linked to the theme of forbidden love in The Mistress of
Spices. Similarly, in Arranged Marriage there is a story of a young Indian woman who
falls in love with a white man. This is a new taboo, to love outside of the community
and outside of the religion. In many ways, immigration has made the transgression of
this new taboo more common in our communities.
Q: It is all about cross-pollination, not only racial, but also cultural and
spiritual, and about how we overcome these obstacles. In The Mistress
of Spices, I appreciate the encounter between a woman of Indian
background and a man who is a Native American. We were dealing with
this novel in my 2009 rendition of the Critical Theory seminar, during
which time you came to give your talk at the University of Alabama. At
the deeper level of myths and symbols, it was rather hard for my
students to understand how the two characters can ever meet. Yet the
male character, Raven, thanks to his encounter with Tilo, has the
possibility to become the person designated by the name he has chosen
for himself. He takes on the identity of a mystical symbolic entity that
brings him back to his own origin and in some way also back to India,
because of the role of ravens in Indian mythology.
A: In the novel, we discover him as he begins to discover himself. At first he is just
the ‘‘other.’’ Here I am playing with the notion of ‘‘otherness,’’ which in postcolonial
interpretations is often reversed. In terms of Indian literature, it is the Indian who has
been ‘‘othered’’ by the colonial writer. But especially in terms of immigration, we are
always ‘‘othering’’ ‘‘the other.’’ That is really what literature is talking about: how to

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Divakaruni
reverse that process, how to make ‘‘the other’’ yourself. That is what happens in
literature, with the experience of reading. When you enter the fictional world of
a book, all those others become yourself.
This is also how mythologies intersect between different cultures. We have similar
mythological figures, similar mythological creatures in the natural world, and we really
have much more in common than we sometimes think.
Q: How can we draw upon the wisdom of old ages to understand where
we stand in life? As in One Amazing Thing, with one earthquake, one
catastrophe after another, how can we face the future that is not very
bright?
A: I think One Amazing Thing at least suggests to the reader that we may find
a common space where we can respect each other’s stories as we share them. In
hearing a story or reading a story, or experiencing a story, the other really becomes

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ourselves, or is closer to us. That is happening in this novel, as people are listening to
the stories that are being offered in a spirit of great trust. This is what we do when we
are offering our stories as writers to readers. I mean, as a part of ourselves: something
that comes from very deep within us and often has never been heard by anybody. The
act of speaking that creates vulnerability can also result in a great and powerful
connection. And that is my hope as a writer.
Q: Such empowerment comes from the connection to your heritage and
to literature in general. As a scholar of English literature, you already
discovered ‘‘the other’’ during your graduate studies. As your writing
triggers other people’s emotions, other people’s creativity, it helps them
reconnect with their own source of what makes them better people. It is
the notion you develop both in The Mistress of Spices and The Palace of
Illusions, of us being an instrument in communication with the source that
inspires us.
A: I think I am going back to a very old tradition of literature or art that is supposed
to bring out our better selves. Literature therefore becomes an instrument of
opening up our spirituality. That is why the ancient epics in India continue to be read,
studied, recited, and venerated, in the hope that they will make us into better people.
This is generally not the goal of what is being written in contemporary literature. In
a strange way, by going back to this very ancient ideal of literature and using it in our
writing, we may become very radical.
Q: You are indeed doing something very radical with The Brotherhood
of the Conch, the three books mainly destined for children. As we know,
they were written for your sons to help them find their own inner
guidance. To me, those novels are far more radical than anything I have
read, first of all because they bring together the boy on the quest and the
girl from the lowest castes in the society, almost outcasts. Using the

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framework of esoteric teachings from the Himalayas, you make them into
spiritual heroes who may save the planet.
A: In the three books of the Conch Bearer trilogy, the hero becomes two, male and
female, coming out of our ancient tradition of Lord Shiva, where Shiva is portrayed as
half male and half female. Together he is the being that upholds the world. It is
a powerful symbol and a powerful metaphor that Anand and Nisha, the two heroes,
can only achieve their quest together. Neither of them can be a hero, separately. In
some of my other works, feminine characters had to be given a central position and
their stories had to be told, but at a certain point, the man and the woman have to
come together, to do their task in the world, to achieve the quest, to save the world
as presented in these books.
I am very interested in the outcasts, the marginalized in these stories. I have tried to
bring them to the forefront. In the first book, The Conch Bearer, we meet two street

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children, Anand and Nisha. Anand lives in the slums, Nisha lives on the streets, and
they become the heroes. In the second book, The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, I go
back to the history of Muslim India, where a number of Muslim characters are
deliberately placed at the center. I wrote this second book some years after 9/11,
after watching how Muslims have been treated in many parts of the world and
certainly here in the United States. There is fear and distrust, even toward Muslim
people who have nothing to do with the fundamentalist side of the religion. The third
book, Shadowland, is an environmentally themed novel and portrays a world that has
been thoroughly devastated.
In this third book, certain people are in power while many others do not have any
place in the new society. People in power live in a dome, within an artificial universe
where everything is beautiful. All the other people who live outside the dome are
literally marginalized and ostracized. In many ways, the book is about them and how
we can, perhaps, bring the two back together – those in the dome who have become
heartless, and those outside who hold onto their traditional skills for survival, who
have heart but no power, who are about to be destroyed.
Q: This image of what could become of Kolkata, an important city in
your life, reminds me of your mother. I know that she read One Amazing
Thing before she passed on.
A: She has always been a reader of my books. I was able to give One Amazing Thing
to her in manuscript form, and she was able to read it before she passed away earlier
this year. Thus this volume will always be special to me because it is the last book I
could physically share with my mother. She always wanted to be a writer. She was
a very intelligent and intense human being, but because of her background and the
time in which she lived, she was not able to become a writer herself. I think she
conveyed to me her love of stories and of writing, and the importance of the task. She
has been central to my enterprise of being a writer. She read what I wrote in a very
typical Indian way, a very typical motherly way. She would not necessarily criticize,
but she was not lavish with words of praise. That was the kind of situation and society

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Divakaruni
in which she grew up, where you did not praise women too much because you did
not want it to go to their heads. I would ask, ‘‘OK, mom, what do you think?’’ She
would reply, ‘‘Hmmm,’’ which meant that it was good. For this one she said, ‘‘Not
bad,’’ a high category of praise.
Q: What are you writing next? Are you going to write about your
mother? She probably comes through all the time.
A: Mothers are very hard to write about. I think she comes through many other
characters and even objects or places I write about. My next book is to be titled
Oleander Girl and is a quest novel of some sort, with a young woman who has grown
up in India. She has been brought up by her grandparents. She has been told her
mother died giving birth to her and her father died even before that in a car
accident. As she grows up this way, she is about to be married. She has met
a wonderful young man, and they love each other. The engagement takes place.

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Then her grandfather dies in a sudden heart attack, and her grandmother says, ‘‘I
have to tell you something that I have never told you, because I promised
your grandfather that I would not. But your father is actually alive. He is not
Indian and he lives in the United States.’’ The grandmother continues, ‘‘I
always felt that I needed to tell you this, but now I would advise you to put it
behind you, to forget it and go on with your life.’’ The young woman replies, ‘‘I
cannot do this. I have to go and find my father. It is only by finding him that I will
know who I really am, as he is half of my heritage. In fact, I can find more about my
mother through him because he knows a whole other aspect of my mother who
married him against her family’s wishes.’’ This is why the family did not want to
acknowledge him, and why he was told, in fact, that his child also died in the childbirth
process.
These characters are typical of our global world and are engaged in a journey
between cultures, between belief systems, because this woman’s grandfather
thought it was a problem that this man belonged to a different religion: ‘‘No, you
shall not marry him. You come back. You stay within the culture. You stay within the
religion.’’ She tells her fiancé about this, and he understands but says, ‘‘Listen. You
know my parents will be very upset.’’ He adds, ‘‘Can we keep this to ourselves? Let
us get married and after marriage, we can go to America together and I will help you
find him.’’ But she is also stubborn, and she affirms, ‘‘No I have to do this myself.’’
She puts off the wedding. She breaks off the engagement. She says, ‘‘I do not want to
hold you to this.’’ She comes to the United States and the rest of the story is to
follow.
It is a very modern story, contemporary in one way, but it is really about the child
in search of the father, which is the quest for the self and ultimately a spiritual quest. It
is taking place in 2002, soon after 9/11. When I was doing the research, I
realized what I had vaguely remembered in the back of my mind, that major religious
riots took place in 2002 in India. Between Hindus and Muslims, there is still a lot of
killing.

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 Q: You anticipate it in Arranged Marriage. Also, there are similar
stories in Sister of My Heart.
A: As there are in The Unknown Errors, where some characters are involved
in riots. The whole question is about safety and how religion changes this
safety. In my most recent text, at some point the young woman’s fiancé will
say, ‘‘You cannot go to America. America is different now. It has changed
for people who look like us.’’ She will say, ‘‘But look what is happening
right here in India, where people of different religions are killing each
other, even though they look exactly the same.’’ That is going to be a debate in
the book.
Q: It is appalling that we are ready to sacrifice everything for some
ideas and kill for those ideas. Yet there are so few ideas we are
willing to live for. That is where you revert to love, wisdom, and ethics,

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which to me are the spiritual dimensions common to all world
philosophies and yet so often disregarded. As a final statement, would you
please recite the Sanskrit mantra at the end of The Mirror of Fire and
Dreaming?
A: Let me first say that in my children’s books, I think of at least some
of the readers as similar to my children who are growing up in a place
where they are not necessarily in touch with their spiritual culture. I try to put
more of that spiritual background into those books. One of the
healing prayers that Anand has learned, which I too was taught when I
was growing up, is this prayer for world peace. In all of my books, I convey
my great desire that people may ultimately come together and make a better
world. The following was actually a very emotional passage for me to write. This is
how it goes:

Sarve bhavantu sukhinah

Sarve santu niramayah
Sarve bhadrani pashyantu
Ma kashchit dukkha bhag bhavet

May all beings be happy

May all beings be healed
May all behold only what is good
May no one experience sorrow

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BanerjeeDivakaruni
Divakaruni
Acknowledgments

The interview took place during the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network conference, held in San
Diego, 7–9 July 2010. It was subsequently revised and edited with the help of the writer. My thanks go to
Edith Frampton, who invited me to conduct this interview; Sherry Shopoff, who did the audio and the video
recordings; and Charlotte Lewis, who completed the transcription of the original audio file, through a grant
by Robert Olin, Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama.

University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, USA

[email protected]

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Divakaruni
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