The Hush of the Uncaring Sea, a new collection of award-winning author Upamanyu Chatterjee’s four popular novellas, embodies the many worlds he interacted with during his time in the civil service. From sniffing out a story in a dreary government file to basing one of his protagonists on the founder of India’s first private detective agency, Upamanyu does all this and more, with his signature biting satire.
The Hush of the Uncaring Sea, published by Speaking Tiger, was launched in Delhi this month. At the event, Upamanyu sat down with Newslaundry’s Abhinandan Sekhri to talk about what inspired him to write the book, and how actor Shabana Azmi telephoned him about turning English, August into a movie.
On his writing process, Upamanyu says it’s “like a fix” that leaves him in a perpetual bad mood.
“I just sit down for two hours at a desk, whether they are productive or not is not relevant. Sometimes something emerges, sometimes it doesn’t,” he says. “Even if it’s two sentences, I put down something and then you read it the next day and say, ‘What shit is this?’...So I’m always in a bad mood.”
He also has a process on how he makes sure his characters aren’t “boring”. “I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t put a lot of myself into him,” he says of the protagonist of English, August.
And on the ridiculousness of government machinery, which forms an important part of much of his writing, he says, “Bureaucracy is always funny...it is always easy to poke fun at it.”
Watch.
We have a new Sena project to report on police excesses across at least eight states in India, and how these impact everyday Indians. Click here to contribute.
Newslaundry is a reader-supported, ad-free, independent news outlet based out of New Delhi. Support their journalism, here.
