Annie Zaidi: When did you start writing Solo? How long did it take, this one and the one before?

Rana Dasgupta: I started writing it towards the end of 2005. So it has taken about four years. Tokyo Cancelled had taken about three years. With this one (Solo), I had several false starts. I had to discard two drafts that were almost fully written. I was playing with many forms, including one where the narrative was structured in the form of a conversation between an interviewer and an interviewee. But the actual book (in its current form) took about a year to write.

AZ: What led you to write a book like Solo?

RD: My first book had been very contemporary. There was no history in it and very little psychology. This time, I wanted to write about a certain phase of history. I have been a little obsessed with the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The twentieth century had started very well but later, it started going down. Yet there were great achievements during this age. Great moral achievements too. The nineteenth century was full of intellectual ambition, in terms of science and philosophy and ethical seriousness. We seem to think that our own time is the best time possible. This (novel) is a counter-narrative to our view.

At a personal level, I wanted to write about failure. My protagonist is a bright, talented, ambitious young man who fails because the world is a very tough place. In some sense, this is the Indian part of the book. People here understand that: failing simply because life is tough. When I sent this book to my German editor, he was very frustrated with it. He couldn’t understand why my protagonist couldn’t just rise above his circumstances.

AZ: Would you say something more about the ‘failure’ of the lead character?

RD: He fails in his marriage. He fails in his work. He fails even to himself for he is unable to sustain his great interest in music. He loses his son. He lives with his mother until both of them are very old. His mother wants him to go out and make more of himself. But he fails to do that and ends up spending his last days lost in daydreams.

AZ: Tell me a little more about the sort of issues that led you to the writing of Solo?

RD: Well, the book is based on the changes Bulgaria and Georgia have seen over the last century. There are two broad themes. One is the relationship between Europe and Islam. The protagonist’s father is an engineer with the railways. A railway line is being constructed between Berlin and Baghdad and it is sort of symbolic of the trajectory between Europe and the Islamic world. The protagonist’s relationship to that part of the world is a very affectionate one. He has travelled across the Ottoman Empire – and Bulgaria was a part of the Ottoman Empire once – and his own mother speaks both Turkish and Arabic. There was much traffic between these two worlds and at some point, it broke down. The book ends with the US bombing of Iraq, assisted by the Bulgarian army.

The other factor was living in Delhi, where one sees a type of hyper-capitalist personality, represented by Khatuna in the book. She has had a tough childhood but Khatuna has adapted remarkably well to modern capitalism. The book talks about the values of progress and wanting to build a better society. This society (Bulgaria) was broken down, first by the world war and, then, by the communist years. When it started to recover, it ended up as a society that was better adapted to modern capitalism than most others, without any of the sentimentalism of the west. It is very like the situation one sees in India now.

AZ: If you wanted to write about the way Indian society is changing, why didn’t you just set the novel in Delhi?

RD: I didn’t feel like I was ready to write about India five years ago. I will be writing about Delhi and India in my next book. Besides, I have an ongoing love affair with Eastern Europe. This part of the world has seen incredible violence and slaughter. It was very hard to preserve a sense of decency through it all. What has come out of it now is weird – in its violence, and in the way people are accepting of violence. There had been a total collapse of infrastructure. Most services collapsed. And yet, you would meet very highly educated people because the Soviet countries invested in an incredible education system. You could meet very poor people, maybe a beggar on the streets who could play concert piano and speak five languages.

The other factor was that Bulgaria, like me, has lived between Europe and Asia. It eventually made a decision to belong with Europe. It got rid of its Turkish Muslims, and built a lot of churches and that sort of thing. But it had not bargained for the violence that it would see in the aftermath of this decision. Bulgaria was more peaceful as a part of the Ottoman Empire than it ever has been since.

AZ: What about the non-fiction book you’re writing? Would you say something about that?

RD: I was trying to understand what this new India is all about and what its depth is. There is a cliché – not without justification – that the new elite of India are totally without morals. You could say that of the industrialists of England too, during the nineteenth century. But these industrialists also built great institutions, universities etcetera. Many in India doubt that that will happen here. Yet, people are accumulating so much money, there are immense possibilities. After they have bought their jets and yachts, they must look for another level of spending. But the people I spoke to seemed to have no intention in that direction.

It is strange. People here are so incredible in their business imagination but so trivial in their consumption. Somebody who makes ten thousand rupees a month might have dreams of buying a scooter, and then a flat, and then something else. Similarly, these people (the elite) buy the newest Lamborghini.

I am also looking at other aspects (of the new India). Like sex and marriage. Lots of people’s lives are collapsing because they just don’t know how to do it anymore. Arranged marriage doesn’t work for them, but love marriage doesn’t work either.

AZ: Why Delhi?

RD: I came here to be with Monica. But Delhi is particularly extreme and there are several things I want to look at. There are elements of the same in Calcutta or Bombay. But the north-Indian business class can be particularly greedy and mean and violent. And very successful. In other parts of India, there are complaints of north-Indianisation.

Delhi is growing so fast, and it is one of the few places that are almost entirely peopled with migrants. Through the 1980s and 90s, there were business families that bought up a lot of land in UP and Haryana and made millions later. Suddenly, everyone was part of the global elite, and this was more starkly visible in Delhi than anywhere else in India. People here have more of a sense of a global takeover. There is also a more satisfying contrast between worlds here, because of the government and bureaucracy. I wanted to look at all of this.

AZ: Would you say that parenting has changed you as a writer?

RD: Not very much. It certainly has changed my rhythm. And it has changed my emotional economy. After my daughter was born, I rewrote certain sections in Solo. I have also grown more sentimental. Perhaps I place more value on the domestic sphere. I think more about what it takes to sustain a family for something like forty years.

AZ: How has your writing changed over the years?

RD: Tokyo Cancelled was a very defined project. It was psychologically shallow. In a fairytale, you don’t have to explain the characters of the prince and princess and why they get attracted to each other; they just do. But with this novel (Solo), I had to follow psychological themes over a lifetime. It was really tough because the protagonist is a hundred years old. It made me think a lot more about old age. Tokyo Cancelled was somewhat crude in its ethic. It was global in that there were stories from all over the world. Now, I am more interested in the ways in which the world inhabits our lives, not just in terms of geographic scale. For instance, India is going through a turbulent time, a time of great change. Lots of global stories can be told without needing to travel. I get bored of reading and writing if the epic dimension is lost. I want to tell stories that are bigger than themselves. Now, however, I can find them in more places.