Why wordless books for children are getting better, popular

Wordless books, a specialised segment within picture books for children, are being seen as aids to visual literacy, not held back by language barriers

A page from Dugga by Rajiv Eipe (Pratham Books)

For many of us, large-leafed picture books have been the first steps to reading. As words grow into sentences and paragraphs, illustrations are edged out. But there’s a lot happening in the space of picture books, particularly in the wordless books that bypass the traditional writer-illustrator collaboration and tell stories only through illustrations.

In just the last few months, children’s book publisher Pratham Books has published two standout wordless books. Pankaj Saikia’s The Theatre Of Ghosts is set in Majuli, Assam, and follows young Jhunali and Rimjhim as they head for a traditional Bhaona drama. The other is Rajiv Eipe’s Dugga, which follows the (un)remarkable life of a stray dog that meets with an accident and is nurtured back to health.

“Overall, we are seeing many more (wordless books) since 2017,” says Bijal Vachharajani, commissioning editor at Pratham Books. She is currently working with animator Aithihya Ashok Kumar and multi-media artist Labonie Roy on a few such books. Other children’s publishers, like Tulika and Ektara, too are focusing on this niche segment.

A defining moment came in 2017, when Ammachi’s Glasses by illustrator Priya Kuriyan, published by Tulika, was shortlisted for the Children’s Book of the Year award announced by Publishing Next. The shortlist for the story about a pudgy grandmother who wakes up in the morning and is unable to find her glasses was a feat: A book from a niche segment surpassed titles that adhered to a more mainstream understanding of what children’s books ought to be.

“The world over, (people still wonder) why (these types of picture books) have no text, and what children will get out of this,” says Canato Jimo, an illustrator and art director at Pratham Books. “But it’s now becoming a popular, visual and artistic form of storytelling.”

For starters, wordless books are finding favour in a world marked by geographical mobility and multilingual families. Now the same book can be “read” to a child by grandparents who speak different languages, or by a nanny who may be literate only in an entirely different tongue. With such books, “bhasha ka koi bandhan nahi hai; words se mukti hai (language is no longer a barrier),” says Sushil Shukla, Hindi poet, editor, and publisher of the Bhopal-based Ektara that publishes illustration-led picture books for children.

Each page of Ammachi’s Glasses, for example, is filled with detail and visual humour, drama and suspense: What will Ammachi do next as she stumbles along without her glasses? While the title might refer to Ammachi, the heroine could as well be Nani, Baa, Paati or Bamma.

Kuriyan notes that “the interaction between parent and child while ‘reading’ a wordless book (is) very different” from that of a text-led one. In the latter, the parent is just reading the author’s words. In the former, the parent is asking the child what they see, and the child narrates the story.

A page from Pankaj Saikia's Theatre of Ghosts. (Pratham Books)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the National Book Trust had published a few memorable wordless books— Debashish Deb’s The Story Of A Mango and Pulak Biswas’ Busy Ants, for example, are now into their 10th editions. Kuriyan recalls Manjula Padmanabhan’s A Visit To The City Market. “This one stands out because (it was about) lived reality. (Others were) just animal and folk stories,” says the Lounge contributor who is known for works like The Poop Book and Around the World With A Chilli. Each page in Padmanabhan’s 15-pager is filled with details that depict the India of a specific few decades.

“The same story…is looked at from different angles, aiding cognitive development,” says Aarti Bakshi, a developmental psychologist and SEL (social, emotional learning) consultant at SAAR Education, a Mumbai-headquartered consortium that offers educational resources for children in the 3-14 age group. This introduces the child to differing world views, building empathy. Also, “the expectation of art and literature is that they open themselves up for various interpretations and wordless (spaces) are nice ways to bring back the emphasis on that,” adds Shukla.

Bakshi notes that illustrators currently place an emphasis on “factual detail (in their work)…developing (children’s) ability to correlate”. They “may play around with colours but (they don’t compromise) on the exactness,” she adds.

Eipe does just this with Dugga—colour drives emotion and plot as sepia-toned, dusty streets give way to grey, grim hospital scenes, with brighter shades seeping back in only when Dugga the dog starts healing. The panels in Dugga have a rich, graphic novel sensibility. Eipe encourages visual literacy in his audience, ensuring wordless books can cater to larger demographic bands and become early introductions to art appreciation.

“At Pratham, there is a focus on visual literacy,” says Jimo. “(Sometimes) we have done away with (text) since it felt…redundant,” he adds. This happens when an illustrator has a “very strong visual and narrative sense”.

“For many years, illustrations were only looked at as decorative elements,” says Shukla. With wordless books, however, illustrators are no longer playing second fiddle to writers. They are finally being recognised as specialised storytellers in their own right.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 26 September, 2022.

Possessing more than one language has never harmed anyone: Geetanjali Shree

The writer, whose ‘Ret Samadhi’, in translation as ‘Tomb of Sand’ is on the International Booker shortlist, on process, writing in Hindi, and more

Author Geetanjali Shree. Image courtesy Penguin Random House India.

Most successful novels have blurb descriptions such as “gripping”. Some of them are praised for hooking the reader from the opening page. Tomb Of Sand, which made it to the 2022 shortlist of the International Booker Prize last week, does not fit this description.

In the book spanning close to 700 pages, the first quarter meanders, with the third-person narrator seeming to speak from a fever dream—an effect heightened by the fact that the dialogue is never demarcated by quotation marks. In an age when writing and “content” work to be the most attention-grabbing versions of themselves, Tomb Of Sand does not bother. Confident in itself and its world, it demands a certain discipline and stillness from the reader.

It begins with a chapter titled Ma’s Back, in which an elderly woman, is grieving and depressed. Her husband is dead. Her back turned to the world, she refuses to get out of bed.

The opening luxuriates in weaving in and out of a backstory, told with distracted charm. If impatient, you are bound to give up. Suddenly, though, sentences of deep, ancient wisdom will hit you: “Those who consider death to be an ending took this to be hers. But those in the know knew this was no ending; knew she’d simply crossed yet another border.”

And this is what the novel is about. The nature and effect of invisible, intangible, yet incontrovertible borders. Between countries, the realms of the mind, and people. Yet there is humour and lightness, undercutting the book’s physical and thematic weight. It takes Ma over a hundred pages to get out of bed but once she’s up, a sense of a plot takes shape. Its flow may not be for everyone but its spots of poetic wisdom resonate widely.

Shree, 64, is a well-regarded writer whose contribution to Hindi literature has been recognised over the years with awards like the Indu Sharma Katha Sammaan, Hindi Akademi Sahityakar Sammaan and Dwijdev Sammaan. In addition to short story collections, Shree has four more novels to her credit: Mai (1993), Hamara Sheher Us Baras (1998), Tirohit (2001) and Khali Jagah (2006).

Mai, about three generations of women in a middle-class, north Indian family and the way they navigate patriarchy, is narrated by Mai’s daughter Sunaina, giving the reader a layered understanding of their lives. In 2000, its English translation by Nita Kumar was shortlisted for the Hutch-Crossword Translation Award. Now, 22 years later, and two years after its Hindi original Ret Samadhi came out, Tomb of Sand too finds buzz with English readers, this time globally. It, too, focuses on women—a mother and daughter, with the latter discovering the unconventionality of her elderly, recently widowed parent.

Over the years, Shree’s stories have also found Gujarati, German, Japanese, Korean, Serbian and French readers. In 2020, Ret Samadhi was translated into French by Annie Montaut as Ret Samadhi: Au-delà De La Frontière. The English translation by US-based artist-translator Daisy Rockwell came out first in 2021, from Titled Axis Press in the UK. Shree’s first book published there, it qualified for the International Booker nomination. While Tomb of Sand had already begun making waves after the announcement of the International Booker Prize’s longlist last month, last week it became the first Hindi novel to make it to the Prize’s shortlist, which features five other books—Korean, Norwegian, Japanese, Spanish and Polish—in translation.

Soon after the shortlist announcement, Shree spoke to Lounge about her relationship with the process of translation, how she views her bilingualism, and how Tomb Of Sand’s original narrative style came to be. Edited excerpts from an email interview:

To many readers, publishers and fellow writers, you are already a well-regarded author. The shortlist means greater awareness of your work with a certain English-centric section of readers and publishers. In view of this, and in continuation of something you said in an earlier interview—that layers are gained in translation but your own “sounds and smells and tweaks and twirls” are lost—how do you see this wider recognition of you and your work?

I do not mean that sounds, smells, tweaks are lost, but that they are not necessarily the ones with my dhwani in them.

For me, translation is dialogue and communication which establishes a new friendship between the two texts—the original and the translated. As in communication there is something live and electric in what one says and in what the other receives, so it is here. It is not a dead object changing hands but a live and mercurial entity going from one place to another. A rich text becomes differently richer. It finds a new belonging in a new cultural milieu. And it also gives to the new homeland, if you will, cultural inputs from where it has originally come. It really is about a dialogue between cultures which brings to both new ways of seeing, being, expressing. 

How active was your involvement with the French translation of ‘Ret Samadhi’? How was each different?

Yes, Ret Samadhi has been translated into French and English (in that order). Given my respect for the autonomy of translation and translators, I cannot be hands-on. It is after a degree of mutual trust, respect and understanding has developed between me and the translator that translation in a different language is begun. Once it has begun, it’s for the translator to decide whether and when she (both the translators of Ret Samadhi are women) needs to get in touch with me for possible clarifications and explanations. That interaction during the making of the translation often turns out to be surprisingly rewarding. Several of the translator’s queries and comments offer clues to meanings and implications of which I had not been aware during the act of writing. This non-interference has been best for everyone.

A lot of Indians grow up at least bilingual, if not trilingual. Sometimes, a lot of this knowledge—of reading, writing, and at least being slightly fluent in our idioms and sayings—is neglected owing to the pressure of jobs, life, and the “convenience” of English. Language is, of course, a practice that needs daily nurturing. Can you talk a little about this?

For Indians, fortunately, it is natural to be multilingual. Our tragedy is that instead of nurturing that, we have let English hierarchise languages in our heads and hearts. English has become the language of success and getting about in the world. Which is fine, but that does not require letting go of other languages available to us. Possessing more than one language has never harmed anyone. It is, rather, a source of great enrichment, given the wealth contained within each, going back centuries. We should celebrate multilingualism, multiculturalism in the world and in our country rather than go astray towards a mono-culturalism, with its totalitarian impulse.

English was the medium of instruction in your education. Did you ever have to “consciously” choose to write in Hindi over English? Or did it come naturally?

Like so many other Indians in north India, I have grown up with Hindi and English. Most of us know English through formal education and Hindi through its informal proliferation in our lives. I think, on balance, the latter turned out better for me because I had picked up Hindi in many registers—the language of conversation within the family, of narrations of our bedtime tales, and the colloquial and lively street language, the exposure to serious, literary, classical Hindi and Urdu via mushairas and kavi sammelans, which were still widespread in my growing-up years in the small and big towns of Uttar Pradesh, and of course the reading that we did where there were still many Hindi children’s magazines available for us.

So, while I did go through some period of wondering and wandering between the two languages for my expression, it more or less quite naturally and intuitively became Hindi for me. This I say without rancour against English—we all write in the language we are most comfortable in.

‘Tomb Of Sand’ flows in poetic, meandering, third-person stream-of-consciousness. It’s almost sand-like—if you are trying to hold on to it and gain immediate meaning or direction, it slips from you. If you stay with it with stillness, the narrative, and the plot, seem to come to you themselves. I am assuming this is true of the original too. Can you talk about this treatment?

You have said it beautifully. That is the fun of (feedback from) readers, because they give the writer wonderful interpretations. What you say makes wonderful sense to me. I have achieved that intuitively, not by following a deliberate formula. The writing process has its own magic. You start off as if you are the controller but the work comes alive only when it acquires its own breath and soul. Once that happens, it takes over, in a manner of speaking, and you flow along with it. You are in a new partnership and sometimes you lead the way, sometimes the work leads, (sometimes) its characters do.

So whatever happened was in the dynamic of the narrative; and it kept happening (as if) that is how (it was meant to) happen.

This interview was first punished in Mint Lounge 15 April 2022

With 'Run and Hide', writer Pankaj Mishra returns as a novelist

Twenty years after ‘The Romantics’, acclaimed essayist Pankaj Mishra’s second work of fiction, ‘Run And Hide’ is now out

Pankaj Mishra’s second novel comes more than two decades after his debut, The Romantics, but Run and Hide is worth the wait.

Arun, Aseem and Virendra, all from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds, meet as batchmates at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Hungry to better their circumstances, Aseem and Virendra reach dizzying heights of material and social success; their eventual fall from grace is just as spectacular.

Arun’s aspirations are fuelled by a different desire—of what he thinks could be love. Told from his point of view, Run and Hide is a slow burn. It covers three decades, recounting stories of lives on the cusp of economic liberalisation in India and globalisation in general, takes cues from high-profile cases of both white-collar crime and the MeToo movement, while tracing political changes in the country and identity politics globally—till the scene is set for a global virus.

This interview was first published in Mint Lounge on 19 February, 2022

Yet no page feels bogged down by the weight of contemporary issues; no strand is underserved. Arun, self-effacing and almost unselfconsciously prone to philosophising, makes the book immensely readable. He observes and articulates minutiae with rare lucidity, grippingly sketching the emotional intricacies of trying to stay afloat through tides of change.

In the time between the two novels, Mishra has earned acclaim as a sharp yet sensitive essayist, a keen observer of our times. This also keeps Run And Hidefirmly rooted in reality, exploring motivations and sympathies, and how these play out.

While it is unfair, of course, to compare works 20 years apart, the arc is nothing short of phenomenal. The sharpness of experience and softness of wisdom find an alchemical balance in Run and Hide. A world-weariness is evident, but so is a deep romanticism towards life itself.

In an interview in the lead-up to the book’s launch today, Mishra talks about experiencing the world through fiction, the challenge of covering three decades of change, and more. Edited excerpts:

The book’s characters share similarities with people who have been in the public eye.

I think the reason why anyone turns to fiction is essentially to do what cannot be done in any other form, whether it’s reportage or essay, or poetry, or a play. The novel is just a much more spacious form that can accommodate different ways of understanding the world; the play and clash of ideas. In an essay you more or less end up taking one side—you might present the other side but you have to put your own position forward.

The fiction form gives you an opportunity to critique your own views, positions, your own class and caste. You can take very many different sides without coming out conclusively on one side or other. It’s a very democratic space; it’s a space that allows all kinds of characters to have their say, to have their inner freedom.

Obviously, I went back to the novel with these advantages in mind. But that does not mean I am going to break with everything that I have been thinking about or experiencing over the last three decades. I have encountered a wide variety of people, ways of being. They will inevitably make their way into my fiction, as composite characters.

These are (also) the themes that have concerned me over the years—the rise of a “new India”, what that actually means, who is rising, how they even seek fulfilment now that they have been freed from old restrictions and constraints, how fulfilled they even are, and how they pursue happiness, so to speak, in this new, very heady world that has been opened up to them by economic liberalisation and globalisation.

I’ve written about the political consequences of that, but the reason I turn to the novel is that only fiction can explore the spiritual and emotional consequences of this massive transformation we have undergone over the last three decades.

Is an essay exploring these concerns not as effective as a novel ?

These are two very different ways of reading and engaging with the world. (With fiction) you are asking the reader to enter into a kind of communication with the author; they are being asked to imagine certain situations, certain landscapes and people, (with) little signs of recognition all around. Which is not to say that only people in India will (relate).

Someone from a working-class background in the north of England emailed to say that the book spoke to him as an account of the humiliation you grow up with as a member of a lower class.The shame of growing up poor, of growing up ignorant—how much that follows you around even when you become successful. (With fiction) a reader brings their own life experience and imagination to the process. Non-fiction isn’t really asking you to do much of that. It’s giving you a set of facts around which a narrative has been woven.

Arun is an interesting choice as narrator. He seems never fully present in the events he recalls. Yet he is observant, reserving it all for a later telling.

This really goes to the heart of how you conceive of the novel and the strategies you adopt to tell the story. It was very clear to me that I had to choose somebody who is on the margins of the world he is describing, and yet, at the same time, not have a particularly moralistic point of view of it. I could not give Aseem the voice of the narrator, even though he is supposedly a novelist; he’s too egotistical and self-seeking to be able to see and observe the world around him. Whereas Arun, while working within the realm of literature, is on its margins too as a translator. It is a unique position—someone who does valuable work, and yet remains invisible.

Once I found this way of thinking about him and his relationship with the other characters, the novel started to fall into place. It was a challenge to think about covering three decades in the lives of these people. But the notion that he can be traumatised into eloquent speech helped me a great deal.

You meet people like Arun all the time—who don’t speak much, aren’t part of the cultural mainstream, who don’t go to parties, but are incredibly observant and insightful.

A certain unease is central to the story. Arun is uncomfortable with both the “victimhood” of the elite and the rage of the socially disadvantaged that lets them aid in oppressions of other kinds. For him, love, friendship, family fall away because of this. Is running and hiding the only way out?

One reason I went into fiction was to get away from easy generalisations or conclusions. It was really to demonstrate that there are so many different ways of being and perceiving the world. Living alone in the Himalaya can be much more exalting and liberating than, say, being at a dinner party in London, where you feel uncomfortable with all the opinions that are being expressed around you. Especially if you come from a background like Arun’s, where you know people have a very good reason to be angry at the way they have been treated by their social systems. He sees that his own father, regardless of how horrible he is, has known what degradation is much more than the people claiming that their rights and identity as a black or brown person should be honoured.

I think he has left open the possibility (of what he will do next). (The novel is at) an impasse he has been driven to, by his experience of all these different realities outside the little world he had created for himself. I would not want the book to be seen as my own kind of general statement on where we are today, and that there’s no other possibility except to run and hide.

Arun has influences of your life. Does inhabiting the book’s world influence you too, and shift how you view your life after writing it?

I do feel that every novel changes (the writer) deeply. Apart from everything else, you are exploring parts of your own self while writing fiction. Non-fiction engages only a very shallow part of yourself; mostly the mind—you have had an experience, you have talked to people and you are putting it in some shape. But when you are writing fiction, you are pulling stuff out of yourself, you don’t know where from. You are conducting a very intense dialogue with different parts of yourself. So if I were to go back and start identifying myself (in this novel), I would not identify myself in just Arun, I would also identify myself in Aseem, in Alia. We all consist of multiple selves—and all those characters carry traces of my own self. It’s only in fiction that you can conduct this dialogue with these different selves—where else would there be an opportunity to do so? So, to answer your question, I think writing it was really a unique experience. If people like it, it will be a bonus but it has brought me into a conversation with aspects of my experience I wouldn’t have otherwise engaged with.

This interview was first published in Mint Lounge on 19 February, 2022

Where is the big covid-19 novel?

Events of a certain scale and magnitude have always shown up in literature, influencing not only subject but form. Will covid-19 similarly affect the novel?

When she answers my call, Mita Kapur is sending off an apology email to a writer. She was to write back about their submission nearly 12 weeks ago but has not had the time to get to it, prompting a reminder from the writer.

It’s not as if she has been on a break. Kapur, who heads Siyahi, one of India’s leading literary agencies, has been reading more than ever: “We are all frantically reading, all the time,” she says. It’s just that her organisation has seen an almost fivefold increase in the number of submissions. Ever since covid-19 sent people into forced lockdowns and isolation, literary agents and publishers have been inundated with manuscripts from writers who have finally had the time to work on their novels.

Especially before the second wave of the pandemic hit India in the summer of 2021, many of them took the opportunity to hunker down and work on old, half-finished drafts. Yet others thought it was time to seize the moment and channel their fledgling ideas into dystopian fiction or medical thrillers.

Along with the first flurry of isolation-driven submissions, all sorts of writing gathered steam online. Instagram poetry flourished. In prose, the online writing platform Wattpad saw a surge in subscribers. In late 2020, its country head, Devashish Sharma, told Scroll.in that “from January through April, the number of new stories grew 151%. In the same period, the number of new writers increased by 125%. Writer activity, overall, increased by 200% from January through April. In India, these growth trends meant a 50% increase in reading time, a 30% increase in new stories, and a 60% increase in writers.”

But there is still no big covid-19 novel. Is it too early to expect one?'

“Let’s look at it like this,” says Namita Gokhale, who came out with her 20th novel, The Blind Matriarch, this September: There were no Partition novels till a few decades after the event. “It took that much time to process (it). World War II is still a (very) good subject to write on. And every time we go into World War II, we find more and newer dimensions, or aspects of the war that were overlooked at that time or brushed over. I think that this pandemic will recur in fiction, perhaps with greater depth, in the years to come.” Rahul Soni, executive editor (literary) at HarperCollins India, echoes Gokhale’s observations. “It may take 10 years to address the pandemic (in fiction) in any significant way, or with any depth,” he says.

Expectedly perhaps, the first movers in the traditional publishing spaces were in non-fiction. They were mostly the scientific and explanatory kind, about disease outbreaks and viruses, specifically about the coronavirus. One notable Indian title was The Coronavirus: What You Need To Know About The Global Pandemic by Dr Swapneil Parikh, Maherra Desai and Dr Rajesh Parikh, published by Penguin Random House India (PRHI). It came out as early as March 2020.

In creative writing, the pandemic started showing up first in poetry and short stories . The novel, even just by virtue of the length and approach to world-building it requires, was not even in the race. One of the first responders, so to speak, was Shobhaa De, with her short story e-book series, Lockdown Liaisons, published by Simon and Schuster—now, a year-and-a-half later, actor Lillette Dubey is adapting five of the book’s stories for the stage. Journalist and writer Udayan Mukherjee followed in October 2020 with his book of short stories, Essential Items And Other Tales From A Land In Lockdown, published by Bloomsbury—recently, it was longlisted for the Tata Lit Live Book of the Year Award.

The same month that Mukherjee’s book came out, PRHI had brought out a book of poems called Singing In The Dark, edited by poet and critic K. Satchidanandan and U.S.-based academic Nishi Chawla. It featured over 100 poets from around the world reflecting on what a crisis of such global magnitude meant. “We did realise that poets typically privilege a slow churning of their art, and that not many poets would embrace the idea of immediately responding to the pandemic as it is shaping and reshaping our lives,” the editors acknowledged in their foreword. This need for a “slow churn” applies also, and perhaps more so, to novels.

Currently, there is a sense that while novelists have begun engaging with the pandemic, both publishers and readers are not very open to books about it. “I am already representing two books that feature the pandemic, both are by well-known women writers,” says literary agent Kanishka Gupta, of the agency Writer’s Side. However, there is “major covid-19 fatigue”, he says. “Even if the treatment is fictional and creative”, such novels are being rejected by readers and, in turn, publishers. “Also, publishers feel like (a novel based on the pandemic) has a very limited shelf-life,” he adds. The uncertainty is in whether when things open up, and life regains a sense of normalcy, as it seems to be doing now, more newsy stories set in or featuring the pandemic years will still be of interest.

Inevitably, the recent months have seen a few prominent books directly or indirectly involving the pandemic. While Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch is primarily the story of a family and its various members who also incidentally experience covid-19 and its consequences, Puja Changoiwala’s Homebound, launched this month by HarperCollins, takes a more granular, newsy approach—it situates itself in the migrant crisis of 2020 to tell the story of a family based in Mumbai’s Dharavi, forced to head back home to their native village in Rajasthan following the nationwide covid-19 lockdown. Last week, PRHI announced that it would be publishing popular writer Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s next book, Soft Animal, “about a young couple enduring an unhappy marriage just as India embarks on its surreal COVID lockdown”. The book, Madhavan’s eighth, will be out in 2023.

Through this all, though, an ambivalence about the quality of pandemic-influenced submissions lingers. “A lot of people are addressing the pandemic itself but that’s almost like just doing something timely to make a submission,” says Poulomi Chatterjee, editor-in-chief and publisher of Hachette India. “To me, nothing else has changed otherwise…. I haven’t yet seen a change in what (authors) are submitting, or a change of form in literary or commercial novels,” she adds.

Barring novels that have featured the pandemic largely in the background, like Gokhale’s, the general consensus is that any attempt to write a “pandemic novel” any time soon may see only superficial and not very well-considered results. It would be as bad as some hastily put-together drafts “swapping out a fascist regime for dystopia as a trope”, notes one publisher. A chunk of the drafts agents and publishers have been inundated with in recent months have tried this tack.

At Siyahi, however, swimming in a sea of submissions, Kapur is already seeing a slight change in the very way the novel is being written. “There is a coincidence (of the pandemic years) with a generation of writers who are willing to experiment. The very physicality of the situation—there has been loss, grief, paranoia, and emotional suffering on so many levels—is bound to impact the way you think, imagine, dream and the way you plot your next move,” she says. The change may not be “ubiquitous”, Kapur adds, “but I can assure you that there will 100% be an experimentation with voice, in character development, and in the way a story arc develops. I am seeing all of this in a few of the books that have come to me, and it’s quite fun to read.”

When the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and World War II started to inform novels written in English, these were the very elements through which the form began to change, ushering in Modernism. Today the novel, which Soni calls “a shape-shifting, accommodating form that’s not dying any time soon”, is possibly seeing glimmers of such change again.

This story was first published in Mint Lounge on 27 November, 2021