‘A backdrop of geological time': Gurnaik Johal on why his novel has the river Saraswati in it

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15 hours ago

Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London. His 2022 short story collection, We Move, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize. Its opening story won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. Saraswati, his debut novel, was published recently by Serpent's Tail in the UK and Hachette in the Indian subcontinent. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.
The novel follows the mythical river of Saraswati through what is now Northern India. But when Satnam arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmother's funeral, he is astonished to find water in the long-dry well behind her house. The discovery sets in motion a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river and build a gleaming new city on its banks, and Satnam – adrift from his job, girlfriend and flat back in London – soon finds himself swept up in this ferment of Hindu nationalist pride.
As the river alters Satnam's course, so it reveals buried ties to six distant relatives scattered across the globe – from an ambitious writer with her eye on legacy to a Kenyan archaeologist to a Bollywood stunt double – who are brought together in a rapidly changing India.
In a conversation with Scroll, Johal talked about how he found the novel's voice, created his characters, and addressed the tension between inherited memory and lived reality. Excerpts from the interview:
Many congratulations on your excellent debut novel! Right off, I'm quite curious to know if you began this story with a central thread or if you first collected the voices, let them speak, and only later noticed how they echoed across continents and generations?
Thank you! The main structure of the book was in place very early in the writing process – from the start, I knew I'd be following seven different characters who were each distantly related to one another. What came as a surprise in the writing was that we would also get access to the story of these characters' two common ancestors. Following the historical love story of that one couple, which I think in a sense is now the heart of the book, was a lot of fun.
In the online space, I noticed many people (including reviews) have drawn parallels between your writing and that of David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, and the like. But your writing also has this quiet wit and humour in surprising places and restraint in other parts that feel very much your own. On that, could you share more on what shaped the tone of Saraswati for you? Are there any writers or books in particular you found yourself returning to while writing it, and drew inspiration?
I drew influences from far and wide, and one that comes to mind now is the films of Werner Herzog. Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are stories of rivers, colonialism and madness, and resonated very strongly with what I was trying to achieve. I remember returning to some sequences in Aguirre several times in the writing process, and the opening music of the film was part of a roster of songs I'd often play to get into the mood to write.
More often than not, professions like eco-activists, entomologists, and archaeologists are written with more symbolic weight than emotional intimacy. How did you resist that tendency and ensure these characters remained complex and breathing individuals rather than devices for moving the narrative forward? Also, what kind of research went into it to bring these characters to life aptly?
My starting place for characters is always seeing them as real people. I'm interested in character-led fiction and so it would probably go against the impulses from where my imagination comes from to see them as devices for advancing plot. Often, the process of trying to ensure I make them well-rounded people begins with trying to think of what an average day looks like in their life, outside of the confines of my plot – what music do they listen to, how do they commute to work, what do they pack for lunch…
The main character, Satnam and his journey, from disaffection to reluctant involvement, reflect a generational drift many readers may recognise if not relate deeply. What interested you most in exploring that tension between inherited memory and lived reality? And how consciously did you weave it into the novel's architecture?
Like many characters in the novel, Satnam manages to find a stable identity by looking backwards rather than forwards. You're right to pull out that he's adrift in life, and he derives meaning from his family history and from a connection to their ancestral land. I hope there's space in the novel for this to be seen as both a good and a bad thing – we need origin stories to help tell us who we are, but they needn't wholly define us.
The book layers modern India with future speculations and ancient myths. How do you see fiction's role in imagining timelines that don't sit comfortably within linear history, especially in a country like India, where the past is often politicised in the service of the present by everyone around?
Sometimes I wonder if the reason we make art, whether that's fiction, music or film, is that these forms allow us to play with time in a way we can't in real life. In reality, time is a constant, but in a book, in a song, in a film, it's something we can speed up or slow down. I wanted to layer different timelines on top of one another in the novel, we get a present story that pushes forward into the future, we get a colonial-era story, and an ancient one, too. I was also interested in showing human stories against a backdrop of geological time – the timeline of a river is vastly different to that of a human life.
Staying on the topic from before, your story weaves modern India with future speculation and ancient myth. What can fiction do with timelines that don't sit comfortably in linear history, especially in a country like ours where the past is constantly being repurposed for present-day politics?
Linear history is a concept I found becoming more complicated as I worked on the book. For example, the characters in the late 19th century feel the effects of water scarcity, which is something that then returns on a larger scale in the imagined present. If you removed the dates from those historical chapters, one might be able to read them as set in a future after the events in the present day.
And finally, what is your view on the idea of 'diaspora fiction' in the current literary landscape? Is it a label that still has any generative potential, or is it something a book like Saraswati ultimately tries to move beyond and break free?
The diasporic element in the novel is one among many, and if readers find the book through it being part of that tradition, then I welcome it, but I can't say it was something I had in mind while writing. I do think there will long be generative potential in writing about migration – our common story, all the way back to the first people, is one of movement and change.