A life beyond borders

India Today

5 days ago

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated August 4, 2025)At 65, Jeet Thayil remains a sleek, honed physical presence, even on a Zoom call, as befits the son of an athlete. It's a detail we learn early in Thayil's new book The Elsewhereans, a 'documentary novel' as the subtitle says, a quasi-memoir about family, belonging and, above all, love.advertisementI received the book in the week that home minister Amit Shah made now-standard remarks about English, about the 'mentality of slavery' that afflicts those who insist on speaking it as if to abjure their so-called mother tongue. Thayil reminds me that he wrote a poem decades ago with the line 'our mother tongue is not our mother's tongue'. That we still remain so conflicted, so unable to claim English, and the varying ways it is spoken and written in India, as a native language is embarrassing.Thayil's novels, poetry and music, for example, could only ever be written by an Indian writer, even as they're written in a 'global' language—the product of a mind shaped by India's particular postcolonial, and for that matter precolonial, history. 'We're in a stage of our national evolution,' Thayil says, 'where we all feel like outsiders.' In a city like Delhi, 'dislocation', he adds, 'is location'. It's an embrace, as is the story told in The Elsewhereans, of uncertainty, of travel as a means of finding not just oneself, but others.
In this case, it is the writer using art and language to locate himself as the son of his parents, a life spent, he says, being a 'bad son', that has come full circle. It's intriguing that the principal concern of a book that whips us through Hanoi, Hong Kong and Harrisburg is home—how we find it in people, how it can be made and remade wherever we, to quote Thayil (and Paul Young), lay our hat.The Elsewhereans is a bit like the work of W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole, in its use of photographs as a narrative device, a gesture at verisimilitude even as we understand this is a novel, an act of imaginative rather than factual recounting. Like Sebald and Cole, Thayil is interested in migration. What the act of leaving does to individuals. The artist, he says, 'is the stranger, the perpetual outsider.' Thayil's fidelity, simply put, is to a community. Of 'elsewhereans', of peripatetic perspectives.When I complained to Thayil about my own background, growing up and being educated in different places and circumstances, so that I have long felt a hole where cultural confidence should be, he said the 'condition' I was describing 'as a 'hole' is actually a whole, a condition that makes it possible to create in a specific way.' Displacement, he argues, whether literal or metaphorical, is the contemporary state of being. It's what makes The Elsewhereans a deeply political book, a 'rich evocation', as Amitav Ghosh calls it, 'of decolonisation and non-alignment.'advertisementThe lives of its protagonists are a rebuke of a global moment in which increasingly authoritarian governments are trying to define what it means to come from a place, what it means to be a citizen. Thayil's father, a reporter and editor, was arrested in Bihar, the 'first editor in independent India to be charged with sedition'. Today, notes the narrator, 'the arrest of journalists and students under the charge of sedition is commonplace. Hardly worth remarking.'
The Elsewhereans | A Documentary Novel | By Jeet Thayil | Harpercollins/Fourth Estate | Rs 699 | 240 pagesIn this telling, the world is embroiled, perhaps always has been, in a battle between those who can empathise with and tell the stories of others and those who cannot make that leap of imagination. A storyteller's job is to put his audience in the minds of others, to take us elsewhere. For Thayil, this is a kind of internationalism that has long fallen out of fashion. Citizens of the world, as the former British prime minister Theresa May said in 2016, are 'citizens of nowhere'. One such citizen of nowhere would have been James Joyce, who exiled himself to Europe to write not just Ulysses but also Dubliners, needing to leave the city that occupied his every waking hour to write about it. In perhaps Joyce's most famous story, he concludes with an image of 'snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead'.advertisementThayil's work is vividly specific, vividly Indian, yet it resonates elsewhere, everywhere, in fact, where people do not want to swallow the narrow, the parochial, the circumscribed ideologies, Thayil said, 'being forced down their throats.'Home may be where the heart is, but our hearts are large. And home is also where the imagination can roam, can find the space to tell all our stories—as Thayil, arguably India's most experimental contemporary writer, reminds us—not just those the authorities deem acceptable.advertisementSubscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends