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India Today
20 hours ago
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- India Today
A life beyond borders
(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, 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 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 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 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 to India Today Magazine- Ends
Scroll.in
6 days ago
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- Scroll.in
‘The Elsewhereans' by Jeet Thayil travels through timelines, ingeniously connects places and events
Jeet Thayil's genre-blending 'documentary novel', The Elsewhereans, begins with a meet-cute. The year is 1957. Ammu Thomas, winner of 27 medals and 25 cups in school athletic championships, now teaches physics, chemistry, and biology at a high school in Alwaye, Kerala. Thayil Jacob Sony George is a journalist in Bombay, working for The Free Press Journal. Their families have met. Marriage has been proposed. In a break from convention, George decides to meet Ammu, scandalously unchaperoned. Swiftly, in a move familiar to Thayil's long-time readers, the author defies audience expectations, and what follows is not a romance but the chronicle of a marriage that is complex and often messy, a family memoir, a travel diary, an extensive documentation of socio-cultural imperatives, all layered within a narrative of grief, loss, and displacement. Embracing disruption With Ammu and George, and a cast of family members who appear and disappear through the text, the narrative travels across continents and decades, reaching back and forth in memory and re-constructing events through documents like letters, photographs, postcards, and fragments of notes. Lest we fall into the trap of reading the text autobiographically, an unpardonable breach of readerly etiquette in a post-truth, post-postmodern world, Thayil reminds us, gently, 'The real names and photographs in these pages are fictions. The fictional names and events are documentary. The truth, as we know, lies in between.' 'Elsewhere' is a construct, as political as it is cultural, that steps away from the trauma inherent in displacement (as seen in much of diasporic writing and theorisation) and embraces disruption. Ammu and George's peripatetic lifestyle takes them from the young bride's family home, Anniethottam in Kerala, to a small, shared apartment in Mahim in Bombay, and thenceforth to provincial Patna of the 1960s, in the grip of student agitations, followed by the cultural conflict and fraught racism of Hong Kong, the harsh aftermath of the war in Vietnam, and routing through Bombay and New York, lands at Bangalore, where they are forced into a lockdown during the pandemic of 2020. They become Elsewhereans who do not belong to any one place, whose home is an unmoored, shifting space, that defies rootedness. In Hong Kong, where everyone is from somewhere else, Ammu experiences Elsewhere 'as a spiritual calling' and begins to see 'internationalism as the true nationalism and freedom as the only patriotism.' This unmooring from the normativity of a fixed, unalienable 'home' and the felicity with which it is transformed into something mutable is what makes the text and its inhabitants unusual. It also captures the multi-lingual/ multi-ethnic/ multi-cultural milieu of many of its readers, for whom leaving 'home' is no longer defined by a hybrid duality. The book's primary narratorial voice belongs to Jeet, the son of Ammu and George, named rather infrequently, despite a significant presence in the narrative. As much of an Elsewherean as his parents, while also caught in that most banal of power dynamics – the father-son conflict, Jeet finds himself retracing the trajectory of journeys already undertaken. He goes to Hong Kong to work for the Asia-centric magazine initiated by his father, re-lives his father's journey in Vietnam, in search of the woman in a photograph he finds in his father's documents, and travels to Paris to visit Baudelaire's grave in a re-tracing of his Uncle Markose's lifelong dedication to the works of the French poet. Jeet insists he is a migrant, not an immigrant, reiterating the difference between someone who wants to make home afresh in a new location and someone whose home moves with them, affecting no need for permanence. He is not the only one choosing a life of continual transit. In a church in Dessie, Ethiopia, Uma, Ammu's sister-in-law, finds a portrait of Mary, Joseph and Jesus, dark-skinned like her, and recognizes in them the aura of Elsewhere: 'Mary and Joseph were migrants when Jesus was born, and for years afterwards. Jesus was a migrant. His family went from one place to another to stay alive. Movement. Movement is God's message'. Early in the book, George points to the centrality of the same sort of movement in the Indian epics as well – in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Elsewhere, then, becomes the human condition for those who subvert stasis, for whom 'home is anywhere but here', whether voluntarily or under coercion. Places and contexts Recent shifts in geopolitics have brought us to a point where history itself has become suspect, subject to constant revisioning, elisions and erasure by governments and systems of education. Fiction and memoirs seem to have nimbly stepped into the gaps that appear in official accounts and textbooks, such that more history – cultural, social, political and personal – is being told in the interstices between fiction and non-fiction than in classrooms and public discourse. The Elsewhereans firmly situates itself within this space where the accounts of the people in its pages also become accounts of the places and contexts they emerge from. When Ammu is in what looks like interminable labour at Anniethottam, there are protest rallies being organised across the state against the Namboodiripad government by anti-communist church organisations allied with the Congress party, the reader learns, getting a minor lesson in the turbulent politics of the state. Da Nang, Jeet's guide during his visit to Vietnam, structures her 'sightseeing' plan to bring alive the history of the war – its horrors, its violence, and the pushback of the Vietnamese people – to tourists who are left questioning their certainties. State control in China and the fallout of the Cultural Revolution are brought home in vivid detail in the narrator's conversations with Lijia, a photographer and documentarian whose father was penalised for his seemingly radical poetry and came perilously close to being executed as a political prisoner. Thayil writes of encounters with racism and the debilitating politics of hyper-nationalism that uses language and linguistic difference as tools of oppression. 'To know history is to know loss, and the displaced know it best', he writes, and the text stands testimony to its truth. In calling this a 'documentary novel', Thayil pushes the boundaries of both genres, incorporating visual, visceral elements in his narrative while disregarding the rules of plot and temporality. Re-constructing memory through material documents and in storytelling, the book travels through timelines, connecting places and events in a manner as itinerant as its characters are. It is the Elsewhereans, people who cannot be assigned a singular location or identity, that give the book its raison d'être, pulling the reader, almost voyeuristically, into the everyday concerns, anxieties, and triumphs of Thayil's characters. At Ammu and George's wedding, we are introduced to Thommen, a wedding chef 'famous for his bad temper and his red meen curry'. It is to Thayil's credit that the force of Thommen's personality lingers in the reader's memory just as much as the spectral taste of his feast lingers on the palate. The 'opiated midwife' who attends to Ammu has a string of legends that follow in her wake and is also a conduit into the history of the opium trade and colonisation in Asia. Then, there are the rule-breaking women – Nguyen Phuc Chau, immortalised in a black-and-white photograph of the woman on a motorcycle, responsible for keeping George alive during his time in Vietnam; her granddaughter, Da Nang, who named herself after her father's hometown, a major site of battle during the Vietnam War; and Chachiamma, Jeet's cousin who chose herself over social obligations. These Elsewhereans weave in and out of each other's stories, constructing a complex structure that needs the reader's participation to come together as a whole. Unusually, for Thayil's incisive writing, at the core of The Elsewhereans is a delicate handling of complex emotions. Grief, frustration, joy, and love all play across the relationships of our Elsewhereans. Ammu's assumption of marital responsibilities that George had started to shed from the very beginning of their marriage sets in motion a critique of marriage and patriarchal oppression that turns darker with other relationships, other marriages in the narrative, leading to the insipid conclusion that women who resent their husbands do not often leave them. Until they do. The breakdown of communication between fathers and sons, the inability to accommodate difference, and relationships caught in the liminality of love and resentment is another thing the narrative captures, without any drama, any cloying sentimentality. Its understated response to grief- stemming from the loss of home or a beloved or oneself – is as heartbreaking as it is compelling. Thayil takes the affect of grief and ties it to an ongoing project of social mirroring. Alongside a young Jeet, the reader must learn that 'the dead did not return. Their peculiarities fade first, then their faces and last of all their voices.' 'In time', Markose tells him, 'you'll find that our forgetfulness about death and a hundred other things, for example, the keeping of slaves, the contempt for people of darker races and castes, the belief in godmen, the denial of equality, fraternity and liberty, all this is not the sole prerogative of Indians.' Did grieving just turn political? You might need an Elsewherean to confirm.
