Latest news with #GurnaikJohal
Scroll.in
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘A backdrop of geological time': Gurnaik Johal on why his novel has the river Saraswati in it
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.
ABC News
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
People turning into trees, mythical rivers rising...new novels by Rhett Davis and Gurnaik Johal (plus, Irish fiction with Colm Tóibín)
Australian author Rhett Davis re-imagines the everyday in his novels. In his latest, Arborescence, ordinary people begin transforming into trees. Is it a cult? Performance art? Or something else entirely? Also on the show: Guest reviewer Roanna Gonsalves discusses Saraswati, the debut novel by Gurnaik Johal, which winds its narrative around a sacred and possibly mythical river in North India. And, Kate Evans speaks with Irish writer Colm Tóibín, delving into the literary influences that have shaped his work. BOOKS Rhett Davis, Arborescence, Hachette Gurnaik Johal, Saraswati, Serpent's Tail Colm Toibin, works GUESTS Roanna Gonsalves is a writer, teacher of creative writing at UNSW, and editor of the literary journal, Southerly Colm Toibin, Irish novelist and essayist – whose books include The Blackwater Lightship, Nora Webster, Brooklyn, The Master, The Magician – and his latest, Long Island. He spoke to Kate Evans at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED Jane Austen, works Jane Austen, works Fiona McFarlane, Highway 13 Fiona McFarlane, Highway 13 Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees J.R.R. Tolkein, works J.R.R. Tolkein, works Malcolm Knox The First Friend Malcolm Knox The First Friend Raaza Jamshed, What Kept You Raaza Jamshed, What Kept You Georgia Rose Phillips, The Bearcat Georgia Rose Phillips, The Bearcat Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge Henry James, works Henry James, works Thomas Mann, works Thomas Mann, works James Baldwin, works CREDITS
Straits Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Book review: Gurnaik Johal's Saraswati a Cubist portrait of modern, global India
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox Saraswati by British-Indian author Gurnaik Johal tells of seven members of a Punjabi family spread across the globe during a time of Hindu fundamentalist resurgence in India. By Gurnaik Johal Fiction/Serpent's Tail/Paperback/374 pages/$32.95 There are shades of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) and Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) in this panorama of interconnected tales – of seven members of a Punjabi family, distantly related, spread across the globe during a time of Hindu fundamentalist resurgence in India.
The Guardian
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal review – an ambitious Indian panorama
Gurnaik Johal's first book, 2022's We Move, demonstrated how rewarding it can be for a gifted young writer to ignore conventional wisdom. Writers who land in agents' inboxes with collections of stories are invariably told to come back when they have a novel, and to write about what they know. Johal's stories were set in a world he knows intimately – the immigrant communities of west London – but they moved between professions and generations with thrilling confidence. Saraswati is also populated by a large cast of diaspora Punjabis. But where Johal's collection stood apart from the landscape it was published into, his first novel is a representative example of a ubiquitous 21st-century genre. That genre lacks a name – in 2012, Douglas Coupland proposed 'translit', which didn't catch on then and certainly won't now – but its features are all too recognisable. These novels contain multiple narratives, each set in a different country if not continent, often in a different century. Although long by modern standards, they are packed – with events, themes, facts. They address themselves to the big questions of the day, not by the traditional means of examining urban society but through a kind of bourgeois exotic. The characters are paleontologists, mixed media artists, every flavour of activist, but never dentists or electricians. The settings are often remote: tropical islands or frigid deserts. The reader puts these novels together, like jigsaw puzzles. This term won't catch on either, but one could call them 'connection novels'; not in the Forsterian sense of human hearts, but rather the ecological, cultural and financial structures that link the globe. In that sense, they have an ancestor in the post-Vietnam systems novels of DeLillo and Pynchon, except without the playfulness or the genuine paranoia. Connection novels might be the only area of contemporary literary fiction that is dominated by male writers: Richard Powers, Hari Kunzru, David Mitchell. Not coincidentally, they owe a lot to science fiction. Saraswati's characters are connected, although they don't know it at first, by DNA. They are the descendants of a proscribed intercaste marriage in 19th-century Punjab. Sejal and Jugaad have seven children, each of whom they name for a river. A century and a half later, their descendants include a Canadian rock musician, a Kenyan archaeology professor and a Mauritian entomologist who specialises in yellow crazy ant removal. The role of connector is played by an Indian journalist who eventually takes over from Johal's omniscient third-person. Beginning and ending in a near-future version of India, the narrative takes us to Svalbard, Tibet, rural British Columbia and the Chagos Islands. Brief interludes after each section tell the family origin story through a series of 'qisse' – Punjabi folktales, passed on orally. 'Saraswati' was the name of Sejal and Jugaad's seventh child. It is also the name of a mythical river that, as any Indian will tell you, meets – in a sacred rather than geographical sense – the Ganga and Yamuna at the Triveni Sangam in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad). Saraswati derives its title, and its plot, from a theory that claims that the Saraswati was a real river that originated at Mount Kailash in Tibet and flowed to the Arabian Sea. The novel opens with water returning to a dry well on the Hakra farm: once Sejal and Jugaad's home, now inherited by a young Londoner called Satnam. The water is a sign not of the workings of heaven but of the melting of Himalayan glaciers. But it is soon seized upon as the former – by frauds as well as true believers, and then by India's newly elected Hindu nationalist government, which embarks upon a nationwide scheme to revive the ancient Saraswati, in part by abrogating the Indus Waters Treaty (a magnificent bit of novelistic prescience; after the book went to press, India did in fact revoke the treaty in response to a terror attack in Kashmir). Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Saraswati has so thoroughly assimilated the features and values of its genre that, to some extent, its appeal to readers will be a function of how much they like connection novels in general. But there is also the more particular business of the suitability of writer and form – of whether Johal is playing to his strengths. There are sections of Saraswati that take the abilities displayed in We Move and extend them. Johal is a brilliant observer of romance: of uncertain beginnings and awkward endings. His heartbreaking account of a sexless but totally real marriage between two Kenyans, one Punjabi, one Black, is a worthy successor to Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage. Equally surprising and affecting is the story of Mussafir, a teenager in small-town Sindh with a Swiftie-like passion for an Indian singer. These are not short stories manqué; each could have been its own novel. But the narrative of Saraswati insists on containing them; on moving away from, rather than towards, the writer's gifts. Johal's imaginative sympathy is undercut by the homogenising evenness of his prose – every character speaks and thinks in the same register, that of London journalism – and by the heavy-handedness of his attempts at symbolism and satire. Saraswati's unstable blend of realism and allegory ultimately breaks down in the face of its central theme: modern Hindu nationalism. Like other connection novels, it is full of thorough research: into stubble burning, rinderpest and fringe archaeological theories. When it comes to Hindutva, however, reality recedes, and the allegory is less Kafka than it is Marvel Comics. Johal's India is led by a man called 'Narayan Indra' (Indra is the Hindu rain god), whose actions and rhetoric are so cartoonish as to drain away all menace and seriousness. His millenarian ravings are a world away from actually existing Hindutva, which might gesture at past golden ages but is always laser-focused on its present-day target: India's Muslims. The very best writers have had difficulty following up a debut collection with a novel. One reviewer of Philip Roth's first novel, Letting Go, suggested that writers 'should solve the second book problem the way architects solve the 13th floor problem', namely by going straight from the first book to the third. The disappointments of Saraswati, if anything, reassure for their indication of a willingness to try but fail. Gurnaik Johal is just getting started. Keshava Guha's The Tiger's Share is published by John Murray. Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal is published by Serpent's Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
An extraordinary debut from a young British writer, plus the best novels of June
Saraswati ★★★★★ by Gurnaik Johal According to Hindu scripture, the Saraswati was one of the great rivers of ancient India. In this ambitious debut, named for that river, by the British Indian writer Gurnaik Johal, a young man of similar heritage from Wolverhampton travels to his ancestral village in the Punjab following his grandmother's death. On his last visit, as a child, the well on her farm had been dry for decades. But now Satnam finds water in it. Could, as the villagers claim, this be the return of the Saraswati? The politicians who get wind of it certainly think so. If Satnam will just sign over the land, they tell him, he could be part of an 'era-defining project' to resurrect the river and 'return our country back to its former greatness'. Satnam, who's unemployed, going through a breakup and looking for a sense of purpose, cannot sign fast enough, and is soon committing acts of thuggery to encourage other landowners to do the same. We're made to wait to find out what happens to him, as the novel then cuts to the Chagos Islands and the story of a Mauritanian pest exterminator; indeed, each of Saraswati's seven long sections concern a different main character. But we continue to hear about the Saraswati, the Narendra Modi-esque prime minister who's elected on the promise of resurrecting it, and the rising tensions between India and Pakistan over the project's contravention of a water treaty. Saraswati is a sobering parable: we corrupt what is miraculous. Yet Johal never loses sight of his characters. In one section, a Canadian eco-saboteur keeps watch for her comrades as they sabotage a lumber mill. She has heard that their next target is where her mother works and phones her, casually suggesting she take some time off. But she can't say what for. It's a brilliantly charged scene. Johal's other characters include an asexual Kenyan academic, a Bollywood stuntman, a 15-year-old Pakistani influencer and a nameless female journalist: all very different, all well realised. Then, there's Sejal, a 16-year-old girl when we first meet her in 1878, 'destined to live the life of her mother, who had lived the life of her mother'. She elopes to the Punjab with a man called Jugaad, but still ends up living the narrow, destitute life she's hoped to escape. It seems an incongruous tale to be telling, until we realise it's the same tale – that our seven present-day characters are all Sejal's descendants. The connection forms a beautiful counterpoint with the Saraswati storyline. There, like the proverbial flap of a butterfly's wings, a small thing escalates into something terrible; here, the reverse happens – that is, from someone seemingly insignificant comes an amazingly various diaspora. But then almost everything in Saraswati works beautifully. Johal has written a major novel, and at his very first attempt. GC Saraswati is published by Serpent's Tail at £16.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books So People Know It's Me ★★★★☆ by Francesca Maria Benvenuto On Nisida, an island off the coast of Naples and site of a notorious juvenile prison, one inmate called Zeno – a 15-year-old who has been detained for shooting and killing another boy – is given a simple task by his Italian teacher, Ms Martina: write down what you're thinking, and you'll get furlough for Christmas. Zeno duly complies. And so through a run of sprawling entries that make up Francesca Maria Benvenuto's engrossing debut novel, So People Know It's Me, we learn about Zeno's life both before prison and inside it. There's his impoverished upbringing, which forced his mother to resort to sex work; descriptions of friends he's made on the inside, among them a guard called Franco; his girlfriend, Natalina; and the story of his slow capture by a world of criminal drug gangs that has led him to where he is now. Almost instantly, we see that Benvenuto is presenting us with that most tempting of literary archetypes: the loveable rogue, who despite having committed some of the most awful acts imaginable, still wins our sympathy through charm, and – in the case of a young criminal such as Zeno – the glimpses of innocence he occasionally betrays. We see this, and we prepare ourselves not to be taken in by it. Only here, through the unusual twists and turns of Benvenuto's narrative, the trick of the archetype works on us all the same. Compelling though this is, So People Know It's Me has an equally strong sales pitch: Benvenuto is an accomplished criminal lawyer who has defended minors in court. Her book draws from the experiences of her mother who – just like Ms Martina – worked as a teacher on Nisida, home to a very real prison for young people. And yet Benvenuto avoids wielding that authority too heavily. She never bashes over our heads the very legitimate moral problems of housing minors in a prison complex as on Nisida; rather, intimate experience affords her an empathy that feels real without being sentimental. Zeno is under no illusions that what he has done is wrong – but that does not make him less human or beyond hope. With time, his simple writing exercise becomes a project of self-realisation; near the end of the novel, Zeno begins to envision a life for himself beyond prison, perhaps even as a writer. As befits her setting near Naples, Benvenuto's original prose blends Italian with Neapolitan. Inevitably, the translator Elizabeth Harris has replaced this interplay between two languages with just one: but the more diminished English, with Zeno's voice peppered with vague colloquialisms, feels as though it belongs everywhere and nowhere at once ('she don't got no problems'). And where Harris has let the occasional Neapolitan word or phrase stand on its own – strunz, scornacchiato, 'nnammurata – we're only reminded of a layer of meaning that has been lost. This dualism is important, though: in particular, I'm left wondering where Benvenuto might have originally slipped into Neapolitan to distinguish between other dualities, such as between social classes or children and adults. (That isn't to criticise Harris's work, however. Another translator might have cast the Neapolitan in another mutually intelligible dialect – imagine a back and forth between English and Scots – but the specificities of Italy would still be lost.) But perhaps this musing is all too hypothetical, and in any case, the unavoidable compromises of translation aren't enough to detract from Benvenuto's strength as a storyteller. Her messaging is similarly deft: everybody is simultaneously the product of structural problems and also not, as Zeno proves. Good people can arise even from difficult circumstances and vice versa. That's a philosophy that survives change and iteration – and is always worth retelling. DMA
