Janice Pariat is an Indian author and poet.

Her books include Everything the Light Touches: A Novel (2022), The Nine-Chambered Heart (2017), Seahorse (2014), and Boats on Land (2012).

In 2013, Janice was awarded the Yuva Puraskar (Young Writer Award) by the Sahitya Akademi, and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction for Boats on Land.

Her novel Everything the Light Touches is out with HarperCollins India, Borough Press UK, and HarperVia USA. It won the Author Award for Best Fiction in 2023, and was listed in The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2022”.

The Nine-Chambered Heart has been translated into ten languages including Italian, Spanish, French, and German.

Janice has also written art reviews, book reviews, fiction and poetry for several national magazines and newspapers. In 2014 she was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, UK, and in 2019, a Writer in Residence at the TOJI Residency in South Korea.

Talking About Books interviewed her on her novel Everything the Light Touches, the way we interact with nature, and the importance of myths and legends.

TAB: Everything the Light Touches is a wide-ranging novel that tells the story of four people separated by time and place. What was the inspiration behind the book? How did you select these four stories?

JP: A long-ago visit to a garden somewhere in England, I think it was Salisbury but I’m not sure, where I came across a small exhibition on Victorian women botanists and their wild, unruly lives. The character of Evie popped into my head—a young woman scientist travelling on a quest to India. What was it that she was seeking? I had to write the book to find out…  Evie led me to Goethe, Goethe led me to Linnaeus, and eventually, all these stories are cradled by Shai’s narrative, which offers us what I like to call the long perspective.

TAB: The section on Carl Linnaeus is entirely in poetry or in prose poems. Why did you choose this particular format?

JP: My idea was this—that within a novel that hoped to question our penchant to categorize, I would insert, amidst the prose, a section of lyric narrative, one told entirely through verse, and more specifically, Erasure. Erasure poetry is crafted using an original pre-existing text, and mine would be Linnaeus’s Lachesis Lapponica or A Tour in Lapland. The journal entries would serve as material for poems—not in the more tangible way that Erasure can function (for example, “blacking out” or visibly obscuring portions of the text to craft a wholly new work from what remains) but in a gentler, less intrusive manner. To take Linnaeus’s words and place them in a poem, sometimes teasing them into a sestina or sonnet form, or allowing them to work in free and blank verse. The original work haunts the new, just as Linnaeus’s worldview continues to haunt us.

TAB: One of the themes of Everything the Light Touches is the way we interact with nature. While Linnaeus breaks up plants into their constituent parts to better categorize them, Goethe believes that plants should be seen as whole organisms that are constantly changing. These approaches are diametrically opposed. Do you think there is space for both?

JP: I would say I’m inclined to support Goethe and his way of seeing in unity and holism and that the Linnean worldview requires interrogation or perhaps even a complete reworking. We cannot continue, for centuries now, to try and contain the uncontainable.

TAB: I enjoyed the section set in Meghalaya, especially the description of life in the Khasi village of Mawmalang. Could you tell us more about the Khasi community and its literature?   

JP: The Khasi community inhabits mostly the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, India, and had for long been a largely oral community, with vibrant storytelling and musical traditions. So, our literatures lie in orality. The written word was brought to these hills by British colonialists through law and missionary work. 

TAB: You often use myths and legends in your books. How important is it to preserve and pass these on? How do they help us understand the real world?

JP: I’m not quite sure that myths and legends ought to be “preserved”. I’m disquieted by the colonial impulse to deaden and “museum-ize” everything. These stories will be told and retold as long as they are relevant, and thankfully, they seem to always be so. They function as histories, reservoirs of identity and ways of seeing.

TAB: What inspired you to start writing? What form are you more comfortable with, poetry or prose?

JP: When I was seven, I plagiarized stories by Enid Blyton. I stole her plot lines, settings, characters, particularly stories involving the Famous Five, and passed them off as my own to my intimate readership—my parents—who were very supportive despite the pieces being…derivative. At that point, I was inspired to tell stories mostly for other people’s praise and amusement—now it’s slightly less shallow! I enjoy writing both poetry and prose, though prose has come to occupy more of my writing life lately.

TAB: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I loved Everything the Light Touches and look forward to discovering your other books.

Read my review of Everything the Light Touches.

Go to Janice Pariat’s website.