In new light
Preti Taneja comes up with a thought provoking adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear set in contemporary India.
What is Delhi about if not land and money?
Delhi of a certain kind, of course. The kind that needs a golf cart to motor through their farmhouses; that swathes their women in diamonds and no dignity; that ensures their men are trust fund babies for the rest of their lives; that think little of the lives of others. Former journalist and now a filmmaker, Preti Taneja's We That Are Young is a searing expose disguised as King Lear, and one of the finest novels to have come out of the new liberalised Delhi, of manicured public prettiness and ungoverned private cruelty.
How did you get the nuances of a rich property-based family living in the outskirts of Delhi so well?
Some of my earliest memories are of running around the back stairs of fine hotels across India while my mother, a cookery writer and entrepreneur, met with the chefs to discuss recipes for her books. In Delhi, I have a close group of childhood friends and family-the book wouldn't exist without them. There's also the vast amount of writing out there already-VS Naipaul's India: a Wounded Civilisation, Gurcharan Das' How to be Good and P Sainath's Everybody Loves a Good Drought are just a few of the classic non-fiction books I drew on. I also worked briefly as a financial journalist on the FT trade papers when I was starting my career; that took me behind the scenes of how international money works and plays. I used that training to get behind the scenes of some of the city's best hotels-from slums on the peripheries to back kitchens to heads of households-everyone I met knew I was working on a book, and was very generous with their stories. It was clear when I wasn't always being told the full truth. Writing We That Are Young was about using all my senses, listening between the lines, and finding ways to represent some of the themes I heard- exploitation, sexual repression, loneliness, and violence.
In many ways, Shakespeare can now be set only in the subcontinent, can't it? With its grand themes of extreme betrayal and extreme devotion?
Yes it's a great place to set Shakespeare! Doing so opens up an exploration of the colonial legacies of language, culture, social and political systems; it makes us question whether we can ever accept our own hybridity. All of us are mixtures of different races and cultures. In terms of themes: the appeals to different gods and goddesses, to nature in King Lear correlate to contemporary India so well, as do issues such as dowry. The cries of despair, the struggle towards a better world-the idea we are all responsible for the world we live in and that we can and must challenge the status quo: we find all of this in India today-and it is all there in Shakespeare too.
There is a deep sickness that manifests itself in the patriarch's violence. The subterranean violence is very particular to India. As a society how do we deal with it?
This kind of violence exists where there is a culture of impunity so deep that almost everyone is implicated, and almost everyone is at risk. It comes from an inequality and lack of accountability so entrenched it seems impossible to address. But we cannot keep sleepwalking through it. It's up to each one of us to care-not just for our own, or for our own ideological or economic ends. That kind of work, to really see others as equal, and act on that begins in the home.
What is Delhi about if not land and money?Delhi of a certain kind, of course. The kind that needs a golf cart to motor through their farmhouses; that swathes their women in diamonds and no dignity; that ensures their men are trust fund babies for the rest of their lives; that think little of the lives of others. Former journalist and now a filmmaker, Preti Taneja's We That Are Young is a searing expose disguised as King Lear, and one of the finest novels to have come out of the new liberalised Delhi, of manicured public prettiness and ungoverned private cruelty.
How did you get the nuances of a rich property-based family living in the outskirts of Delhi so well?
Some of my earliest memories are of running around the back stairs of fine hotels across India while my mother, a cookery writer and entrepreneur, met with the chefs to discuss recipes for her books. In Delhi, I have a close group of childhood friends and family-the book wouldn't exist without them. There's also the vast amount of writing out there already-VS Naipaul's India: a Wounded Civilisation, Gurcharan Das' How to be Good and P Sainath's Everybody Loves a Good Drought are just a few of the classic non-fiction books I drew on. I also worked briefly as a financial journalist on the FT trade papers when I was starting my career; that took me behind the scenes of how international money works and plays. I used that training to get behind the scenes of some of the city's best hotels-from slums on the peripheries to back kitchens to heads of households-everyone I met knew I was working on a book, and was very generous with their stories. It was clear when I wasn't always being told the full truth. Writing We That Are Young was about using all my senses, listening between the lines, and finding ways to represent some of the themes I heard- exploitation, sexual repression, loneliness, and violence.
In many ways, Shakespeare can now be set only in the subcontinent, can't it? With its grand themes of extreme betrayal and extreme devotion?
Yes it's a great place to set Shakespeare! Doing so opens up an exploration of the colonial legacies of language, culture, social and political systems; it makes us question whether we can ever accept our own hybridity. All of us are mixtures of different races and cultures. In terms of themes: the appeals to different gods and goddesses, to nature in King Lear correlate to contemporary India so well, as do issues such as dowry. The cries of despair, the struggle towards a better world-the idea we are all responsible for the world we live in and that we can and must challenge the status quo: we find all of this in India today-and it is all there in Shakespeare too.
There is a deep sickness that manifests itself in the patriarch's violence. The subterranean violence is very particular to India. As a society how do we deal with it?
This kind of violence exists where there is a culture of impunity so deep that almost everyone is implicated, and almost everyone is at risk. It comes from an inequality and lack of accountability so entrenched it seems impossible to address. But we cannot keep sleepwalking through it. It's up to each one of us to care-not just for our own, or for our own ideological or economic ends. That kind of work, to really see others as equal, and act on that begins in the home.
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