“The more opposition I get, the more energy I get” – An Interview with Sudeep Chakravarty
Image: Jaipur Literature Festival / YouTube
Author and journalist Sudeep Chakravarty speaks about the stories that drive him, wandering across genres, and his Delhi-based latest work, Fallen City.
It’s inevitable for anyone deeply interested in reading and understanding the many aspects of India to come across Sudeep Chakravarty’s extensive body of work. Chakravarty’s latest is Fallen City: A Double Murder, Political Insanity, and Delhi’s Descent from Grace (Aleph Book Company, 2024), a true crime novel enmeshed around major historical episodes. The book adds to Chakravarty’s eclectic bibliography that encompasses novels, business guides, historical tomes, and more.
Fallen City covers the high-profile kidnappings and murders of siblings Geeta and Sanjay Chopra in late 1978. But the book is also the story of a nation still reeling from the consequences of the Emergency imposed by prime minister Indira Gandhi. Through the story of that crime, Chakravarty captures the tumultuous times in a country before the larger bouts of violence in the riots of 1984 and 1992.
I caught up with Chakravarty earlier this year amidst the chitter-chatter and hustle-bustle characteristic of the Jaipur Literature Festival. We spoke on a multitude of topics, from his choices in selecting topics for his books, to how he brings different sensibilities to the various genres of work. Edited excerpts:
The Chakkar: Tell us about the opening of Fallen City, which features a long passage that sets the context of the tale. There was a fine mishmash of literary techniques, where you present not just the story of these two major characters, but an important larger backdrop at hand.
“I thought that there was an equally interesting story to be told, which is in the same universe. Because Delhi is moving on, India is moving on. I don’t like stories in a vacuum. I need a superstructure. I need a context.”
Chakravarty: That was intended, where I’m talking about how they met the fates. There’s a sort of continuous paragraph. There is a similar passage in The Bengalis, which is a long sentence, like, We are this way, have you seen this? Have you seen that? And it’s on the blurb, the continuous sentence. [Fallen City] has a page-and-a-half-long sentence which ends with “Geeta and Sanjay met their fates”. I was trying to set it up as a literary technique. I know it can be cumbersome to some people, but to me, this sort of set the tone of the universe of Delhi the same day that all this was happening. It was a deliberate writing technique that I thought would describe it best at that point in time.
So, I mesh my experiences. In my fiction, I bring my journalistic techniques of research and rigour and a multi-dimensional look at things. In my non-fiction writing, I like to bring novelistic techniques without losing the rigour of non-fiction. I often use novelistic techniques to tell the [non-fiction] story, like that passage [referred above] is a novelistic technique. Like Jeet Thayil’s, The Book of Chocolate Saints, or Narcopolis… long paragraphs! It’s a technique which I like to employ from book to book. I don’t want to be bound or pinned down to one description or one genre. I love writing, and I want to tell the story that comes to me most organically, and I feel confident enough to tell the story.
The Chakkar: It’s very clear in your work that you do not want to tell just the story of how this everything happened, but you also want to tell the story of Delhi and India. Was that intentional, or was that something that happened gradually as you worked on Fallen City?
Chakravarty: No, that was intentional. Everything happens within a context. [The book] is a true crime reconstruction of the murder and investigation and the judicial process that followed, and how Delhi and India were consumed and transfixed by its government. But I saw many interesting things happening alongside it. It was just after the Emergency, the Janata government was in power, and I wanted to locate it in an arc of the Emergency to the anti-Sikh riots. I thought that there was an equally interesting story to be told, which is in this sort of the same universe. Because Delhi is moving on, India is moving on. I thought that a parallel story was very important to tell.
I don’t like stories in a vacuum.. I need a superstructure. I need a context.
The Chakkar: Your books travel across genres, topics, and many different aspects of society. Is there an intentionality in doing so? For example, your last book was on Northeast India, and this one is very different: true crime and the history of contemporary Delhi in parallel. What is the process like for you of picking your projects or choosing your topics?
Chakravarty: I’ve now published 10 books, and I’m working on my 11th. As you said, most of my books are not genre-specific. I write on areas of interest. But my first book was a novel. I wrote it because I was at the top of my profession as a journalist at that point in time, but was looking for a break away from my usual routine and rhythm. I actually moved from Delhi after spending nearly 25 years, lock, stock, and barrel to Goa. So, I just didn’t want a mental shift. I wanted a physical shift from my life and my location. I wanted to write. I’m driven by stories that I think were not told enough in my years as a mainstream journalist or as an editor, and I felt the urgency to try and tell the story then. So that’s what drove me to start writing books.
I’ve written nearly 1000 articles, columns, and essays. But books are books. Books are different. You need a different mindset, you need a different message, you need a different motivation to write books, which is very, very different from writing a column, which I can write like breathing. But books are laboured breathing, easy breathing, lack of air, hyperventilation, panic attacks, and sometimes very calm breathing. Writing a book brings in all of these kinds of emotions, because that’s what books do.
After a novel, I decided to address non-fiction because I wanted—I won’t say ‘voices of the voiceless’—but essentially, stories that I thought needed all the telling. So I wrote Red Sun, which is a study on the modern-day Maoist rebellion. After that, I wrote a novel. After that, I wrote a book of nonfiction, again, which is set in Northeast India, again, a geography and a story that I thought needed telling because I thought that there were a lot of miscommunications and misunderstandings between what the Northeast calls ‘Mainland’ India, and what we call the Northeast. There’s a lot of disconnect and misunderstanding between these two regions. And I wanted to explain to mainland India why the dynamics of the Northeast are the way it is. Because there was a black hole, a vacuum that I saw while I was a full-time journalist, I found that there’s not enough writing on the Northeast. There’s sort of a wilful misunderstanding of urban Northeast. So, I was driven to write by these urges.
“When there is a jadedness, and when people are not listening or refusing to listen: that’s when the writer’s job or a journalist’s job or a storyteller’s job truly picks up value and quality. That’s when we need to walk on and say, No, listen to this. Read this, because you need to know. You need to think.”
After that, I wrote a book on business and human rights because I began as a business journalist, and that’s another aspect I thought India wasn’t addressing enough. Then, another novel, but this is almost like a loose sequel to my first, set in Delhi. It was sort of a cathartic thing, maybe a self-indulgent story. After that, I wrote The Bengalis, which is a very different kind of book. My publisher said, Do you want to do this book? I said, Sure. That came from my publisher. From that, I came back to Plassey, which was history, as I’m a student of history.
So, you’re right. My literary journey (if I can be presumptuous to call it that) is essentially driven by my urge to tell the stories that I want to tell, rather than it being dictated by the market. Before Fallen City, my new book, there was The Eastern Gate, set in the Northeast or eastern South Asia, a non-fiction, with stories that I thought needed all the telling, and I wanted to tell.
My next book is back to being history, which I’m writing now. I can only say that it’s set in medieval India—which is a very competitive situation—but it’s a book of pure history. I want to write another book of fiction, but I don’t think I’m ready to write it right now. Maybe in two or three years, or five years, I might be in the right place. My skills will probably match the ambition of the novel.
So, that is all that drives me. It’s not anything formal; it’s a mix of everything.
The Chakkar: As a journalist, I’m curious to know how you navigate a world that seems to be more apathetic than ever?
Chakravarty: Oh, that makes me even more energized. To push back when the world gets apathetic and people get jailed—that’s the time to push hardest. You know, when people have bought into your programme or your outlook, then it’s a tame world. You’re preaching to the converted. When there is a jadedness, and when people are not listening or refusing to listen: that’s when the writer’s job or a journalist’s job or a storyteller’s job truly picks up value and quality. That’s when we need to walk on and say, No, listen to this. Read this, because you need to know. You need to think.
So, the more opposition I get, the more energy I get to walk the story. I’m motivated to tell the story. You push back against me. I’ll push back with my story; try and stop me, you cannot.
The Chakkar: Are there any books that you would like to recommend, that have shaped you, or you think are very important?
Chakravarty: The books that have shaped me are hundreds. When I was growing up, I found the books of Kurt Vonnegut very moving. JG Ballard, Anthony Burgess. JD Salinger. In India, Mahasweta Devi, Bhisham Sahni, Rabindranath Tagore, terrific stuff. Nazrul Islam. At our home, my parents would give me books for my birthdays; I would not get clothes or treats.
There are various names, because certain things are interesting at certain times in your life. These are phases. Now I’m a middle-aged man, I read books which affect me in a different way at this point in time, but I respect the learnings I’ve had by reading the work of others, and that’s a learning that I continue to have, because I think in order to write, you got to keep reading. It’s an intrinsic act. Without reading, I think it’s difficult to be a good writer.
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Amritesh Mukherjee is a writer and editor. He is a content writer at a marketing agency and the long-form lead at Purple Pencil Project, a platform to promote Indian literature (and languages). You can find him on Instagram: @aroomofwords and Twitter: @aroomofwords.
