Even though the novel isn't exclusively about Mumbai's underworld, it does play a large part. Over the past two years, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram concentrate on that aspect of the city too.
Did the appearance of either book affect your writing in any way? After all, a number of people who helped you with research helped Suketu Mehta too...
It didn't really affect my work because, when you're writing fiction, the life of the fiction lives in the specifics of what you're doing. You have formal intent, thematic intent and the lives of your characters, so I knew that whatever I did was bound to be different. Also, the great topics are done again and again anyway, so I don't mind that at all.
An essay you once wrote for the Boston Review, 'The Cult of Authenticity', described the emphasis Indian critics used to place on phrases like 'Indianness in a Western context', with reference to your work. You sounded angry at the time.
Are you worried about people here reacting to your novel by throwing these terms at you again? It's been a little over a decade since Red Earth and Pouring Rain was released. Would you change anything about it to address this sort of criticism?
Not really. For me, if you draw from various founts of literature, and traditions within India that have existed side by side with what started as eighteenth and nineteenth century realism, all of that co-exists. I was quite comfortable with that, and still am.
As a writer, however, you question what you have written even a year after you're done (laughs). Your consciousness and perhaps your style alters, shifting in response to the experience or theme you are writing about. I am quite comfortable with the politics of the book (Red Earth...). It is interesting in the sense that it found its own readership in the world. That was my first education in the weird ways by which a book travels. Just getting email from people from really faraway places, for instance...
A lot of people have often wondered about that -- the risk of putting your e-mail address up for everyone to take note of.
When I did it in 1995, my editors were flabbergasted (laughs). But, I used to write reviews of computer hardware and software while in graduate school, and it was normal to publish an article with your e-mail address at the bottom. It still is very useful for me.
This modern idea of an author who keeps his distance, the aura of being a recluse, is different from what, for me, is the invigorating position of being a storyteller. You tell a story, it goes away into the world and people make what they will of it. Getting to understand or observe what people are making of it is fascinating.
Read an exclusive extract from Sacred Games: Tales from the Underworld
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