INSIDE VOICES

Parul Kapur is a novelist, journalist, and literary critic. Her short fiction centers on the aftermath of colonialism in India and the lives of Indian immigrants. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Wascana Review, Prime Number, Midway Journal, and the anthology {Ex}tinguished & {Ex}tinct. As a journalist and critic, she has written for The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ARTnews, Art in America, Guernica, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review. 

Inside the Mirror, which is inspired by her encounters with art world figures in Bombay, won the AWP Prize for the Novel and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Parul was recently named Georgia Author of the Year for First Novel by the Georgia Writers Association.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: Will you tell us about Inside the Mirror and how you found your way to Jaya's and Kamlesh's story?

The simplest way to describe the story is ‘A Portrait of the Artists as Young Women.’ The girls are twin sisters in 1950s Bombay (now Mumbai) who dream of becoming artists of different kinds—a painter and a dancer. Jaya is attracted to the modern art movement taking the city by storm. Kamlesh is mesmerized Bharata Natyam, an ancient temple dance that the British outlawed and was nearly lost. The twins’ father is a progressive man who decides to educate Jaya as a doctor and Kamlesh as a teacher. Afterward, he expects to arrange their marriages. But they have ambitions to seize their power as artists.

The story grew organically over twenty years, but came together very suddenly, in four months, when I had to distill the narrative and cut the manuscript nearly in half for publication. Rewriting at rapid speed gave it new energy. Similarly, its beginning was sudden. A literary agent I met in New York while I was in the MFA program at Columbia liked my short stories but told me only novels sold. I needed to write a novel. I was twenty-four years old and daunted by the assignment. After a couple of false starts, I found my way to this story of twin sister artists, probably because I’d always longed for a sister and because I was a young woman hellbent on becoming an artist myself—a writer.

I knew whatever I wrote would be set in Bombay, where I’d just spent the most momentous year of my life as a reporter. Reconnecting to India on my own, without my parents presence, was essential to me, since I’d left as a child and wanted to know I still had a home there. Slowly, my experiences in Bombay, writing about artists, dancers, and even the residents of slum colony for a city magazine, worked their way into my novel. The time is mid-century because I was nostalgic for the India when my parents came of age, which I’d heard many entertaining stories about.

Inside Voices/Robert: Jaya and Kamlesh are twins, and they share a similar struggle to find a way to live in the practical world—pleasing their family, not alienating themselves from society—and also be true to themselves as artists. They go about it differently. Will you talk about what motivates Jaya and Kamlesh to go on their separate journeys?

Their childhood takes place during a turbulent time, and tragedy becomes the genesis of their arts. As twelve-year-olds, they witness the grief of relatives who’ve lost everything in the Partition of India—homes, wealth, close family members. Some of these refugee relatives take shelter in their home, and the girls absorb their distress. Jaya draws scenes of the violence she hears about. Their mother realizes they need an outlet for their disturbing emotions. Drawing and dance lessons become escapes that set each girl off on a journey to discover her creative powers. 

As they mature, Jaya emerges as the more practical one. She negotiates with her parents to get a modern art teacher, despite the lowly reputation of male painters, and later negotiates permission to leave home—unheard of for an unmarried girl—to live with a female mentor. Kamlesh lives more deeply in her fantasies, wanting so fiercely to become a dancer that she doesn’t fully reckon with the fact that dancing on stage and in the movies would break every taboo of her society. Like many powerless people, she resorts to deceit to get what she wants. In the end, though, both girls are faced with breaking the sacred bond with family, which feels like a mortal wound in a society where family is the core of oneself.   

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: Mirrors and mirroring images are so important. There is the dressing table with multiple mirrors. The paintings become a mirror of sorts as one twin paints the other. I'd love to hear more about this theme that runs through your book.

Growing up, I would sometimes stare at myself in the mirror not out of vanity but curiosity—Who is this person? I lived in my head a lot and couldn’t reconcile the abstract world of thinking and feeling I mostly existed in with the finite image in the glass. In the book, the mirror becomes a vehicle for reckoning with reality and the limitations of our identity. The way the world sees us also impacts us. And, of course, art is considered a mirror of life, and the story looks into the artist’s life, all the drama, pain and conflict she draws from and must rise above to create something meaningful and beautiful.   

Inside Voices/Robert: Jaya wonders if beauty is reason enough to paint something. She also muses on the artist’s struggle to capture and translate what we see into art. Will you talk in a little more detail about her journey as an artist and the challenges she faces to capture what touches her as important?

Jaya’s dilemma is that she’s frustrated painting flowers, a subject her teacher led her to, but she doesn’t know what else she might paint. The dilemma of the subject is one a lot of young artists confront. Flower painting goes back to Mughal art in India and it was also considered an acceptable subject for the female hobby artist, as were sentimentalized village scenes, which Jaya also paints. It feels like a kind of liberation when the faces of the suffering patients she sees at medical college come bursting out of her. Eventually her heart splits between two subjects, perhaps natural for a twin—her sister in the motion of dancing and poor women in a remote hillside slum where her grandmother takes her to do volunteer work. The important thing about these women, she comes to see, is not the hardships they endure, but the vitality and capacity for happiness they possess despite everything. This leads Jaya to the idea of shakti, the Sanskrit world for female creative energy. I think of shakti as the foundation that launches her future.   

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: A hallmark of Post-Colonial India was strict rules, especially the different ones for men and women. The common room with the table tennis is but one example. I'd like to know how those constraints shaped how you crafted this tale?

The segregation of the sexes used to be absolute. Girls and boys were educated at separate schools. They didn’t mix socially. The first time anyone had a close encounter with a member of the opposite sex was at their wedding! An exception to this segregation was medical college, which admitted both sexes by the 1950s, though the number of female students, like Jaya, was miniscule. Since it used to be exclusively male, the campus was still oriented that way with a boys’ common room that she and her friends deliberately breach. When she enters into an illicit romance with an older student, she guards it with the utmost secrecy, even from other students, because it’s taboo. But this relationship becomes part of her journey of freeing herself, just like art. Jaya isn’t an outwardly rebellious person, but she’s inner directed, and a person who listens to their own voice is sometimes the most subversive of all. 

Inside Voices/Robert: Kamlesh is an accomplished dancer and is infatuated with the movie industry and longs to make films. What was the inspiration for her. Is she based on a dancer or actress of the time?

I’d studied Bharata Natyam as an undergrad at Wesleyan from a disciple of the legendary Balasaraswati and found it thrilling. So, when I decided Jaya would have a twin, I imagined her to be a dancer because I loved the dance and was familiar with a beginner’s practice. Later, I spoke to a professional dancer for deeper knowledge of the art. Also, somewhere in the back of my mind was a story my mother had told me about a college friend whose sister was the actress Bina Rai. When Bina Rai came to campus once, all the girls rushed to take a look and were dazzled by her beauty. Only in revisions did it occur to me to make the connection between Kamlesh and Bina Rai explicit. I decided she would be inspired by Bina Rai in her most famous role as the dancer Anarkali and feel emboldened in her secret quest for stardom by an actress who comes from a respectable family like her. Though India is mad for the movies, which are full of song and dance, actresses used to be denigrated as women of ill-repute, since some did come from courtesan backgrounds in the early years of film. The culture prized a woman’s modesty, so public performance was stigmatized as shameful. Bina Rai bridged the gap between stardom and respectability, which reassures Kamlesh she can do the same. 

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: You make an art of describing Jaya's paintings. Is she based on a real painter, and do any of the paintings exist?

Jaya grew out of my passion for visual art. If I hadn’t been a writer, I would have loved to become a painter. Creating her was also an act of defiance. During my year working at Bombay magazine, I covered the art scene and met a longtime gallerist who’d witnessed the birth of the modern art movement in 1947, the same year as independence, with the founding of the Progressive Artists Group. He recalled them as a band of poor, unruly, contentious but extremely talented painters, though they were big names by the time we spoke in the 80s. I asked him if there had been any women artists in the group and he flatly said no. There were no women artists at the time. A couple of years later in New York, as I contemplated writing my novel, I wondered, what if there had been one bold woman?

Recently it was discovered there was a woman artist who exhibited with the Progressives at their first show, but she soon abandoned her painting career.

Inside Voices/Robert: I’m paraphrasing, but Jaya observes, “In medicine, you remove yourself from the person so that you can focus on the illness. In painting, you take a step back from the work so that you can find your way more deeply into your subject.” How does Jaya navigate this in the almost double life she leads?

Medicine is the vocation her father chooses for her since she’s an excellent student, and he has full authority over his children’s lives. When the book opens, Jaya is a first-year anatomy student, dissecting cadavers and witnessing the suffering of countless patients at her teaching hospital. You haven’t seen suffering at its most graphic until you’ve walked into an Indian government hospital that treats the poor. By nature she’s an emotionally intense person, so she’s overwhelmed by everything she sees. 

A doctor has to keep a certain distance from the patient to maintain the clarity needed to treat them. Jaya is not able to pull back from the people she’s learning to diagnose. She falls into their suffering with them, she’s horrified and haunted by the dead bodies she dissects. Even when I researched medical student life in Bombay in the 1980s, the bodies the students dissected weren’t highly processed as they are today. They were soaked in Formalin but otherwise looked fully human laid out on the table. Jaya comes home and expels these images on canvas. The stepping back occurs when she’s in the flow of painting and gains control over the picture. She’s able to stop, look it over, and decide how to proceed. In that moment, she’s both inside and outside the image, achieving an objectivity she’s incapable of in the wards amid other people’s pain.   

Inside Voices/Robert: What's next for you?

I’m revising a new novel about a young man struggling against the legacy of British corruption in India. They continued to dominate the economy long after independence and he ends up fighting white-collar crime at a large British company and later at a family firm. He becomes a whistleblower with devastating consequences on his marriage and family. One of the few options left to him is immigration. It’s a specific story from my family history, but I hope it illustrates the broader connection between colonial rule’s wrecking of India and the flight of Indians away from that wreckage to America.