Tags: New Literature
Asha Thanki was given a college assignment: interview a member of your family, and understand their relationship to a fraught historical event or structure. So Thanki interviewed her late grandmother about her late grandfather leaving Karachi for Gujarat during Partition, catalyzing the core of her debut novel A Thousand Times Before.
A Thousand Times Before is an expansive, intergenerational novel that takes inspiration from Thanki’s own family migration story – from pre-Partition India to the contemporary United States. It follows three generations of women and their supernatural connections to making art. It is also the story of queer love, framed as an oral history Ayukta tells her wife Nadya to explain her family’s gift – or curse. Kajal sat down to discuss Thanki’s artistic process, the novel’s historical background, and how the book meets this political moment of rising nationalism in South Asia, with India named a country at risk for genocide.
Kajal: So much of this book was written in 2020, during a time of isolation. What do you think that context gives to the writing?
Asha Thanki: The writing of this book was inseparable from the time it was written, and that timing is shaped so much by what was going on in my life. From a purely process standpoint, I don’t think I would have written it as fast as I did had I not been isolated. Returning to it now is a bit of a return to that headspace of some fear, angst, and grief that dominated the way I drafted this from 2019-2021 especially.
Losing my grandmother in 2019 was the reason that I pivoted from a different project to this one. In some ways, I know I could not have done it if not for that strange time of life, but it is weird to look back and see it as a product of the writer I was then and the person I was then. It can make launching it into the world a bit of a strange mirror – I feel like I’m looking through this kaleidoscope back at the person I was and trying to figure out how I’m managing those feelings now.
You bring a complexity to difficult historical periods that moves them beyond hardship into the details of what helps people survive. How did you think about that balance?
There was an interview I did in 2019 with my grandfather’s older brother – he passed in 2020. I was in India with my mom, which was the first time as an adult I had gone to India with my mom which was also great for translation reasons because otherwise I would be speaking in a kind of stilted Gujarati. We were asking her uncle about taking the steamboat from Karachi to Gujarat. My grandfather, who passed in the 2000s, was a kid then, but his older brother was a teenager, so he had a greater hold of that memory.
My mom found out that my grandfather, who was somebody who never ate out and wasn’t a cook at home, was running a nashta, a salty snacks shop. The look on my mom’s face when she realized – it was ground-shifting in her understanding of her dad. In that moment, it was almost like the version of her dad that she got to learn about made the version of him that she actually knew even better, or made him more of the person she might have wanted him to be, even if those things were withheld from her. I think the gender dynamics, labor dynamics, were never as evolved as they might have been had she known this.
That feeling that there’s a reason why someone is the way they are, or that if you sit and ask enough questions, you can find something out – that’s what I was interested in. Amla, the main character, is not my grandfather, but writing her was an exercise in my own family history. I would sit down and wonder at his experience.
Asha Thanki photographed by Serena Seshadri
There’s a thread in the book related to queer love, even in a historical context. There’s a lot said about queer futures, but often the past isn’t as filled with imagining. How were you thinking about that?
There’s a part of writing the history where I get to follow my grandparents’ migration pattern with something I would love to know – if there were queer people in that generation – but instead just get to create. Like of course I wanted a little gay grandmother. If fiction gives us futures that allow us to be aspirational in terms of what we want to build, then looking backwards has to give us the ability to say, “This isn’t new.” This type of love and person is always around. Especially in a world where the politics of India are so grounded in, “This is what this country was built on,” I wanted to problematize the dominant narrative especially for caste-privileged Hindu families.
Can you speak a little bit about your political hopes for the book?
I am forever going to be worried that the politics in the book are downplayed. I think people read Pachinko sometimes and don’t read it as a novel about Japanese imperialism, but I read it as inherently about that. None of the story could have happened if it weren’t for those politics.
A Thousand Times Before takes place in moments that contribute to the BJP in power. Partition is inherent to the idea of a Hindu state. 1974 leads into 1975 Emergency. The logic or success that comes from ousting a state government means that new governments take hold and one of those is the BJP.
I wanted to explore the moment people began to push back on the narrative of the state and say, “Is this actually what we want? We’re not so old as a country, is this the type of democracy we want to build?” If we sit with the history of India where people were disappeared and murdered and dissidents were repressed – you have to have a critical history of how the BJP came to power. That’s a lens we can apply to many places. We should be skeptical of anyone who tells us that their land is a promised land for any people.
In the book, each generation gets more and more disenchanted with the idea of the state. There’s a responsibility that comes from the fact that this novel is about a caste-privileged Hindu-descended Gujarati family, and people within that positionality are the ones actively contributing to a Hindu fascist state. I would like a reader to think about what responsibility a person in that position has. The characters in the novel start doing work around that.
I’d rather not write a story that’s from a positionality that’s so different from mine that it would be so much better done by somebody from the community. If the outcome is that someone with my positionality reads the book and says, “I could have questioned this the whole time,” then that’s a political success.
What are you most excited about in joining a lineage of Asian writers?
I would like to keep going in writing political histories – that’s what I’m excited for. How do we indict our own community in particular politics, while also telling a story and one that is compelling and hopefully beautiful and has as much of that political responsibility as it has a deep love and compassion and praxis that is steady at its core.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.