Neel Mukherjee Meet the Author

have been some clashes, water cannon fire, pepper spray fired as well.

Migration, human dislocation is one of the dominating

And it is the springboard for Neel Mukherjee in his new novel,

Set in India, which portrays five different, but sometimes

interlocking, lives that are in flux, on the move,

looking for escape, or at least something better.

On the frontispiece of the book, before the story begins,

you quote a Syrian refugee on the Austrian border,

saying: "Migrants, we're not migrants - we're ghosts.

Now, the ghost is sort of suspended between this world and the next.

Yes, that is exactly the soul of my book.

I wanted to look at migration, which is the thing that most

People moving, mass movement of people from one place to another.

And I wanted to sort of splice their history by thinking

A ghost is something, a ghost is a creature that has not

And the unhappy history of migration in the 20th and the 21st century.

And I wanted to look at the history of people moving.

But not in the form of the immigrant novel,

which has become sclerotic, I think.

But I wanted to look at the movements of people,

whether voluntarily to look for a better life or enforced

Your country of origin, obviously, where you were born

We're just about 70 years since the partition of India.

So that must be very heavily on your mind at the moment.

It wasn't in my mind when I wrote the book.

But now that you mention it, I think, you know,

when you think of partition, what is it that...

What is the first thing that you think of when

You think of migration, of people, you think of the movement of people,

and the very unhappy movement of people.

People are being cut off, carnage, violence, destruction.

We now have to look at 70 years of partition, we have

to focus on that kind of migration, too.

The book is structured in five sections, really.

But we discover as we go through that there are links,

slightly elusive links, very slightly.

Again, this is touching a new sort of ghostlike theme.

And of course in India, I think people who go

there for the first time often find that the closeness, the gritty

reality around them, and the world of the imagination

and the spiritual, I mean, there's a very, very small gap

And I wanted to do something like that with the book,

to sort of, you know, bend realism within, if you will.

To have that surface of nitty-gritty realism, as you call it,

and not to blink while I was sort of detecting that on the page.

And at the same time, to push that realism

into its anti-form, if you will, by thinking about ghost stories,

by thinking about migration, and by also letting the coherence

brought to the book by the reader in the way with those elusive links.

Of course, there's an irony in the title.

You call it A State Of Freedom, but it's a strange kind of freedom.

Well, when you think of freedom, the first thing you think

And I also wanted to play on the notion of state, you know.

Not just a mental state or a state of being,

And I am trying to say something about India now.

And I was also trying to allude to Nehru's great speech

And I wanted to have, the title to have all

But the destiny that you implied that awaits us

Yes, at this moment in my life I do not feel very

I mean, you can't get blunter than that.

Well, you know, climate change is one very obvious reason why

I think politically, the whole world is headed

towards a certain way that is leaning on perhaps

But there is also the best in ourselves.

And even in this book, where people are lost, adrift,

there are glimpses of humanity, and you must believe

I do believe it on the individual scale, yes, of course.

But aggregated, something happens, we become something

No, of course, I give you that there are hopeful

things in the world, there are good people

But I think good is losing at the moment, I feel.

In that case, where do you think these people in the book

I think perhaps the children of one of the characters in section...

The central character of Section Four, they are going

to end up in a better place than their parents.

This is something I find very effecting about India, actually.

The fact that education in the country is aspirational,

it's a key to a better life, which is what migration is all

And I think she will give, her name is Millie, she will give

And I hope that beyond the page you can imagine a better

Do you find yourself becoming more depressed about the world around?

I mean, you say that you need to look at the world

as a writer and not blink, because all of your instincts

are that you want to turn away and close your eyes.

But that is the only trick a writer needs to know, actually.

You know, I keep saying that great writers don't

Like older writers I look up to, older writers who are considered

the masters, they don't teach you how to write, they teach you how

And I think one of the ways to look at the world

And I think this is what I want to do, this is what I attempt to do,

actually try and look at the world without blinking.

When you say that great writers have inspired you and taught you how

to look at the world rather than how to write in some mechanical way,

who are the great writers who've most influenced you in that regard?

I think VS Naipaul has been a very great influence on me.

And also I read a lot of speculative and science fiction

A very underrated writer called M John Harrison, who thinks very

So, M John Harrison once said in an interview that always think

of what it is that a genre cannot do, and then push it

I think it's current in my heart, that's a great lesson.

And science-fiction writers can imagine things,

or they want to imagine things, that others don't.

On a cosmic scale, it goes without saying.

And that appeals to you, because you seem to believe

that the planet would do a lot better without any of us around.

Yes, this is a central theme of a lot of speculative

Saying actually, you know, if you take out the humans

as a species, maybe very peacefully and quickly so that there is no

pain, I think that the planet would be doing a lot better.

So, when you finished the book, does that mean there

was no sense of elation, that you still felt trapped

Well, I don't normally feel elation when I finished the book.

But I felt, you know, the book does not end hopefully.

And it ends with a kind of freedom for a particular character,

but it's a very radical kind of freedom, a liberation

And I thought I'd written a more hopeful book than my previous one,

But, you know, as I said, not to blink when you're

Neel Mukherjee, author of A State Of Freedom,

What a day and we're not done quite yet, another three hours yet! At its

best, glorious across the southern half of the British Isles, 32

Celsius down the road in Twickenham.