Winslow Schmelling Interviews Namrata Poddar

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, and teaches literature as well as creative writing at UCLA. Her work has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and The Best Asian Short Stories. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. She is multilingual with “roots” in the Thar Desert and currently lives in Greater Los Angeles. Her debut novel, Border Less, was a finalist for Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether Prize; it’s releasing on March 1, 2022 from 7.13 Books, and later this year in South Asia from HarperCollins India. You can find her on Twitter, @poddar_namrata, and on Instagram, @writerpoddar.

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From Associate Editor Winslow Schmelling: Border Less traces the migratory journey of Dia Mittal, an airline call center agent in Mumbai who is searching for a better life. As her search takes her to the United States, Dia’s checkered relationship with the American Dream dialogues with the experiences and perspectives of a global South Asian community across the class spectrum—call center agents, travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, blue- and white-collar workers in the hospitality industry, junior and senior artists in Bollywood, hustling single mothers, academics, tourists in the Third World, refugees displaced by military superpowers, Marwari merchants, and trade caravans of the Silk Road, among others. What connects the novel’s web of brown border-crossing characters is their quest for belonging and a negotiation of power struggles, mediated by race, class, caste, gender, religion, nationality, age, or place.

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Namrata Poddar about the deserts and coasts of Border Less, the process of constructing a circular novel, the art of Rajasthani dance, subversions of language, and a lineage of postcolonial storytelling.

WS: Border Less feels like an intricately woven tapestry. There is fine tuning to the details that creates clarity to the characters and spaces, yet an expansiveness to their interconnected stories. If I were to choose a verb for this novel it would be “span.” The novel spans the relationships of families, romances, friendships. It spans physical distances, across deserts and coasts and the globe. It spans generations, cultures, class, religion, gender, all creating that broad tapestry of interconnected experience. Did the idea of interconnectivity play a part in the overall construction of Border Less, which has a fragmented and, of course, spanning narrative? What was the intention behind fragmenting the chapters into vignettes of experience?

Namrata Poddar: Border Less was written over a period of 17 years, and I noticed repeatedly that the characters in my drafts connected organically, that these drafts refused to stand alone in many ways. In telling Dia Mittal’s story and her relationship to the American Dream, I couldn’t get myself to write a book that would center one protagonist, strictly speaking, and her journey that I see as inseparable from that of her community, who has also crossed borders in varying degrees. Besides, this inextricability of individual identity from a communal identity is a worldview much more common to communities of color than to a white West with its entwined history of capitalism and individualism. 

And then, I was not only a writer with an individual and communal history of migration, but also, a brown woman writing from within a global patriarchy. Ideas of continuity and wholeness don’t reflect my historic truth in ways that gaps, fissures, ellipses, and fragmentation do. 

When it comes to both, interconnectivity and fragmentation, the epigraph by Edouard Glissant alerts the novel’s reader right away to its aesthetic ideology, one that is grounded in communities of color and their histories of endured oppression, in the relationship between the individual and the community, and in fragmentation as opposed to an illusion of wholeness that I associate most with realist fiction and its popularity in an American workshop pedagogy.

WS: The title of Border Less and other parts of the novel play with double-meanings. We might think of “without borders,” versus the verb form “to border less.” We might think from the perspective of inside a border, or outside of one. Throughout the novel, words or phrases are funneled through the lenses of different characters, different uses or simply repeated enough times they take on new meaning. Words like “productive,” “home,” “adjust,” “American Dream,” or the novel’s two titled parts, “Roots” and “Routes.” What is the significance of wordplay and the act of subverting or disrupting language in this novel? 

NP: As you may know, I grew up in India, home to a few hundred languages, not counting the dialects and regional variations with each, and this diversity is perhaps best reflected in my hometown, Mumbai. I’m fluent in Hindi, our national language, and in English—the main language of my schooling. I speak a few other Indian languages, and then with higher education, picked up foreign languages, especially French.

As for Marwari, my native tongue, I understand it but don’t speak it fluently because there was no classroom in my life ever offering a course in Marwari. Besides, like other urban Marwaris, my parents are multilingual, and due to our communal history of migration, the different generations in our family use different languages with each other. My parents spoke to me in Hindi and Hinglish more often than in Marwari, although they used Marwari more often with my grandparents. This back and forth between different languages is very common in migrant communities, unlike communities that stay rooted in land. So this history along with my own migration to the US meant that I found myself to be an outsider to every language I speak, including American English. And yet, language is such a key part of who we are, and how we see and process the world. 

Most postcolonial writers, especially those impacted by migration in deeper ways, have felt this linguistic paradox within them. There is a rich legacy of writing in English where BIPOC writers have repeatedly disrupted English and made it their own. If a play with language punctuates Border Less, it’s because I come from that lineage of postcolonial storytelling, but also, given a life of navigating multiple languages, it’s a big part of who I am.  

WS: So much of Border Less is about family, what defines a home, and what constitutes belonging. We see what it’s like for Dia navigating her own desires while balancing responsibility, especially in the eyes of the women in her family. In “Chutney,” Dia argues with her mother while folding laundry about what she should do with her future, before she snaps at her mother, guilt welling immediately: this scene rings true for many daughters, no matter where they come from. What did it mean to you to center much of the novel on the relationships of women in this novel? Were there tropes of daughterhood, motherhood, or sisterhood that you sought to illuminate all sides of, or any you sought to push against?

NP: I didn’t intentionally decide to focus on daughterhood, motherhood or sisterhood for my book. That said, centering brown women in the various roles they play in life was very important to me. This is because I yearned to see women who looked and talked like me in contemporary writing by South Asian writers, here in the U.S or in the subcontinent–expats returning to their home as migration becomes more of a global norm or first-generation desis in American fiction who aren’t depicted in tired ways (thick homogeneous accents, arranged marriages, a fierce attachment to the motherland, etc.) so that “progress” or “modernity” inevitably rests with a second or third generation of South Asians who are born and raised in the West. Histories of migration are rarely this neat or linear, and in a 21st century America, layers of South Asian diaspora from different parts of the world including those from Africa and the Caribbean coexist—at times reinforcing, at other times resisting, and often redefining each other. 

Besides, Mumbai and Greater Los Angeles, two cities I’ve lived the longest in, are homes to huge brown communities, yet I can’t think of literary fiction by a woman writer—and this might simply be my ignorance–published in the U.S. that shows 21st century South Asian women in those cities in ways that feel relatable. Centering women characters in Border Less, and their relationships, was a way for me to write the kind of fiction I yearned to read. After this choice, I did my best to get quiet and go wherever my characters took me.  

WS: Some of my favorite chapters slip slightly outside the boundaries of Dia’s narrative and enter the characters and spaces in the peripherals. In “Ladies Special,” we sprint and jump onto a moving train, take the long commute with women who chop vegetables to make more time with their children in the evening. In “Excursion,” we witness a young maid with an abusive madam, but though the maid wishes to run away, she finds moments of hope and defiance. I think one reason I find these chapters so gripping is how they expand that tapestry of experience, but also because they are told in the first person, capturing new voices. How did alternating between the first and third person expose itself as the right choice for Border Less? How did you choose which voices to embody? Were there more voices you wished you could have included?

NP: I’m definitely an aural over a visual reader and writer. What this means is: I tend to almost always experience the page firstly in terms of voice, and hearing a character or a narrator. Also, first-person narration tends to be my natural inclination, maybe because, when it comes to brown women talking, how often have we been given the space to speak as “I” in literature? If left to my unconscious self, I’d likely have written all my characters in the first person. But writing Dia in the third person felt important because her journey is closest to mine to the extent that she too is a first-generation Indian American with desert ancestry who was raised in Mumbai. Choosing the third-person narration with Dia felt important so I could hear her in more nuanced ways, without the obvious overlaps we share on our paths. Aesthetically too, alternating the first-person stories with a third person POV felt important as it added more texture to the fabric of the novel’s polyphony.

WS: Dance is crucial to Dia’s story. It trickles through each chapter, whether we witness the swirling movement of a pair of cousins or feel the itch to tap our feet as the energy builds. Could you tell us more about the role that dance plays in the novel?

NP: In a very literal way, dance in Border Less stands for vocation in the sense that the opening chapter shows Dia yearning to quit a job she hates and yearning for a life she can spend doing what she loves. Dance here also forces the reader to confront the bigger questions of agency and class, as in, who gets to pursue freedom in life–professional or otherwise? 

And then, dance is a key component of performing arts in my ancestral home of Rajasthan, especially the Thar Desert; it’s huge to North Indian culture in general; it’s as important to Bollywood whose influence is omnipresent in its home, Mumbai, where I grew up. If dance trickles into my fiction, it’s likely because it’s a huge part of the world the book’s author comes from. Also, in the novel’s continued return to the Rajasthani dance, ghoomar, and its circular movements of the body that highlight repetition with a difference, dance works as a structural device and an aesthetic worldview in Border Less. 

Lastly, with the novel’s obsession with different forms of artistic expression (dance, painting, textile crafts, storytelling, architecture), it felt fitting somewhere to end the novel by reimagining the Tandava, or the great dance of destruction and creation in Hindu mythology as one way to dethrone colonial art forms in favor of new ones, including the novel. 

WS: In “One,” we see a spattering of comparisons of place, from the look of a coast, to the taste of tea, to strip mall Thai food. The similarities “feel close” to other places for Dia, not necessarily the same. This feels connected to Édouard Glissant’s epigraph from the start of the novel, “’Being is relation’: but Relation is safe from the idea of Being.” This chapter ends with a conversation between Dia and an American woman, also from deserts and coasts, but their exchange so quickly exposes itself as more difference. I’m fascinated with how Border Less feels concerned with exposing “being,” rather than reshaping experience and structure for “relation” or expectations. How do you balance “being” and “relation” in your writing? With a character and story that is concerned about pushing against inequalities, how do you choose when to illustrate similarities or equivalences, and when to hold difference as sacred? How do you balance comparisons in a way that a reader might empathize with, without leaning too far into cozy and “safe” relatability?

NP: Like most human beings, the characters of Border Less strive for belonging and a genuine connection with others. That said, most, if not all important characters here are also minorities within their story’s specific context so they often work at honoring their differences too, the kind that gets erased by the “majority” in a room. Like you say, this play between similarity and difference punctuates much of the novel. Although when to honor “being” versus “relation” was mostly an intuitive over a rational choice; it was about getting quiet in the process of writing, and letting the characters guide me on what stance they choose in any given moment of a story. 

WS: The novel ends with “Kundalini,” which is tonally different from the rest of the novel. It seems to take the reader by the shoulders to shake them, make sure they are listening, before turning the final page. In a direct address signed off by the goddess Shakti, whose fiery strength and coil of energy straiates the novel, the chapter entwines many women's voices to call out injustices and oppressions of storytelling and history. This chapter is frank, clear, strong, in a way that pushes against the idea of “mediating” one’s own voice to “become relatable to the human-ity of it all.” What led to the decision to end with this chapter in particular? 

NP: This chapter came to me, almost as it is, when I was working on my MFA thesis that eventually became Border Less. It was a very insistent voice, and after I was done transcribing it, I’d no idea what to do with it. I was working on short stories then and given how “Kundalini” is a piece of epistolary short fiction as well as a monologue of sorts, it served no purpose in my writerly plans, so I put it away in my file for miscellaneous writing. Except that Shakti’s voice kept returning to my head and saying: I want to be in your book, and I want the last word. It was only when my MFA thesis expanded into the novel it became today that “Kundalini” made sense, aesthetically speaking, as a closing piece, even if ending on Dia’s journey would’ve made more sense, conventionally speaking. 

I chose to close my novel with “Kundalini” because the immigrant journey of its characters isn’t the novel’s sole focus. In many ways, Border Less resists character-driven fiction that centers the psychological drama of one or few protagonists. Here, the “secondary” voices speaking are as important to the novel’s polyphonic makeup, as hinted through the chapter, “Ladies Special,” where the narrator wonders, “Who plays the central character and who becomes the footnotes in that fragmented city with a hollow center?" Ending my novel on a character who often returns in the book as a leitmotif, and eventually speaks in the first person therefore made more sense to me. 

Besides, “Kundalini” is an unapologetic critique of patriarchy from a brown woman’s voice, a key focus of Border Less. As importantly, the chapter is a critique of colonial modes of storytelling that have marginalized, when not erased, other forms of storytelling across the world. Within the universe of my novel, who better to tell imperial power and patriarchy to border less the many forms of creative expression—including the novel—than the mother of all creation, Shakti, or the one to “own that ancient game of Form and Illusion”?

Lastly, “Kundalini” reinforces a certain circularity over a linearity, when it comes to the novel’s  structure, so much like the ghoomar dance movements, as the closing piece’s “manifesto” on oppression and non-colonial art mirrors Glissant’s words that open the novel. This cyclical connection creates a frame for the different stories that make up the novel, and framing is crucial to Rajasthani art and architectural forms, from jharokhas to miniature paintings.

Winslow Schmelling is an Associate Editor with Hayden's Ferry Review and an MFA candidate in fiction at Arizona State University where she's mostly been writing about deserts and their patterns of persistence.