Samrat Upadhyay

Samrat Upadhyay was born and raised in Nepal. He is author of the novels The City Son, The Guru of Love (a New York Times Notable Book), and Buddha’s Orphans, as well as the story collections Mad Country, The Royal Ghosts, and Arresting God in Kathmandu. His work has received the Whiting Award and the Asian American Literary Award and been shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. He has written for The New York Times and has appeared on BBC Radio and National Public Radio. Upadhyay is Distinguished Professor of English and Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities at Indiana University.

His new novel Darkmotherland.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I settled on the title Darkmotherland fairly early in the process, and the title didn’t change even though the novel went through numerous drafts.

This is not my standard writing process. Normally, I have a working title that changes later when I have a firmer sense of what the novel is about. But in Darkmotherland, the name of this dystopia came to me early on, and it felt very right. It’s a combination of Darkmother, a prophetic figure in the novel, and Motherland, which evokes old-timey patriotism and nationalism.

Darkmotherland is not only a place but also a character, a mythical reverse-Shangrila. It holds the major characters in a grip they cannot escape.

What's in a name?

Character names are important to me either in their symbolism or the physical image they conjure for me as I’m writing—sometimes they are a mixture of both. One of my main characters, Kranti, for example, means “revolution,” but she dislikes her name because she has an antagonistic relationship with her mother, a dissident-activist who gave her that name. The mother herself has earned the nickname Madam Mao, undeservedly, for her communist leanings. The irony of the two names hover over their contentious exchanges throughout the novel.

Interestingly, the naming of places and temples became important to me in the novel. I found myself translating Nepali street names into English, so much so that they became, at times, awkward and convoluted, which then provided another texture to Darkmotherland as a land of dissonance and dislocation. So, Battispulati became Thirty Two Butterflies Street, Ghantaghar clocktower became Home of the Bell, and so on.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self would be quite surprised by my new novel. I was a serious teenager, and as a young man I wrote about serious things. So the dark comedy in Darkmotherland would be a surprise to my younger self. But on second thought, maybe not so surprising. As a teenager some of my favorite books were Catch-22, The World According to Garp, and Cat’s Cradle.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My interest in “translations” of culture and language is at a heightened display in Darkmotherland. I’m interested in how global English has become, and how it transforms and is transformed by other cultures and countries.

I’m generally interested in politics, especially in politics that impacts our daily living, and it was interesting to explore this in the novel with an all-consuming authoritarian figure who inspires fear. I’m also fascinated by how American politics dominates the globe, and I had fun imagining this influence in the emotional landscape of Darkmotherland.

Visit Samrat Upadhyay's website.

Writers Read: Samrat Upadhyay (August 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Buddha’s Orphans.

The Page 69 Test: Darkmotherland.

--Marshal Zeringue