Taking coins out of a jar

In conversation with Sharanya Manivannan

AQUAMARINE: Sharanya Manivannan's Witchcraft traverses questions of identity and gender.

The first time I met Sharanya Manivannan was at a reading at the Park Hotel in Chennai, early in January. A friend of mine, Mridula Koshy, a writer based in Delhi was reading at the event and had invited me. Later, some of us had gone for a drink at the Bamboo Bar in Savera Hotel, on Radhakrishnan Salai. Sharanya and I barely spoke that evening, although she did give me a card with her e-mail address.

Therefore, I could only vaguely summon up her appearance after she agreed to meet me for an interview. We meet at The French Loaf, a charming cafe on Harrington Road, sitting comfortably on wooden benches under the shade of two huge trees. “I was born in Madras,” she says, as I try to sound interesting, despite itching for the facts.

Born in 1985, she spent the early years of her life in Sri Lanka (her mother is Sri Lankan Tamil) before moving to Malaysia. “It was the worst decision my family ever made,” she says. In 2007, Sharanya caused a controversy by terming the practice of racism in Malaysia as ‘apartheid’. “I thought I was stating the obvious,” she says. “Any country that practices segregation, based on race and class, can be accused of apartheid. And to name something is to give it power.” She recounts horrendous incidents of being at the receiving end of a backlash by the Malaysian establishment. Finally, she gave up, left college and moved to Chennai 15 months ago.

This condition of exile and dislocation permeates her work at some level or another in her debut collection of poetry, Witchcraft.  Described as a “startling, sensual book of poems heralding the debut of a new voice”, Witchcraft traverses the questions of identity and gender. It is a mature work, and belies the voice of someone so young. Sharanya says that being brought up by her grandmother has made her ‘wiser’ and while listening to her, there is clarity of thought unusual for a 23-year-old. It is almost as if she has lived many parallel lives, and her perception is the aggregate result of the experiences she has accumulated.

I mention her poem Blood Lotus, and how I feel that the conflict between nature and culture underpins many of her poems. Suddenly, she gives a shriek of delight (“You’re very perceptive. You just made me understand my work better”) and then goes on to talk about the social taboos linked with menstruation. “The ancient idea was that a force rests in objects and the body. But this has been appropriated by conservative thinkers to see menstruating women as a polluting force.”

She takes out a copy of Witchcraft and talks about her poem Ananku, which deals with the trauma of the ceremony that accompanies female puberty. She says, “The poem is about the relationship with my parents.” Towards the end of Ananku, there is a line where without any warning or explanation, the script changes from English to Tamil. The question of language is a delicate one, for anyone from the subcontinent writing in English, and I found this innovation particularly striking.

She says, “The language in my head is a hybrid of Sri Lankan Tamil and English, though English was my first language.” She points out the use of non-italicised Romanised Tamil in other sections of the book and then says, “The idea is also to obscure things from the reader. I’m saying to them – Listen, I’ve already told you too much. So, this is a medium of inaccessibility to me for a largely non-Tamil audience.”

I tell her that one of my favourite poems is the powerful and nostalgic You Bring Out the Sri Lankan In Me. She says, almost immediately, “I would like to say here that, in that poem, I made some politically irresponsible statements purely in the interest of lyricism. I do not and have never supported or believed in the separatist terrorism that the country suffers under.”

The statement has a rehearsed quality to it, but when I talk about the various protests across the state, she pounces on it. “Oh, these armchair activists! They don’t understand our culture and let me say that we are a different culture. We are a clannish community (laughs) and like all clannish communities, we look down on other cultures.”

She mentions with dismay about the self-immolation of Muthukumar and saves her contempt for the irresponsibility of the political class. “They go for their own motives, and get the people excited by making them feel part of something bigger. Now, we have schools and colleges closing down. They don’t understand conflict and history. I don’t understand it either, but they just pontificate to serve their own interests.”

She talks with passion and feeling about the Sri Lankan issue, but the conversation moves away when I ask about the novel she is working on, Constellation of Scars. “It’s got all the usual clichés – love, loss, longing,” she says. “It is the tale of a 20-something photographer, who is obsessed with the preservation of transitory moments.” She expects the novel to be finished in a few months and says, “The protagonist has been in my head since I was fifteen. It’s been inconsistent over a lot of years. Only now, I have found the right voice. But I want to finish it first and then talk about it.”

We hang around for a little while more, talking informally. She tells me she is looking for an opportunity to move out of Chennai, where she currently lives with her family in Nungambakkam. She is considering writing the rest of her novel in Pondicherry, and quitting her job as a copywriter. “I need to quit my job,” she says, while asking me not to take it down.

“I have a really cushy job. And someone once asked me – do you want to be a full woman or a writer? Because a full woman is supposed to have money and financial independence, all the feminist nonsense about the woman who pays her way. But a writer is someone who, at times, takes coins out of a jar.”  On this final, beautiful note, we end our conversation. Sharanya walks away, stops an auto, mutters something in Tamil, and then she’s gone.