‘An immigrant’s sensibility of a shifting identity makes its way into my novel’: Brinda Charry, author of ‘The East Indian’

In Brinda Charry's novel The East Indian, Tony, the son of a Tamil courtesan, narrates a gripping bildungsroman set in 1635. Charry, an academician and writer, explores themes of nation-building, race, identity, faith and belonging in her work. She researched the early history of the East India Company, London, Virginia and South Asia to transport her readers. Charry also examines the network of prejudices that come into play and reinforces each other. She also looks at the dichotomous identity of immigrants. Next she is working on a novel set in the 1800s in Boston about the world of popular entertainment.

It is the year 1635. Charles I, grandson of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, is still on the throne in England, fifteen-odd years away from being executed on charges of treason, like his grandmother before him. The sliver of land which would become Madras is a few years from being bought by the British East India Company, while a brutal, brave world is being built in Virginia, North America, the first permanent British settlement in the New World. 

Into this surprisingly global milieu comes Tony, the protagonist of Brinda Charry’s new novel The East Indian, a gripping bildungsroman that goes back centuries. The story offers nuanced ideas of nation-building, race, identity, faith and belonging, funnelled through the voice of its engaging, perspicacious narrator, the son of a Tamil courtesan. 

This is Charry’s third novel; she has also written a volume of short stories and several books and articles focused on her specialisation in English Renaissance Literature (Shakespeare and contemporaries). “Creative writing is very different from academic work,” says the New Hampshire-based academician and writer, adding that she has always kept the two compartmentalised. 

In that sense, The East Indian, set in an era she is very familiar with, brings together both, she says. “I have studied the 1600s and am particularly interested in questions of the early formation of race and the early construction of cultural encounter and globalisation,” says Charry. “For me, it was not just the story of an individual. It was a story of a world coming into being.” Edited excerpts:

It involved a lot of research. Historical fiction, in general, if you take it seriously, does. I took maybe two years to just read: from the early history of the East India Company, particularly in Southern India, about London and the South Asian presence in London and, of course, Virginia. 

The Virginia part takes up most of the novel and involved the most extensive study. It is not just about the larger things but the little things — the plants, animals, what people wore, what they ate. You have to transport your reader. And that, for me, was challenging but also good fun. 

I am a Shakespearean scholar by training, and it always stood out for me that there is this Indian boy in this very English play. Like Tony, the little boy in the play is an outsider. He is the object of desire in the play, because he is fought over by the king and the queen, but is also the outsider. That encapsulates a lot about what Indians’ identity could have been like back in the day, and that is what I wanted Tony to see.