Author Shumona Sinha calls her tryst with the French language “love at first sight”. With time her fondness grew stronger so much so that she has written six books, all in the language that she believes “sets her free and gives her extraordinary freedom”. Calcutta-born and France-based Shumona talks about her relationship with the French language, how Calcutta remains a part of her novels, and why Bengali will remain at the core of her identity.
Though you left Calcutta long back, the city and state have been part of your narratives. Has the city evolved in any way in your literary world?
Yes, India, especially Calcutta is the backdrop of all my novels. My third novel Calcutta is a journey down the memory lane of a Bengali family, inspired by the one I had, intricately woven with the collective memory of the Bengalis, of the Indians, with our political history. My fourth novel Stateless is a trialogue between three young Bengali women — one living in Paris, facing the social, racial, and religious fractures in a post-Charlie Hebdo scenario; the other in a village near Calcutta, raped and murdered in a complicated political context in early 2000; and the third one, an orphan in Calcutta and adopted by a French couple, comes to Calcutta in search of her roots. In my fifth novel The Russian Testament (Gallimard, 2020), I explored the literary heritage of Calcutta, especially the passion for Bengalis for the Russian literature translated into Bengali and English. The novel explores the fascination of a young Bengali girl, Tania, for a Russian Jewish editor in 1920 who was the founder publisher of Raduga Publishers.
You hold the French language very dear to you. What place does Bengali hold in your life and who are your favourite Bengali writers?
I wouldn’t have become the person I am, the French writer I am, if I didn’t hold Bengali language and literature in my heart so passionately since childhood, throughout my teenage life and early youth. I will of course mention the whole œuvre de Tagore. I have translated poems of Bankim Chandra (Chatterjee), Sarat Chandra (Chattopadhyay), Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay, Kamal Kumar Majumder, Jibanananda (Das) and Shankhya Ghosh, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Nabanita Dev Sen, Joy Goswami, Mallika Sengupta, Subodh Sarkar. It was a collection of contemporary Bengali poems in French, published in Paris in 2005. So Bengali is at the root of my being.
Tell us about your last book Down With The Poor! It has quite an intriguing title.
Well, it’s a very realistic novel written in poetical prose, it’s a virulent criticism of the French/European political asylum system, exposing the postcolonial misery, distress, and trauma of people from Bangladesh and Bengalis from West Bengal, who are thriving to survive, looking for a better place, a better life. And to do so they have to lie, to buy made-up stories from the public writers, because that’s the kind of story, of political persecution, the French/European asylum system considers, just to reject their application afterwards systematically…. The narrator lady, the interpreter at the asylum office, resembles me a lot and is torn between her integrity and her desperate anger in front of this inhuman disastrous condition of her fellow countrymen.
You are six books old, and all are in French. What is it about the language that attracted you and you made it your own?
The attraction was from the very beginning, it was love at first sight with the French language when I started learning it in Calcutta, when I was 22 years old. But writing in French doesn’t happen because of attraction, it happens because I breathe the language, I live in it, and I can’t think in any other language anymore. The process of writing is cerebral and physical at the same time. Words and sentences gush and flow inside you. Writing in French gives me extraordinary liberty and it’s on so many levels! As a woman I feel free, liberated from social patriarchal moral boundaries. And the French language itself is full of linguistic possibilities, especially as I wasn’t born into it but had to explore it like an adventurer, my writing process gives me a fantastic opportunity to be experimental, and to create linguistic inventiveness.
What are you working on next?
My new novel will be published by Gallimard. It’s a road trip in India of a young French woman, her spiritual and emotional quest, her soul-searching…. And I’m in the mental preparational state for the next one, which will be a sequel to this one.