Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was educated in politics and philosophy at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Pennsylvania. His novels The Gabriel Club and The Storyteller of Marrakesh have been published in fourteen languages. He lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York.

In this issue, we talk to Joydeep about his newest novel, The Watch, published by Hogarth in 2012. The Watch featured as the inaugural title in Random House's 2012 re-launch of Virginia and Leonard's Woolf's Hogarth imprint, and was simultaneously published in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US.

Joydeep:  Antigone is one of those ancient myths which have survived over the centuries because they frame basic questions of life in a manner that transcends time and place. Antigone was a young Theban princess who challenged the king of Thebes, her uncle, when he refused to bury her brother who had opposed his rule and died in the attempt to overthrow it. Antigone demands the right to bury her brother in accordance to religious custom and the values of their society. In the face of his royal opposition, she is willing to die to stand up for what is morally right, and her courage sows doubt among her people despite the powerful king’s outrage. The parallels with the young Pashtun girl, Nizam, lie in her opposition, in turn, to the imposition of what she sees as unjust foreign dictats that go against her people’s societal values and religious customs.  More specifically, she is a sister who is determined to bury a brother she loved dearly, and dismisses all reasons to the contrary offered by the American troops as beside the point.

Zinta: In most war novels, we read a great deal about men. We rarely see the women in war. Why did you choose a woman for your protagonist? What were the challenges of doing so, if any?

Joydeep:  The conduct of war has always been framed as an overtly masculine trope, with women figuring either as passive casualties or as chattel. The paradigm was set early on with the Iliad and also in epics from other cultures, and it continues to be the case, with contemporary books about war, both fiction and non-fiction, playing out war as the ultimate expression of male fantasies of violence and oppression. This despite the fact that women have played an essential role in war-fighting, beginning with the early Amazons, right down to contemporary guerilla wars such as the FARC in Colombia or the Tamil Tigers where men and women share combat responsibilities. Further, most wars could not be sustained without the supporting role of women who keep the wheels of civilian society running in the absence of the men who’re away fighting. This is explicitly acknowledged in many tribal societies. Finally, women as a group form the collective backbone of any society, and Nizam, the protagonist in my novel, is a tribute to that fact. As such, there were really no challenges in formulating her character.

I would also like to point out that I was inspired by the example of the women of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, who opposed the fundamentalist regime when it was in power in the country, but also opposed the American intervention. Despite being the target of assassinations—their young founder was murdered—they stand as a rebuke both to Western journalists who seek to portray Afghan women as a silent and passive mass, and to Islamic fundamentalists who deny the role of women outside the confines of their homes.

Most of all, I wrote Nizam as a female exemplar—as the archetype of a woman who, armed with nothing apart from her convictions, challenges and faces down the entire arsenal of masculine aggression and oppression. She upholds the primacy of family ties against abstract imperatives of state policy and, in this regard, she is the modern descendant of the Greek Antigone. It’s my hope that, in thinking about her, my readers will also see in her character a standing reprimand against the culture in the U.S. armed forces where enlisted female soldiers and officers bear the brunt of sexual assaults and violence from their male counterparts, who often view them not as partners but as prey.

Zinta: The statistics of the Afghan war, no matter from what side you approach them, are staggering. Collateral damage, as the euphemistic phrase goes, is a big part of any war, yet one people probably talk about the least. You chose a very few, basically one woman, to stand in for many, rather than writing about a great many. Can you talk about that decision?

Joydeep:  ISAF casualties pale when compared to the civilian casualties inflicted by the Western forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. We know of these casualties in passing, because they are glossed over by the mainstream corporate media, and mentioned, if ever, only as statistics. I was determined to put a human face on the suffering, and to give that human face depth and personal history, rather than allude to it as a generic mass.

Zinta: Something your readers may be surprised to learn is that you yourself never went to Afghan to research this war. Why this decision? What challenges did it present to write this from a distance and how did you overcome them? Tell us more about your research process …

Joydeep:  I write fiction, which means my primary tool is my creative imagination. I’ve been astonished by how reticent writers in the West have become when it comes to writing about experiences outside their comfort zone. This conservatism is a recent phenomenon, and the natural expression, I believe, of an increasingly parochial culture.  Also a culture that is politically timid, and reluctant, for personal and professional reasons, to upset the status quo.  Very few creative writers today are in the forefront of movements for political change, and that’s a sea change from the early years of the novel when writers imagined foreign realities as easily as they did their native ground in order to make ethical stands: think of the tradition that ranges all the way from the early Romantics like Chateaubriand writing about the American wilds to Jules Verne’s and Joseph Conrad’s imaginative forays all over the world. I ally myself to that adventurous tradition, and am always taken aback when I’m asked this question.  I mean, do people ask Hilary Mantel what it’s like to write about Henry VIII’s court without actually having been there, or the many fantasy writers about what it’s like to be a vampire or whatever else? Look, a blank page is an invitation to paint.  Why replicate what you already know? That’s imitation, not creative writing.

Zinta: I understand you did some intensive fact checking on your manuscript. Who were your fact checkers and what was their response? Beyond just facts, did they offer other input?

Joydeep:  Various American officers and enlisted men checked on diverse logistical facts in the various manuscript drafts according to their functional backgrounds and specializations. They were also enormously helpful when it came to operational details.

Zinta: Did you make any discoveries while writing this book that caught you by surprise?

Joydeep:  The extent of disillusionment among the young Americans who are sent to fight these wars, both with the armed forces as an institution, and with the political system in general.

Zinta: There are certainly great challenges, some arguably impossible to overcome, whenever one tries to look at another culture than one's own. You've taken on not just two cultures—that of Afghanistan and that of the United States—but you are also approaching this as a man born in India, and you've spent time living in Europe. Advantages? Disadvantages?

Joydeep:  Coming from a cosmopolitan background makes it comparatively easy to dive into the deep side of the pool, as it were; and as a former graduate student, intensive research is a honed skill. The challenge in writing a novel about a place and a culture about which one has had no first-hand experience is akin to the challenge faced in crafting an identity, both personal and literary.  What made this book easier for me, however, was the fact that Afghanistan is part of the larger Indo-Iranian diaspora, with many commonalities in language, culture and worldview, not to mention things like geographical terrain and climate.  As for the U.S. army, I’ve long been a student of military history and literature, and writing this book was perhaps the adult equivalent of the war games I played as a child.

Zinta: Another aspect of your background that you've brought to this work is your education in philosophy. Possible to condense the philosophy of life, of war, you've put into The Watch?

Joydeep:  I’m laughing. How about this: “War sucks,” as my army mates like to say, because it leaches the humanity out of everyone. We live in an age of endless warfare against nebulous ‘terrorists,’ the entire endeavor perpetuated by civilian politicians and deskbound generals who nuzzle on the teats of the military-industrial complex. Think of them as equivalent to the rapacious hedge fund financiers of Wall Street, except that war is primarily a trade in human lives and suffering.

Zinta: What literary influences would you say have affected your approach to writing fiction? Were there other war novels you've read that made you want to give it a try?

Joydeep:  In writing The Watch, I measured myself against four war novels, coincidentally all written by Germans, although excellent translations in English exist. They are The Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, both dealing with World War I, and The Stalin Organ and Payback by Gert Ledig, which are set during World War II.  What struck me about these books was, precisely, their emphasis on human suffering. Apart from these, my literary influences are largely continental European.

That aside, I’ve always admired writers who’ve put their talents to use in fighting against political and social injustices; consider, especially, the poets Shelley and Coleridge and William Morris in the English language, the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers like Hugo, Zola, Sartre, and Camus in France, Frantz Fanon, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, others.  Their example has been a spur to me to dedicate my own present work to challenge the false paradigm sought to be imposed on us of the “clash of civilizations.”

Zinta: Your "Antigone," alone against an entire army, against an entire nation, really, and standing against tyranny … what are your thoughts on individuals standing up against a government? Is that something we should aspire to, even require of ourselves, to protest injustices—is that your message in this book?

Joydeep:  Although Bradley Manning was not yet on my radar when I wrote The Watch, I would present him as an exemplar of an upright individual standing up to a corrupt system. More and more, this is becoming a necessity—one that former inhabitants of the Soviet Bloc would instantly recognize—in the daily struggle to square one’s personal definitions of fairness and morality with an increasingly corrupt and intrusive political regime.

Zinta: When we look at what has been written about wars, little has been written about the war in Afghan. Why do you think that is? Does fiction serve a role in helping humanity understand war, if it is even comprehensible?

Joydeep:  The Afghan war has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States, both in terms of men and materiel. At least in Iraq, there was an attempt made at devising a fig leaf to cover the emperor’s nakedness; I refer to the so-called ‘surge’ whereby the U.S. military bought off Sunni and Shia militias.  But the men who’ve fought – and continue to fight – in Afghanistan have had no success with such ploys, even as they continue to be dismayed by the utter folly of announcing three years beforehand the date of operational withdrawal, as the current president did in 2011, which ensured the catastrophe that has followed.

Zinta: What role do religions play in The Watch?

Joydeep:  I think the primary opposition in the novel is cultural, with religion being only one of the aspects under play. Neither the two Afghan characters in the novel nor the soldiers in the US combat base are overtly religious, though the girl’s personal determination to bury her brother is buttressed by religious conviction.

Zinta: You gave each soldier his own voice, his own chapter. Why this choice rather than simply a third-person narration? Surely that was adding yet another level of challenge to your writing …

Joydeep:  It was very important for me to grant each character autonomy of thought and make sure that all viewpoints were represented, even those that I don’t personally agree with. In a novel that is based on an already fraught conflict, I didn’t want to be the puppet-master behind the scenes, insinuating my own opinions: that would be propaganda.  Rather, I was intensely conscious that the essence of tragedy – and The Watch is a tragedy in the classical sense – is to asssure each character of their dignity and humanity so that, at the same time as their integrity is respected, I can still make clear to the reader by means of the narrative design the fundamental inhumanity and irrationality of war.

Zinta: Is there an overall message you would like your reader to get from reading The Watch?

Joydeep:  Each of us has the potential to be an Antigone or a Nizam, in that we are all born with the moral capacity to distinguish between right and wrong. Whether or not we choose to exercise that capacity is up to us. And whether or not we choose to let ourselves be cowed down by authority is also entirely of our own volition. Certainly, there are real costs in exercising acts of courage, but would you rather go to sleep every night with the knowledge that you could have made a difference and chose instead to keep silent? I do realize that that’s a heavy burden, but there’s nothing more self-defeating than stifling one’s natural sense of passion and compassion. 

Above all, I’d like to impress on readers that the kind of political passivity that has been the feature of post-war Anglo-American literature is no longer a viable option.  As readers and writers we need to make our voices heard because authority is always in a minority.

Zinta: Certainly a remarkable book. If beauty can be powerful enough to rise above war in the occasional moment, you've found several of those haunting moments. Thank you for talking to us, Joydeep.