Manisha Jolie Amin’s book Dancing to the Flute is the story of a young boy Kalu who fights against all odds and dreams big. Interspersed with India’s music and its golden past, it portrays the resilience and strength of the people. She tells Yogesh Vajpeyi that the book is about making the best of what life offers and how the first scene she had imagined, of a young boy sitting in a room with a bamboo flute, never made it to her debut novel.
How would you like to describe Dancing to the Flute?
It’s my love song to India. The country that I love and have loved as a child. When I travelled to India I was always taken by the resilience and strength of the people I met. This book is about that strength. It’s a book about making the best of what life offers.
When and how did the idea of the novel occur to you?
I was at a writers’ conference with my husband and by the end of the first day there I realised that I wanted to be a writer. That night an image came to me. That of a young boy with a bamboo flute in a small room, desperately trying to play an older man back to life. I wondered about the boy and the man and why a child would be in this situation. While the exact scene never made it into the book, it started my journey.
Did it require any research and preparation?
Yes it did! The novel was initially part of my PhD so I had to research a number of key aspects. I don’t play the flute and I’ve never lived in India. So I did a lot of research on music and on ragas. I read a lot of texts by and about musicians and spent my time in India in small rural villages. I researched different versions of folk stories and songs that I wanted to integrate into the writing. I was fortunate to have family and friends in India and in Australia who I could talk to and who read the early versions of my work.
As a child of immigrants, how do you look at India?
I love India as the country of my soul and of my heritage. This book was a way of telling my child about the India I remembered growing up. India has like all countries problems and issues. However, I was always taken by the spirit of the country and the people. It is something that India gives to the world. A sense of joy, wonder and energy, despite what life can throw towards people. This is what I wanted my book to reflect.
Does the structure of your novel echo a melody?
Yes it does, both in the structure of the work and in the nature of the main characters themselves.
How did you source the Tansen story for your novel?
My father used to tell me the Tansen story when I was a child, and my mother used to sing me the compositions. However, when I was doing my research I found a number of different versions of the story which got me thinking about the way stories change as we tell them. One of the versions in the novel was actually found on a tourism website on the internet!
Which authors and books inspired you the most?
With this novel there were so many! Raga Mala by Ravi Shankar, Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri, Raag Darbari by Sri Lal Shukla, to name my top three. The author that inspired me the most, however, is my aunt Sunandaben Poddar, who has written and published books in India—both in Gujarati and in English. She encouraged me to write this novel and was the first family member to read it.
What are you working on next?
My next book is set in Australia and deals with a family that migrated from India to Australia.