for the Dublin Literary Award in 2019. The story begins in 1932 and its protagonists, Nala and Rajan, are married in 1946, just before Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain. With the country’s descent into civil war, they are forced to make profound decisions that will affect them, their children and grandchildren, and take their diasporic story across three continents until the narrative ends in Sydney in 2010. The book drew enthusiastic responses from readers and literary critics for its intelligent and well-informed treatment of race, language, migration and Sri Lankan history. Chandran’s richly textured writing moves at the outset from the young Rajan’s witnessing of the shocking self-immolation of a monk to the homogeneous, warm world of his first home, conveyed through details of cooking and reading:
Every day, Rajan read until it was dark and then he read by candlelight. He meticulously scraped wax from the bottom of the dish with his footruler. He would reuse it with a new wick tomorrow. Years ago, Lali had shown him how; she was very careful. For his birthdays he never asked for books because they were so expensive—he could borrow books—instead he asked for candles.
As Shankari Chandran reveals in her interview, much of her own family history, life on three continents, historical research, social and legal awareness are explored in her first novel, as well as her own reflections on home and homeliness: “Song of the Sun God was a way for me to explore, find or even create, a connection to Sri Lanka—the actual Sri Lanka, the historic one and the Sri Lanka that I had received through my family’s memories”.
Moving from a historical novel to a dystopian thriller set in the future, her second book The Barrier (Chandran 2017b) creates a world devastated by religious war and the Ebola epidemic. Short-listed for the Norma K. Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018), it uses “action-packed, tech-savvy speculative fiction to examine intractable problems of today’s world” enthused the reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald. Within three years it was to prove remarkably prophetic in the light of the onset of COVID-19. The book is abuzz with ideas and, with its “faith-inhibiting” side-effects of a vaccine, rogue virologists and debates about faith, freedom and justice, is in some ways closer to the concerns of Song of the Sun God than one might initially think.
Shankari Chandran has completed a third novel, which combines the generic elements of her previous two works: a political thriller set in post-war Sri Lanka. A fourth novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, is forthcoming with Ultimo Press.
The interviewer, Birte Heidemann, is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Dresden University of Technology, Germany. Her most recent publications include Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature (Palgrave, 2016) and the co-edited collection Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Her work has appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Wasafiri, and Postcolonial Text, among others.
Birte Heidemann (BH): Shankari, you grew up in Australia and began working as a lawyer in London. Only in 2010, after moving back home and giving birth to your fourth child, did you decide to commit to creative writing. Could you tell me a bit more about what prompted you to switch careers and become a full-time writer?
Shankari Chandran (SC): We moved back to Australia because I wanted to bring our children back to my home, to the home of my childhood. But when I returned, I felt disillusioned and disappointed, and I felt that home was not home. And through that sense of disappointment, I felt lost, and I turned to writing in order to work through my feelings. I began by just blogging for myself, and it actually attracted a following. After the following grew, the blog was picked up by a lifestyle website that introduced my writing to a much broader audience in Australia. This gave me the confidence to attempt a novel—something that I had always wanted to do but for which I previously lacked the time or confidence. And so, I wanted to give that one great novel a go, a novel I think so many of us feel within us. In 2012, after a year of blogging, I attempted what eventually became Song of the Sun God. It was the first time in my life since I was young that I was not working for money, because I had chosen to be the stay-at-home carer for our family. We were having our fourth baby, and it seemed like an opportunity to pursue that ambition.
BH: You mentioned that when you returned from London to Australia (where you were born and grew up) you were terribly disillusioned and disappointed by the experience. Could you elaborate on why that was? Especially from the point of view of a traveller / diasporic? What in the return to Sydney brought you to this mood? Had London changed you? Had Sydney changed in your absence?
SC: I lived in London for ten years where I was considered (and where I quickly considered myself) a British Asian. I felt like I had a valued place in Britain, where the distinct impact of my culture on British culture was recognized, and where I felt a part of the society, entitled to claim a more equitable place in the country. Perhaps this has changed in Britain as it is changing elsewhere in the world.
When I went home to Australia in 2010, it was a shock for me. I did not understand the country I was raised in. I did not understand the hatred towards asylum seekers, the public fear-mongering about boat people and the attribution of many of our societal problems to migrants. There was a xenophobic undercurrent hidden in the rhetoric of border security, Australian-ness and patriotism.
When I turned on the TV, I wondered where all the brown people were. All multicultural representations were siloed in the ethnic public broadcaster SBS. It was as though we’d done our bit for multicultural Australia, by funding SBS; TICK. But everything else in the public space was as it has always been, monocultural and essentially white. This was also true of the bookstores—the “Australian fiction” that was making it past the gatekeepers was distinctly white.
The public spaces (the media, TV, the arts and national dialogues) were not reflecting or representing what I was seeing on the streets. They were not accepting of the Australia that I was living in and the Australia that I had brought my children back to. The disconnect was upsetting. And it was more than that—the disconnect felt like a manifestation of a deeper refusal to fully acknowledge the presence, position and value of non-white Australians. This was really troubling for me because I had actually felt at home in London, a place I had only lived in for ten years. On my return to the “home” of my childhood, I felt like Australian society did not want to accept me on my terms.
London made me feel like my South Asian-ness was normal. I had forgotten in those ten years that Australia often made me feel like an outsider, generously allowed in but only if my voice did not challenge its own.
I think my kind of normal should be recognized within the multiplicities and complexities of a rapidly evolving, dynamic and spacious Australian identity. I want my children’s kind of normal to be recognized not because they are the quiet, grateful, hardworking grandchildren of quiet, grateful, hardworking immigrants, but because they are who they are. When I returned home, I felt homeless. Writing was a way of trying to understand myself, and then write myself back into the “Australian narrative” by creating my own.
BH: For how long had you been contemplating the idea of writing?
SC: I think it was only in 2012 when Song of the Sun God took form and substance that I realized how much I loved doing it and that I really wanted to keep doing it. I wanted to create a career out of it, and I wanted to be published. There is a certain point when you are writing where you realize that you do not want to just write but you want to be published.
BH: You want to share it, your story.
SC: Yes, you want to share it with a wider audience, and you also want the validation of being published. With this particular novel, it’s from my heart and it’s for my people, so the motivation to share it with a wider audience became very powerful. You know, there is something that seeks that external validation. In terms of how long I had wanted to be a writer, I knew that I loved writing from the time I was a child. I could sense that I enjoyed it. “Enjoy” is such an empty word—I loved it. When I was in fifth grade, my teacher gave me a diary and she literally said to me: “just keep writing”. And so, I used to journal on and off from