Becoming A Writer With SouthAsia Speaks
2022 Fellow Sanjana Ramachandran reflects on her year as a SAS Fellow and what it means to be a writer in South Asia
I’ve been feeling strange ever since I’ve started to say “I’m a writer” to anyone who asks what I do. It is because that simple answer belies many complications. Foremost, fortunately, is a sense of satisfaction from having realized a dream that I thought, all my life, would be just that. Then there is quizzical anticipation about what will happen when the other person’s eyes widen.
“Oh wow!”—and I might douse them with smiles and tell them about the book I’m writing, with more than a little help from the South Asia Speaks fellowship for emerging writers. Through 2022, my mentor Sanam Maher has been guiding me with what is tentatively titled Famous Last Questions, a collection of essays in search for answers about how to live in modern India. Think of navigating extreme differences within families and generations and a fraught society, whose political environment is so overwhelming that most practical action feels futile, while mostly swallowing all thoughts, moral or otherwise, with Instagram Reels and making ends meet and managing the mental health fallout of these mundane, privileged activities. Exciting, right? Sign-up to receive more updates about it here.
Many times, however, the response to my answer is more confused. Especially if the other person belongs to said generation which has differences with mine.
“So, you’re sitting at home?” they might blurt.
Or: “You do this full-time?”
Or: “What do you do during the day?”
Well, strictly speaking, I am sitting at home. It is hard to write outside, on the road, or in someone else’s house, or in the corporate office I no longer work at, which, for these conversationalists, might be the only fathomable, sane place to be. “What have I done with my life?” is their more basic question.
I would’ve had more wrath for this variety of response if it wasn’t, on some level, valid. I used to receive a pleasant, predictable income in exchange for doing predictable, if sometimes unpleasant, tasks. Now, little is predictable: neither the income nor the nature of tasks. Because when I say “I’m a writer”, what I really mean is: “I’m trying to investigate myself and my place in this ever-changing world so that I can put into words something that might make me and others grappling with similar questions feel better, because things have really changed forever along with our ways of finding meaning and answers, so I think we could all use some balm. And reading and writing have always been my balm, so I’m trying to make some too, the best I can. And as unpleasant as it is to confront myself every day, I have also decided to work three to five other jobs in order to do so. So, really, I’m a marketing consultant.
This too is a kind of lie, though. (I do really like marketing consulting.) But I also doubt I’d so valiantly be “investigating myself and my place in this ever changing world” if it weren’t for encountering others who seem to engage in similar insanity, even if not through exactly the same self-inquiry. Most South Asia Speaks fellows work day jobs, or are studying, paying bills and managing ordinary lives while funding and working on their fellowship projects, which range from short stories and novels and poetry to translations and non-fiction. Even though I haven’t met anyone who writes tweet threads about how to 10x your productivity, these fellows seem to be among the most productive people I’ve ever come across. Our exchanges on WhatsApp, apart from alerting each other to pitch calls, writing opportunities, and contacts and sources across countries, also reveal the quiet hustle culture behind our chosen paths. Nothing hits writing like life stuff, such as illness and home- and rent-making and burnout and generally being part of a shaky industry where delayed payments and information asymmetry are some of the many problematic norms. And it seems to only be getting tougher to operate in it.
Perhaps this is why nobody knows what writers really do. The profession isn’t supposed to exist in these parts of the world.
These structural challenges are, of course, over and above the craft of writing, which is the fundamental premise of the fellowship. The 2022 class attended sessions with the likes of Pankaj Mishra, Suketu Mehta, Meena Kandasamy, Nilanjana Roy, and several other South Asian writers who might not provoke our kind of enthusiasm and veneration in the families or certain friends’ circles we belong to. But this stops to matter after the authors’ classes—and their very existence—offer living proof that it, in fact, does not matter. Masters have walked the path before us and not only survived, but also lived to teach and tell glorious, if cautionary, tales. And they are now creating a space for others to follow, less dangerously. “It is worth it,” you think every now and then, before being forced to live your wildest dreams.
The aim is to make it all less wild. On the Zoom call that wrapped up the class of ’22, our program director Sonia Faleiro reiterated the purpose of the fellowship: “We often wished for such systems of support, so prevalent in the West, when we were starting out. It’s hard enough to write as it is. The rest of it—finding the right people, navigating publishers, editors, agents—shouldn’t be.”
Having started this journey myself now, I cannot imagine how our mentors did it a decade or so ago, without the kind of support and knowledge they now provide us. I know I would have struggled without the fellowship, and certainly wouldn’t be going around calling myself “a writer” working on “a book about modern India” faster than I could actually write it. Given also that my project involved an accelerated-coming-to-terms with years of eating disorders, dependence on substance, unexplored parts of my sexuality, my expression of my gender and my religion, all wrapped up in an unhealthy amount of ambition and workaholism and ignorance, I was particularly blessed to have a mentor so insightful and kind that I worry, at times, she might stop writing to instead pursue her talents in counselling. (In case this transpires, I’d offer the program and future fellows my deepest apologies.)
Mostly, however, I am grateful about landing this opportunity. It became obvious, over the sessions with other fellows, mentors, and authors, that earning one’s own confidence is the bedrock of the writerly obstacle course. I am thus finally more accepting of the massive fillip that the fellowship has provided, and internalizing that it is probably deserved, and certainly necessary, as anyone who has wanted to write will know. How else do you do the thing you most want to do, that you’re most afraid to do, in an age where everyone is doing it anyway—on Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Substack, all of which ooze with content, content, and more content?
Now, after years of being told to “do it on the side”, like some vulgar affair, I can look back to a year of reading, writing, and navigating the industry as a South Asia Speaks fellow as some proof of my profession—even if it is still being done, strictly speaking, “on the side”. Despite not facing the plight that anyone queer might have had to with “coming out”, I sometimes feel like that is the best phrase to describe my acceptance of myself as a writer. Nothing else captures the difficulty, and the final liberation, of fully expressing the part of me that was always so suppressed and relegated, and that is still made so unviable structurally and culturally.
But like Kurt Vonnegut said, “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.”
I am going, finally, with what will hopefully be scores of other South Asia Speaks fellows over the years.
Sanjana Ramachandran is a writer from the class of 2022 of SouthAsia Speaks. She was mentored by Sanam Maher. As the SouthAsia Speaks Fellowship welcomes its third cohort of fellows, we thank everyone for reading and writing along with us. You can connect with us on Twitter and Instagram to see more of what we’re up to. Until next time.
Love this. Thank you so much Sanjana.
Wonderful to read this Sanjana. It inspires we mentors in the South Asia Speaks program to know how much it means to our fellows.