Anindita Ghose Talks About Lunar Symbology In Her Book The Illuminated

Author and journalist Anindita Ghose talks about her debut book The Illuminated which follows the aftermath of Shashi’s husband’s death and how the mother and her daughter, Tara deal with their personal lives and their relationship with each with a backdrop of rising religious fundamentalism in India.

The author also dives into her inspirations as well as the need for women to stand up to voice their opinions and stories along to make themselves heard in the society rather than serving as a reflected light succumbing to male privilege while in conversation with Shethepeople's Shaili Chopra. Some edited snippets:

Writing this novel, what has it meant for you and why did you choose to do it?

I think most novelists, if you ask people who are writing books, probably have always known they wanted to write a book. It's been a long-standing interest. I've always wanted to write. I want to credit one woman writer, in particular, for making me believe that me as an Indian woman could write a book that could hopefully travel the world.

I was thirteen when God Of Small Things was out. I had an elder sibling so I've been a very voracious reader because I used to read whatever he would read. I had read all of Anton Chekhov while I was eleven or twelve, and all of that, but Arundhati Roy's God Of Small things was the first book by an Indian woman, the woman who looked like the people around me. 

Tell is how The Illuminated happen?

However, the commercials of book-writing, fiction-writing globally, but especially in India aren't really conducive for it to be a career. And I don't come from a family where I could just, you know, graduate and sit around at home and say, "okay, I'm going to try to be a novelist". So, I think unless you have a trust fund, you can't really do that. I tried to spin my love for writing, built a career in journalism. I was very happy and I am happy being a journalist and editor and I'm almost quite proud that I could give myself the privilege to then write a book.

So, I've been writing this book since 2015 and it was a five-year journey, one year of editing after that and it's finally out. And now we're here!

 The Illuminated was supposed to be called The Moons of...Their Lives. So, what's the moon center of this, because I see you following a lot of conversations where the metaphor of the moon and its light is what you talk about, at least on your Instagram page. Just curious to know about the secret there.

I did adopt a kind of lunar symbology, there’s a lunar trope through the book which is what inspired the cover. For the whole time that I was writing the book, in my head, the title of the book was ‘The Moons of their Lives’. All the women in the book are named after the moon, Tara is of course star but all the other women are named after the moon; the men are named after the sun, the chapters are moon phases and the idea was about how we think of the moon as reflecting the sun's light but what happens after the sun goes away.

The sun is eclipsed, then can the moon find its own light and I was just using that as a metaphor for men and women because the central figure, the patriarch; it's not a spoiler because it's on the jacket and he dies on the page one but Robi Mallick (Robi is a Bengali version of Ravi so it means sun) dies on page one. So, how will his wife and his daughter navigate life without being circling this central sun. Hence, there was this moon metaphor and the interpretation by very talented designer Bonita Vaz Shimray was about showing this kind of collective of women because I feel that the story is not just about mother or daughter or one woman or two, it's about women coming together.

So it's about many moons and I particularly like, I don't know how many people would open it and see so I'll do it here, but the idea is there are half moons here, but if you open the jacket, she's kind of got, you know, you reach your full illumination. I really love what she's done there. So that was the lunar, kind of, symbology.

Anindita Ghose Interview: I feel also, in a lot of feminist writing the moon has always been used, the lunar energy kind of signifies the female energy. It's more calm, glow, there’s a lot of talk about how the moon cycle mirrors the menstrual cycles, all of that.

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I was really keen to play with that bit more and eventually I realised that the idea of moons expanded to the idea of light so hence it's called The Illuminated. But it’s about women, and the moon, basically finding its own light. So that was the story behind the cover and the symbology.

Watch the interview with debut women writers Anindita Ghose and Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari talk about their respective books ">here.