This week our fiction team is thrilled to feature a new short fiction story, "Ponnian of the Elephants", by writer Inderjeet Mani. The whole story can be read here on our website.
Inderjeet Mani is an Indian-born former US professor and scientist now based in Thailand. His first novel Toxic Spirits (now in its second edition) is based on his experiences volunteering with hill-tribes in Thailand’s Golden Triangle. In addition to his new novel The Conquest of Kailash, which deals with Buddhism and the search for identity, Mani has also published six scholarly books and nearly fifty shorter literary pieces.
Recently Mina El Attar, one of our fiction editors here at the Umbrella, talked to Inderjeet about his new story and his inspirations more broadly. This is the transcript of their conversation.
Mina El Attar: The vivid imagery in your work is captivating—I could picture every scene, especially the descriptions of Shanti the elephant, like when she’s ‘skipping daintily on her toes’ and her ‘pink tongue hanging loose, with her tiny tusks showing.’ It’s clear you’ve spent time around elephants. Were you naturally drawn to writing about them, or did their role emerge more as a backdrop to the story’s subtler themes?
Inderjeet Mani: Like many writers, I enjoy a close relationship with nature. Our home in Thailand is close to several wildlife parks, with plenty of wild and rescued elephants to admire! That said, I am a fan of descriptive writing, whether it’s Zola writing about cheeses or the nature writing of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Rachel Carson. (My novel Toxic Spirits, set in Thailand, is rather dense with descriptions of nature and botanical and animal life, including deep dives into our bodies.) Readers might also be interested in Chapter 21 of The Voyage of The Beagle, where Darwin describes the elephant ride which forms the basis of my story.
Mina El Attar: As someone from a formerly colonized country, I’m often drawn to exploring how colonialism impacts individuals. How much of your work delves into themes of colonialism? Do you feel a personal pull toward creating work that engages with these themes?
Inderjeet Mani: As a writer, it’s rather difficult to free oneself from the conditioning of one’s own history. My post-colonial upbringing involved a great deal of exposure to Western writings from an earlier era, and some of that was highly colonialist in outlook. As an example, I had surgery a few months back, and during recovery I consoled myself with best-sellers I used to enjoy as a teenager. Among them was the writer Nevil Shute – whose racism and sexism I now find deeply disturbing. However, when I was a teenager growing up in a postcolonial culture, I hardly noticed any of it! Another writer I read a lot of in childhood was Rudyard Kipling, and the title of my story is an allusion to Kipling’s Toomai of the Elephants, a story (from his Jungle Book) of a young elephant handler. Kipling loved both India and imperialism, and given the theme of my story I thought the title was fitting! In the case of writers on Mauritius, the naturalist Bernardin de Saint-Pierre provides marvelous descriptions of the island’s botanical treasures well as impassioned and genuine condemnations of slavery which had a huge impact in France – while also using slaves and vigorously promoting European settlement.
Mina El Attar: Who inspired this particular work? Do you usually draw inspiration from the same writers for all your projects, or do different writers influence you depending on what you're working on?
Inderjeet Mani: Some of my writings are indeed directly inspired by other writers. In this story, the inspiration is obviously Darwin, who is such a terrific writer and observer of nature. (We have ignored the natural world to our peril, and it behoves us to pay closer attention and to try and save what’s left!) For another example, I have long been a fan of the short stories of Julio Cortazar, whose writings I was introduced to by the great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes when I took a course with him. I ended up writing and publishing two stories directly influenced by Cortazar, including one that is a sequel to his story The Island at Noon. However, I mostly write on a whim, inspired by whatever interests me.
Mina El Attar: You’ve shared that you’re a fan of Darwin, Baudelaire, Walter Besant, and Mark Twain. Given your deep connection to Mauritius, which has spanned from childhood through to recent visits, how has your evolving understanding of the island's complex history—particularly regarding slavery and indentured labour—influenced your choice to focus on historical fiction centred around these well-known Western writers?
Inderjeet Mani: As a child, I was not that aware of the history of slavery during French rule of the island – I went to a French school where such details were conveniently left out! However, my parents’ circle included political figures who had been in the labor movement, and thus I was a little more aware of the struggle for rights among Indian laborers during British rule. A few years ago, I published a travelogue about Mauritius that delved deeper into the history of the island, and in the course of reading Western accounts of life there in earlier periods, I couldn’t help wondering about what ordinary people living there at the time would have thought of those visitors and their narratives. That led me to write a succession of stories where encounters with well-known writers like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Darwin, and Baudelaire are narrated from the perspective of erased or ‘subaltern’ characters. Such cross-pollination can shed light on how writers struggle with the limitations of their era, while revisiting attitudes towards diversity and progress. Of course, our relationship to literatures of the past keeps changing, and we read works we enjoyed earlier with fresh eyes, gaining a more nuanced appreciation of their lives and work. I’m a great fan of Darwin, Saint-Pierre and Baudelaire, and would never dream of posthumously canceling any of them.
Mina El Attar: I’m curious about how long you’ve been writing and how your work has evolved over time. Have you noticed consistent themes, voice, or style in your earlier work, or has it changed significantly? Also, are you currently working on anything new, and how does it compare to the work you submitted to us or your past projects?
Inderjeet Mani: I’ve been writing for more than a half-century. I started out imitating the writers I admired, and it was only about a decade ago that I really discovered my own voice! My writing has grown a bit more political over time, and my new novel The Conquest of Kailash, which just came out, is about cruelty and marginalization, and the struggle to find meaning in a world of mounting prejudice and false belief. It was written as a response to the horrible rise of religious intolerance and anti-Muslim discrimination in India, as well as a tour I did of ancient Buddhist sites there. I'm also writing other stories set in Mauritius in the periods I mentioned, including one involving Baudelaire that's in submission. However, only some of my work has this political aspect. I’m also working on a collection of literary science-fiction and fantasy stories tinged with ideas from mathematics, for example, tessellation and infinity.
Inderjeet Mani
Inderjeet Mani is an Indian-born former US professor and scientist now based in Thailand. His first novel Toxic Spirits (now in its second edition) is based on his experiences volunteering with hill-tribes in Thailand’s Golden Triangle. In addition to his new novel The Conquest of Kailash, which deals with Buddhism and the search for identity, Mani has also published six scholarly books and nearly fifty shorter literary pieces.
Mina El Attar
Mina El Attar, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Trinity College Dublin, crafts contemporary short stories that pulse with emotional depth. Her explorations of relationships and friendships, rendered in a captivating stream of consciousness style, invite readers into the intricate landscapes of the human heart. With an innate talent for exploring the intricate human psyche, Mina's stories offer readers a vivid and empathetic window into the complexities of human connection.
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