Blood Caste: My Inspiration and Challenges by Shylashri Shankar
I’m a sucker for any advice on ‘how to write’. My bookshelves are stuffed with books on how to write, don’t murder your mystery, thanks, but it’s not for us, re-vision, finding your voice and so on. I flailed about, hunting for the portal key that would take me to my novel. But at the end of fourteen years, more than the time Odysseus spent lost and wandering, I realised, like him, that I hadn’t been lost. Writing Blood Caste was my journey to digging deep within, drawing out what rang true, and learning how to say it on the page. So here is my ode to those how-to-write books that kept me going over all those years.
Write what you fancy reading, the how-to books say. Blood Caste came from my love of Sherlock Holmes stalking through the streets of foggy 19th century Victorian London with danger lurking in the form of Jack the Ripper. But for inspiration, I tapped into my memories of Hyderabad, a fable-like kingdom of Nizams and courtiers, diamonds and pearls, palaces and tombs, eccentrics and adventurers. I spent my childhood and teenage years there, reluctantly taking visiting relatives and family friends to the Nizam’s palaces and forts, and the dreaded Salar Jung Museum with its collection of artefacts, swords, clocks and what-nots from all over the world. Little did I realise that those hot weekend afternoons spent tramping through Golconda fort or sitting in the museum courtyard waiting for the bloody soldier to pop out of the cuckoo clock had laid the seeds of Blood Caste.
What ifs
The story was created through some kind of alchemy—fancy tweaked by these memories and a dash of ‘what ifs’. What if the Ripper wandered over to Hyderabad in the late 19th century. What if an Indian Sherlock Holmes hunted for him? What if the Ripper suspects were visiting Hyderabad? I chose 1895, the moment when modernity was about to enter Hyderabad: bicycles, electricity, and notions of Indian nationalism, equality, and freedom.
Soob, my main character, came to me fully formed: an excommunicated Brahmin (a Hindu) working for the Muslim ruler’s police force. The how-to books dictum, write what you know, applies to my main character’s cultural background. Despite Muslims forming the majority in Hyderabad, Soob wasn’t one because I knew little about the everyday habits and food in a late nineteenth century Muslim home.
In historical fiction, the challenge for the writer is to find out the daily rhythm of life: what they ate, wore, did. I haunted the archives, read microfiche copies of newspapers and magazines, and ploughed through the letters and journals of local nobles and British officers. There I found some gems including a court case involving a menage a trois that found its way into Blood Caste. Finding out about food habits was easier—these haven’t changed much. Also, we inhabit multiple centuries simultaneously in India. You step into an alley in the old city and find yourself in a different era, in a different rhythm of life.
But my main character, Soob, though alive in my head, was just not jumping off the page. How to make the reader connect with him? Give him flaws, the how-to books said. I’m a great fan of essays (especially by Montaigne and Hazlitt), so I turned to de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater. Soob became an opium addict grieving over the death of his wife. But on the page, all I spewed out was high melodrama. His cultural background just didn’t sit well with such an addiction.
By then I’d created a darling – an exquisitely turned out nobleman-journalist sidekick. Beware of your darlings, the how-to books said. How right they are. Though I hung on grimly to Watson through two more stories, I finally had to let him go. He was too much of something or the other: flippant, melodramatic, righteous—take your pick.
My day job and training as an academic helped and hindered in equal measure. While it helped with the research, plotting, and structure, it was useless for character development and the way I wrote the story on the page. I struggled to conjure the scene, putting the reader in the skin of the character.
A million words later . . .
Ten years, four academic and non-fiction books, six novels (two with Soob and the sidekick, three present day ones and a children’s book), dozens of rejections, and a million words later I realised what was wrong.
One, I was simply picking things off the shelves, unable and unwilling to explore the story’s psyche, which in reality was my psyche. Two, I had peculiar ideas about talent and writing. As a child, I watched Hindi films. In them, the hero or heroine stands at the window, gazes up at the moon and starts singing. So as a child of six or seven, I would gaze out at the moon expecting a song to burst out of me. Never did. But that notion—all I had to do was sit down and write and a novel would appear in the notebook—had never left me.
Covid struck, we were all locked up, and willy-nilly, I was forced to gaze inward. I decided to write the Ripper story again, but approach it as a craft. I joined a writing course, found a mentor, and worked on the manuscript. This switch to seeing words as a craft rather than some mysterious god-given talent made a big difference. I understood the importance of choosing words, the skill required to make the reader relate to the characters, and guide them through the story.
Since I’d done courses in gardening, botanical art, and kept a herbarium, I made Soob a plant hunter in his spare time, a very Victorian pastime. I also began the inward journey into my psyche. Meditation and other alternative forms of therapy I used to connect with my unconscious mind, did proprioceptive writing (pose a question and then write for twenty minutes whatever comes into your mind), and practiced reading slowly and with my body.
I inked the words page by page in a notebook: a story draft, a first draft, a second draft and a zillion revisions. In the process, I found the theme that recurred in my stories and in Blood Caste—how to tackle prejudice. Ironically, the character who came alive very quickly on the page was a Yorkshire policeman from a farming background. In him, I channelled two of my favourite uncles who had politically incorrect and insular ideas of how the world ought to be.
Writing through all these challenges has never felt like a chore. Frustrating yes, hair tearing going on, yes, but also uplifting, hopeful, joyous, this voyage into those wondrous worlds. I think the unconscious contains many stories, all fully formed. The process of writing and finding oneself uncovers a particular story. Stories, though, have to trust you to finish them. If you do, more stories will come to you.
So my advice is: use any method to dig deep within yourself to find out what you want to say, then find a good teacher who can help you learn the craft of saying it, trust the process, finish the story, and above all, have fun with it.
About Blood Caste by Shylashri Shankar:
Is Jack the Ripper at large on the streets of Victorian India?
Hyderabad, India, 1895. When three bodies are discovered with mutilations bearing an eerie resemblance to the Ripper’s Whitechapel victims, Chief Inspector Soobramania – known as Soob – is summoned to investigate.
Suspicion alights upon three powerful men: a Russian grand duke and an English earl visiting the city, and their friend, a Deccani noble, who is also the stepson of one of the victims.
Faced with the thorny imperial politics of accusing relatives of Queen Victoria, Soob must ally with his rival in the British Residency Police, Inspector Wilberforce, to hunt down the killer.
So begins a deadly game of cat and mouse played in the shadow of empire, where high birth protects foul deeds and where spilt blood counts for less than wealth.
A richly textured and utterly compelling historical crime thriller from a dazzling debut voice.
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