Parul Kapur is a novelist, journalist, and literary critic. She was born in an oil town in northeastern India and took her first plane ride out of the Upper Assam jungle at eleven days old. She spent her early childhood between Bombay, Calcutta, and New Delhi, and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was seven. Parul graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in English and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She has worked as a press officer at the United Nations in New York and as an editor at Travel & Leisure.
She returned to India briefly in the 1980s to work as a reporter at the city magazine Bombay, writing about culture, arts, and society. Painters and gallerists she met there offered their first-hand accounts of the birth of India’s modern art movement in 1947, the same year as Independence. Inside the Mirror, which is inspired by her encounters with art world figures in Bombay, won the AWP Prize for the Novel and was published by the University of Nebraska Press on March 1, 2024.
What has been your journey in being an author/writer?
I’ve been a journalist and fiction writer for over thirty years, and also written literary and art criticism. My work habits as a reporter have carried over into my fiction, such as investigating the locations where my story is set and interviewing people. For instance, the main characters of my debut novel, Inside the Mirror, are twin sisters in 1950s India, so I interviewed artists and Bharatanatyam dancers who’d lived in India at that time since the twins aspire to become a painter and a classical dancer. Books can be vital to research, but I find speaking to people yields the most interesting information.
I worked on my novel off and on for twenty-five years. When I couldn’t find a literary agent, I finally put it away and began a new novel. A few years later, as a critic in Atlanta, I interviewed Deepa Mehta, who’d made the movie version of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children. I thought Inside the Mirror might make a good film, so I asked her if she’d read the manuscript and she generously agreed. She sent back wonderful notes on how to improve my story, though she declined to make a movie. Once I had her comments, I could see the book playing out as a movie in my mind and immediately drew up a plan for how to heighten the drama in revision. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to return to a story I’d already spent so many years on.
The novel stayed in a box for almost ten years, until I noticed some friends were winning writing contests and getting their novels published. So I submitted mine to the AWP Prize for the Novel in 2022 and won. What followed was six to five months of intensive editing, cutting, and rewriting, distilling the original manuscript into an emotional drama about the twins and their family. My journey has been long, with surprising turns, and over the years, I wrote a number of short stories and drafted two other novels, giving me plenty of material to work on for the next few years.
What role has your culture, ethnicity, and identity played in your career and your creation?
My cultural identity has been central to my fiction. I began writing short stories as an undergraduate and every one of them was set in India, though I had immigrated to the States with my parents as a seven-year-old. I have no explanation for why that was except that some part of me was left behind in India.
Nonetheless, I like to be involved in the world around me, and writing for newspapers and magazines as both a staff writer and later as a freelancer allowed me to be engaged in whichever place I found myself living. I’ve moved around a lot. I spent a decade in Europe—Germany, France, and England—so I would write articles from there for papers like Newsday and The Wall Street Journal Europe, and magazines like Art in America. I feel comfortable with this dual existence of reporting on the world outside my door while imaginatively dwelling in India. Lately, though, my short stories have been about Indian immigrants in America and Europe, and I have a novel in the works set largely in Connecticut, where I grew up. My heart and mind have been migrating to where my body is.
Describe the plots/ideas of a few of your most recent and most notable books. What significance do they hold for you?
Inside the Mirror is set a few years after Indian independence, when the nation was left impoverished and reeling from bloodshed after the British partitioned India. Several million people were killed, and millions more left homeless. Against this backdrop of death and destruction, my protagonists, twin sisters Jaya and Kamlesh, dream of becoming artists, responding to the suffering they’ve seen with an impulse to create. Their father is a progressive man who wants them to be college-educated but has chosen their professions for them—Jaya is to be a doctor and Kamlesh to be a school teacher.
Their struggle to define themselves pits them against the wishes of their family, whom they love very much, and the prescription of their conservative society. It’s unacceptable for Jaya to make art her vocation and join a modern artists’ group composed of male artists. It’s also taboo for Kamlesh, a devoted student of classical Indian dance, to display her body on stage or in the Hindi movies. When the sisters push against these limits, they meet the harsh judgment of their parents and severe punishment by their society. Inside the Mirror is a drama about family love as well as an interrogation of gender, power, and creativity.
I began this novel when I was young and hoping to become an artist—a novelist—so in some ways the story of Jaya and Kamlesh reflects my own. It’s set in the 1950s when my parents came of age in India, a time my father told me many stories about. It’s a mingling of my parents’ India and my own burning ambition to become an artist as a young woman.
What impact do you hope to imprint on the world with your writing?
I write about vulnerable characters who experience a terrible crisis. I hope the reader feels for the fragility of their position and dreams, but also recognizes the courage it takes to live after your world has been shattered. Like the twins in Inside the Mirror, some of my characters experience the world intensely through their creativity, yet others through their ability to love openly despite the pain they’ve endured. To me love and creativity are part of the same wish to live and hope, to make the most of our time on earth.
What advice do you have for aspiring AAPI writers?
If you’re interested in writing about your family history or culture, try to discover the rich stories your parents and elders possess. Ask them questions, listen to them, learn from them. If you have a specific story in mind, you might interview them if they are willing to sit down with you. Sometimes people are self-conscious or they don’t have the time. In that case, speak to them informally but remember everything, so you can write it down afterward.
It’s important to write down what you hear, because while our elders’ memories might be vast, what we hear is out of context, so those words might float away in this new world unless we anchor them to paper. If you can, visit the places where your story is set, then it will become real to you.