Science friction

'I'M IN THE business of telling lies - believable lies - because that's what all good authors do,' says Kunal Basu. 'I'm a great believer in fantasy, in daydreaming, in going beyond one's own demographies.'

Basu has certainly gone beyond his. The Indian-born, US-educated author's first novel followed the opium trade through India, China and Malaya. His second chronicled the life of a miniaturist in 16th-century Mughal India. His harrowing latest novel, Racists, is set in Victorian England.

The story is about 19th-century racial science - the science of the differences between the races. What Basu describes as 'an indecent and dangerous curiosity' to determine the superiority of the races has fostered many streams of science, from craniology to intelligence tests, genetics and eugenics. Racists focuses on craniology, the science of measuring skulls to determine brain capacity. But Basu forgoes dry scientific theories in favour of describing an inhuman experiment: a test to determine which race is superior.

The story takes place on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, after British craniologist Samuel Bates makes a bet with French rival Jean-Louis Belavoix. Two infants, a black boy and a white girl, are raised on the island by a mute nurse in silence and deprived of human contact. They are monitored twice a year by the scientists. Bates, a white supremacist, believes the girl will emerge the winner. Belavoix predicts that neither will be superior, but that one will eventually destroy the other. It's Lord of the Flies crossed with Darwin's The Origin of Species, disturbing and thought-provoking by turn.

'It's still a mystery to me why I thought about it, particularly because I don't suffer from a minority syndrome, nor have I experienced the heat of street racism,' says Basu. 'As an author and academic, I've by and large given race a miss. But I wanted to write a novel, not about racism per se, but the enduring fascination with the puzzle of human variation - how societies through the ages have tried to rank humans as superior or inferior.'

Was it difficult to write a novel with such unlikable protagonists? 'I had to resist the temptation to slang back at the race scientists, given their extreme views and the hurtful references to the savages and heathens to whose lot I surely belong,' says Basu. 'But once I had gotten over the absurdity of it all, the intricacies of measuring human heads with complicated devices had me intrigued. Hard as it is to approve of the two racial scientists of my novel, I construed them as men of their times, not evil characters. So my novel doesn't condemn Bates and Belavoix, but the underlying ideology of their enterprise.'

The two children were equally challenging to depict. 'In portraying them, I sought to explore the tricky borders between civilisation and savagery. Were they actually civilised beings on the island where they lived, or were they savages bereft of the most precious of human gifts: language? I wanted to leave some ambiguity - tantalise the readers.'

For a Victorian novel, Racists is surprisingly current. Much of the rhetoric of the racial scientists could as easily be heard in this century or the last, as justification for everything from the Holocaust to Islamic fundamentalism. In one of the book's most chilling passages, Bates tells a do-gooder worried about the children's suffering: 'The children suffer so that you have the God-given right to civilise the savages ... so that you have proof of God's will.'

'History has shown us that today's good science turns out to be tomorrow's absurdity,' says Basu. 'The Holocaust and countless genocides have exposed the absurdity and danger of interpreting black skin as inferior, or a certain people or gender as inferior. Hopefully, our rising consciousness will help us muddle through our naivety about human difference and transcend our perceptions.'

Basu has two distinct incarnations. When not writing fiction, he teaches strategic marketing at Templeton College in Oxford University. He has a PhD in management, and has taught on four continents. 'Actually, the lines don't converge, and I have managed to live with the disjunction,' he says. 'There's no secret corridor between my academic writing and my fiction. But fiction has always been an enduring passion. Not a hobby, not something I love to dabble in, but the reason I get up in the morning.'

He has made up for his relatively late start as an author - his first book was published when he was 45 - by writing three books in five years. 'I fit it all in by being maniacal about writing.'

Most Indian authors are expected, even encouraged, to write about India, but Basu doesn't believe in the usual writer's wisdom of writing what you know. 'It's true that writers should be free to write anything, but I see an unhealthy trend away from imagination. Authors are advised to write only what they know to be true, as if literature was a handmaiden to social commentary. I was once interviewed on an American TV show, where the interviewer asked me, 'Mr Basu, you are not a Chinese, yet you have written about opium and China; you are not a Muslim, yet you have written an Islamic novel; and now you are writing a Victorian novel and you are not even white. Do you own this world?' To which I replied, 'I own this world by my imagination.' Grand words. But I believe them.'

Writing about such unfamiliar subjects requires considerable research, but Basu says he doesn't believe in overdoing it. 'I do a bit of reading to acquire the inviolable facts, but spend a lot of time trying to uncover the foreground details that make my story credible. I read all kinds of things - published diaries, old newspapers - to fertilise my imagination to tell the tale.'

Although all three of Basu's books are historical novels, his writing style changes from book to book. The lush, evocative prose of The Opium Clerk gave way to a more measured, atmospheric style in The Miniaturist. By contrast, Racists is taut, almost minimalist. 'Style is very important to me,' Basu says. 'I wrote The Opium Clerk reminiscent of a long sea journey and The Miniaturist in the Urdu dialect of a court painter in the Mughal era. Racists is a harsh novel in many ways, so I have deliberately chosen a harsher, sparser style.'

His three novels all feature common men who wage uncommon wars against the British Empire, Mughal social mores, or the Victorian scientific establishment. Yet he denies having a pet theme. 'I write complex novels, and I hope to weave in many grand themes. My novels need to tell a compelling story with characters and plot, keep the reader engaged till the last page, and yet evoke a grand theme related to the human condition. The challenge and excitement of writing on a broad canvas is that different readers can see different things. It's like life itself.'

Basu says he considers himself an Indian writer, a label many Indians writing in English find stifling. But he says that 'writers who write on post-colonialism or the Indian diaspora tend to spend a great deal of time thinking about their identity. I don't. Categorisation of authors by their residential address is crude, to say the least. I think it's a huge advantage being Indian, not least because we come from a civilisation that is reputed for its imagination. One thing that is common to most Indian writers is their penchant for storytelling.'

He credits three novelists as influences: Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and 19th-century Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.

As for the future of Indian writing in English, Basu says the best is yet to come. 'The best of Indian writing is in vernacular languages. People forget that Indian writing in English is a very new phenomenon. I think we will see more varied writing - histories, biography, travel - if we give it time.'

Basu's next novel will entail a return to China, but his protagonist will be a Portuguese doctor seeking a cure for syphilis. Again, he says, there will probably be no Indian characters. 'What I would like to do is enter doors I have never entered, and have my reader enter the door with me. That, to me, is success.'

Racists (Orion, $188)

Kunal Basu is a guest at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival

author's bookshelf

Love in the Time of Cholera

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'It overwhelms even the most jaded of souls'

Waiting for the Barbarians

by J.M. Coetzee

'A stark reminder of the evil within'

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

'For its delicate fusion between poetry and historical narrative'

Samarkand by Amin Maalouf

'A sweeping novel that bridges civilisations'

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

'For sheer playfulness'

WRITER'S NOTES

Genre Historical fiction

Latest book Racists

Born Calcutta, India

Lives Oxford, Britain

Previous titles The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003)

Other jobs Fellow of Strategic Marketing at Templeton College, Oxford University; former director of McGill University's Centre for International Management Studies in Canada. He's also worked as a literary columnist and acted on the stage

Family Married with one daughter

Next project Historical novel about a Portuguese doctor who visits China to find a cure for syphilis

What the papers say 'Kunal Basu's Racists is a cool dissection of the roots of European racism. The novel is also a cutting satire about the 'scientific' attitudes which buttressed racist beliefs, and which are still a recognisable feature of current academic behaviour' - The Guardian