Shankari Chandran’s first manuscript: ‘The Song of The Sun God’ was rejected on the grounds that it was not “Australian” enough. While how one should mould a work of fiction to make it appear “Australian” enough does not have a manual, Chandran tried again with the novel that ensued, ‘The Barrier’. In this, as she shares with the interviewer Janet Manley from LitHub, “I essentially went back to it and did control-all find-all replace-all. And I changed the central character whose name was Zakiya Ali to Noah Williams. And I made him a white character, a white protagonist, white male protagonist—in fact a white American protagonist. And that novel was picked up very quickly by an Australian publisher”. Despite having engaging plotlines that mostly advocated for social change, Chandran’s manuscripts were not ‘accepted’ until ‘Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens’. This book was able to win Australia’s most prestigious award; The Miles Franklin Literary Award. And it was embraced with open arms by not only Australians but by audiences far and wide. And the international appeal that this book built for her can be attributed to the fact that at the heart of her novel was storytelling, negotiation of identity, community, race and a deep seated love for writing. Things that were relatable and had people saying ‘me too’.
Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer (who is based in Sydney, where she lives with her husband and four children) and a writer. In addition to ‘Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens’ winning the award, even her other books ‘Song of the Sun God’, which was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award (2019) and short-listed for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award (2018) and ‘The Barrier’, which was short-listed for the Norma K Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018), were ones that had already gained an international fanbase. Furthermore,‘Song of the Sun God’ is being adapted for television, starring Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran. She already has plans for 2024 as well, where her next novel, which currently does not have a title, will be released by Ultimo Press. Additionally, her unreleased manuscript titled ‘Unfinished Business’, will also be published as an Audible Original in the same year. This manuscript marks the beginning of her Ellie Harper Series.
While the fact that she won this award is a testament to her international appeal, it is also an acknowledgement to the gravity of raw and unfiltered storytelling. Richard Neville, Miles Franklin Award Judge, while sharing his thoughts with Special Broadcasting Services about Shankari Chandran’s latest milestone confirms this fact when he says “We are looking for great stories and I think a lot of the great stories at the moment are coming out of people who are telling their backstories, telling their stories about growing up in this country [Australia] and it is important that we hear them”.
The great feat of having her name under the most prestigious award in Australia is something that Chandran will undoubtedly cherish for her entire life. While it did give her a spotlight and recognition in manifold, it was also a well-deserved affirmation and recognition of how prolific of a writer she is. As she mentions in most of her interviews, storytelling to Chandran was a way of breathing life into memories and ensuring their longevity. It is a vehicle via which cultures are preserved, identities are created and connections between communities are established. She extends the role of storytelling to show how it can and is used to create a national identity and the way in which those identities are created to the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.
‘Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens’ is set in a nursing home in Western Sydney and it is set against the backdrop of rising racism in contemporary Australia, but it also flashes back to the residents’ lives in Sri Lanka because a considerable crowd; including the staff who work there, are originally Sri Lankan Tamils. So the story travels constantly between the two timelines. While the book explores larger themes such as race, migrant experience and social change to a greater length, it is also first and foremost a story of a group of individuals who were a part of an intimate community, which was also a part of a larger whole.
Speaking to Valerie Khoo from Australian Writers’ Centre, Chandran explains how her novel has so many layers to it. She tells Khoo about how she really wanted to explore race via this novel and she deemed the nursing home to be the perfect setting to do so. The setting came first, because she drew from her lived experience of visiting her grandmother in a nursing home where at any given time there were four generations of individuals who were gathered around sharing stories and building a sense of community. She delineates further by saying:
“I did map out who was gonna drive a narrative about race and I found this novel technically almost legally very hard, because it does grapple with the right to freedom of speech, it grapples with what we consider to be hate speech and what do we consider to be racial vilification. And there is a sort of narrative about reverse racism in the novel, and what is it and does it actually exist and who gets to call that out. You have these characters for example who will argue the right to freedom of speech when they wish to ‘other’ other people and when they wish to pick on and vilify minorities or people from the LGBTQ+ community, they will hide behind the right to freedom of speech. But when they are called out for their bigotry they will then vilify the person who has called them out … and accuse them of being un-Australian” . This compelled her to draw from the political and public discourse around who gets to belong to a community and who is ostracised.
In an era where there is an influx of migrants due to reasons that range from economic to political, Shankari’s appeal as an author that is embraced by an international audience rests on the fact that her work is an honest reflection of how identity is negotiated in instances such as this. She speaks of and for people from diasporas, immigrants and people who are displaced externally and internally. And she speaks for them not in a way that would champion an individual narrative but in a way that makes space for people to either repudiate, agree or occupy neutral grounds about what she is saying. Her statements are never definitive but they are always in forms of questions. While the structure or form of her novel may not reveal that it is more of an inquiry rather than a response, if read between the lines and through the nuances, she does not speak for otherselves but rather explores her experience and experiences of people who are close to her about what it means to have a fluid identity that is often dictated for you, how it feels to be made like you belong (or don’t for that matter), the layers of being a part of a community, the chronic binary division of ‘us’/’them’ and who gets to stand on which side. And she does this via writing and storytelling.
A universally accepted fact is that writing happens in waves, in stages and it is never linear. There is no hard and fast rule about how many drafts are the correct number of drafts or how many keyboard smashes away you are from your final edit. A novel is something that will continue to grow even after it has been published and is no longer in your possession and in your possession alone. Initially, it is you, your pen and your blank pages against the world and the million thoughts that inundate your headspace at every waking moment. This is when you build a rapport with the characters that you bring to life, have serious conversations with your pages in order to decide who they are and who they want to be. Gradually, it becomes a public property, it becomes accessible, it becomes a communal platform for people to park their thoughts at, merge their thoughts with and draw aspiration for thinking new thoughts. A book comes to life once it is received and a book is in constant metamorphosis because there is nothing called a final thought on it. Every individual interaction with it will shift its meaning, even if it is by a decimal. Shankari’s oeuvre and the way that she converses about her work is a tribute to a book and its life.
(Sandunlekha Ekanayake)