Interview | Mapping imperialism: Deepa Anappara on her new novel The Last of Earth

What inspired the historical setting of ‘The Last of Earth’?

Answer: In 2009, I came across an Englishman’s account of travelling through Tibet in the 19th century, where he referred to his two Indian “manservants” as loyal and faithful and credited them with saving his life but in the same breath spoke about whipping them as a necessary corrective to teach them to behave appropriately. I became interested in the power dynamic between the coloniser and the colonised, away from the setting of imperial power, in a region like Tibet, which can be harsh to an outsider. I was also interested in looking at who is considered an explorer and who becomes a coolie. For instance, in this particular account, it was clear that the Englishman saw himself as an explorer while his bearers were just that, despite the fact that they were walking across the same landscape that he was. 

Traditionally, the exploration novel is seen as the domain of white men, and I wanted to subvert the tropes of that genre to examine how exploration and cartography can be tools of imperialism. 

Have you travelled to Tibet? What did your research for the book entail? 

I travelled to Tibet after I had finished a first draft; most of the novel was written during the pandemic when Tibet was closed to outsiders. For primary research, I looked at accounts written by British officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, who trained Indians in rudimentary aspects of surveying and sent them to Tibet to bring back geographical information. Tibet was closed to westerners in the 19th century when the novel is set, but Indians could travel for trade and pilgrimage, and the British made use of this provision to train Indians to spy on Tibet. 

My novel is inspired by these real-life stories, so I read the accounts written by Survey officials and accessed archives at the Royal Geographical Society and the British Library in London, and at the Survey of India in Dehradun. For the voice of Katherine, I read accounts by female explorers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, some of whom also travelled to Tibet or nearby areas. 

Was it challenging to navigate multiple voices, or was it liberating because the story can go places?

The novel has two voices, one of which belongs to Balram, a schoolteacher and spy-surveyor for the British, and the other is Katherine, a female mixed-race explorer who wants to be the first woman to reach Lhasa. I chose third-person narration, so while it is close to each of these characters, it also allowed me the distance to write from a somewhat omniscient perspective in places as well. 

Has the role of the storyteller changed over the years? Are there greater expectations around social or political commentary from the writer today?

A writer can only be true to their craft, as far as I am concerned. I pay attention to my characters, their motivations and interests, and I follow them to see where the story goes. They may be up to things that society may find offensive, so external expectations are not important to me as far as my writing is concerned. Of course, I do see my writing as being political, in that I am keen to recover voices marginalised by contemporary society or history, but that can’t be the sole yardstick for writing a believable character or an engaging story. 

The ongoing global conversations around borders and belonging also find a parallel in your novel.

I believe the conversations around borders and maps are as relevant today as they were in the 19th century. In the novel, I wanted to look at whether maps can be objective representations of the landscape as we have been taught they are. What I hope my novel points to are all the ways in which the mapmaker’s eye can carry biases, and how the arbitrary lines they draw may not always show the relationship between cultures and communities.

You are involved with initiatives to promote inclusivity and improve representation in creative writing. Can you tell us more about them? 

I co-edited a collection of personal essays on writing fiction through the lenses of race and culture, titled Letters to a Writer of Colour, in which acclaimed writers such as Madeleine Thien and Tahmima Anam contributed essays on how they approach structure, characterisation and other aspects of craft. We have different storytelling traditions from around the world, but what may appeal to the western reader could be a narrative that’s easily digestible, written in a form with which they are familiar. I find it necessary to challenge such assumptions, including the notion that we have to translate our culture for a western reader even if such translation may not be in keeping with our characters’ understanding of their worlds. 

I continue to organise events to discuss these subjects, to encourage those of us from different parts of the world to stay true to our own storytelling traditions, despite the fact that most of western publishing is notoriously white with less than 15% diversity in their staff.