I started writing Border Less in 2004 when I took a sabbatical from my PhD program in French literature, although I didn’t know I was writing the first draft of a novel then. I’d returned to my home in Mumbai from Philadelphia, and wanted to rethink my choices with a world of books. As I scribbled aimlessly in a notebook every night, I wondered if a path of literary criticism that my American education was training me in was truly for me. At the same time, I felt ridiculous rethinking my choices. After all, I’d won a fully funded fellowship at an elite American school and was getting paid to read and absorb great books and teach a foreign language and culture, things I deeply loved.

Why then was I rethinking my path with a world of books? Because, in loving language and storytelling, I couldn’t truly confess to myself that I yearned to pursue creative writing over criticism as a professional path. Although as I say this, I don’t mean an easy binary between creative writing and critical thinking that a North American art world loves. I couldn’t truly admit to myself then that I yearned to belong to a community of “literary” writers I’d read over the years of my schooling—Shakespeare, Wordsworth, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, Zola, Balzac, Céline, Proust, Louise Labé, Marguerite Yourcenar, Tagore, R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, and more. As is obvious from this list, I understood literature then via an uppercase L, thanks to my colonial education. In other words, literature meant a world of colonial languages and dead white men, and to a lesser degree, a world of white women, or a world of upper-class and upper-caste brown men and women. This doesn’t mean I didn’t grow up immersed in a rich culture of storytelling that reflected my South Asian identity and an ethnic, Marwari one within; I absolutely did, and I import much of it within my fiction. Literature though, for the longer chunk of my schooling, evoked a foreign country, one that did not reflect my community nor the English I knew in my blood and bones, a country I couldn’t foresee offering me citizenship.

With all my love of language and storytelling then, a path in literary criticism via a foreign language as opposed to “my” language, English, often felt like a logical one, a path where I’d encounter lesser resistance from the Anglophone Indian in me. Besides, in the middleclass, non-upper-caste Third World I grew up in, the concept of creative writing as an educational or professional pursuit did not exist. Even today, I see the idea of writing workshops to be a very American phenomenon, one that’s exporting itself across the world—an empire its own.

From the time it was conceived to the time it was completed in a global pandemic, Border Less took 17 years because like many “minority” writers who endure layers of historic marginalization (thanks to patriarchy, caste-ism, European colonialism, capitalism, American imperialism, and more), becoming a fiction writer for me meant going on a long journey of learning, unlearning, and relearning. On a road to decolonizing my mind, I discovered an alternative relationship with language and literature, a rich legacy where Black and Brown writers appropriate the colonizer’s tongue and art forms, and make it their own. This legacy has been the focus of much of my research, writing and teaching for nearly two decades. Border Less, in many ways, is a culmination of the above journey.

To offer a glimpse into the novel, I pass the last word to Dr. Prabhu, a brown reader and literary critic whose work I deeply admire:

“Namrata Poddar's Border Less is a dazzling debut! The promise of each character, who appears through vignettes, is to take you through a Mumbai you only thought you knew. Poddar's characters emerge from crevices in the city and they cross borders of class and convention, driven by ambition, imagination, and necessity. With the ladies' special train commuter, you wonder, "Who plays the central character and who becomes the footnotes in that fragmented city with a hollow center?" But the existential question that is cleverly posed becomes: do you have to see your blood spring from your body and taste it to look beyond the aggrieved resignation in the endless crowds of which you are a part? Pieces of the novel's puzzle gradually come together in the plot, which stretches from India through Mauritius to California. Characters are thrown up in a narrative that mirrors their intractability or tedium: a Nepali maid cooped up in a glass kitchen with the hopes of paying for her father's surgery; Dia who wants to be more Indian in her heart than in her habits; cousins whose separate lives across continents allow no reconciliation except in the rhythm of a childhood dance unforgotten by their bodies; immigrant parents and their American children negotiating family, home, love, and that elusive Dream. With a light hand but profound insight, sympathy, and humor, Poddar explores the new versions of gender and hierarchies that play out for different generations and different versions of "Indians" in the U.S. With this auspicious inception, she experiments with hybrid literary genealogies, giving us a novel of poetic form and sensibility.”

--Dr. Anjali Prabhu, Professor and Director of Comparative Literary Studies, Wellesley College, and Author of Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli where she curates a series on Race, Power and Storytelling, and teaches literature as well as creative writing at UCLA. Her work has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Her debut novel, Border Less was a finalist for Feminist Press’s Meriwether First Book Award, and featured as “The Millions’s Most Anticipated" books for 2022, Brown Girl Bookshelf's "2022 Books to Read in 2022" and BuzzFeed News’s “16 Upcoming Books from Indie Presses You’ll Love.” The novel releases on March 1, 2022 from 7.13 Books in North America, and later this year from HarperCollins India in South Asia. Poddar holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. She lives with her husband and son in Greater Los Angeles. Website: www.namratapoddar.com.

Here, the author reads an excerpt from one of Border Less's chapters, “Chutney,” published in The Best Asian Short Stories 2019 anthology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLDsXcFHi3A