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About the Book
Wise, funny, touching, wide-ranging, deep-delving; whip-smart dialogue and graceful, paced sentences, thousands upon thousands of them. Written by a novelist with the eye of a poet, and a poet with the narrative powers of a novelist, this is a book that needed to be written, that tells true things, and is entirely its own being.
-Robert Macfarlane, author of The Lost Words and Underland
Shai is a young woman in modern India. Lost and drifting, she travels to her country’s Northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with Indigenous communities, ways of being that realign and renew her. Evelyn is a student of science in Edwardian England. Inspired by Goethe’s botanical writings, she leaves Cambridge on a quest to wander the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas. Linnaeus, a botanist and taxonomist who famously declared “God creates; Linnaeus organizes” sets off on an expedition to an unfamiliar world, the far reaches of Lapland in 1732. Goethe is a philosopher, writer, and one of the greatest minds of his age. While traveling through Italy in the 1780s, he formulates his ideas for “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” a little-known, revelatory text that challenges humankind’s propensity to reduce plants—and the world—into immutable parts.
Drawn richly from scientific and botanical ideas, Everything the Light Touches (HarperVia, 2022) is a swirl of ever-expanding themes: the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban and rural life, capitalism, and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and “song and stone.” Pulsating at its center is the dichotomy between different ways of seeing, those that fix and categorize and those that free and unify. Pariat questions the imposition of fixity—of our obsession to place permanence on plants, people, stories, knowledge, land—where there is only movement, fluidity, and constant transformation. “To be still,” says a character in the book, “is to be without life.”
Chat with the Author
Mary: One of my favorite questions to ask authors is about who they are: their background, their current work. Where did you grow up, what are some of your favorite childhood experiences, and what do you do now?
Janice: I grew up in the Northeast of India, the bit at the end that almost falls off the map, in the vast plains of Assam, and the beautiful mountainscapes of Meghalaya, one of the wettest places in the world. Some of my favourite childhood memories involve running around like a wild child amidst goats, cows, dogs, chickens, and ducks at the tea estates in Assam where my father worked for many years. In Shillong, the capital town of Meghalaya, I remember my grandfather telling me stories during power-cuts in candlelight. Now, after travelling the world, I’m back in the northeast of India, writing, trying to tend a garden, being bullied by my cat, walking, seeking forests—and I also teach creative writing at Ashoka University in Delhi.
Mary: You previously published Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories, Seahorse: A Novel, and the novella The Nine-Chambered Heart. Would you like to touch briefly on each of these books?
Janice: The stories in Boats on Land are set in and around the places where grew, and they are in many ways an homage to all the storytellers in my life. I grew up in a community with rich and vibrant oral storytelling roots—and this continues to play an enormous part of my writing life. Seahorse, my first novel, travels farther, to Old Delhi and London, retelling the lesser-known Greek myth of Poseidon and his youthful male devotee Pelops. It’s a novel that explores queerness, love, memory, hope. The Nine Chambered Heart offers us nine voices that narrate the story of their relationship with one woman, who is at the heart of the book, but remains distant, and silent, to the reader. The novella is about the fragile, fragmented nature of identity, how others see us only in bits and pieces, and how sometimes we tend to become what others perceive us to be.
Mary: Your most recent book, Everything the Light Touches, won the AutHer Award for Best Fiction in 2023 and was listed in The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022. Amitav Ghosh and Robert Macfarlane lauded the novel. Can you explain to readers what is happening in the novel?
Janice: In Everything the Light Touches we meet many travellers: Shai, a young Indian woman who journeys to India’s northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with Indigenous communities, ways of being that realign and renew her. Evelyn, an Edwardian student at Cambridge who, inspired by Goethe’s botanical writings, embarks on a journey seeking out the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas. Linnaeus, botanist and taxonomist, who famously declared “God creates; Linnaeus organizes” and led an expedition to Lapland in 1732. And Goethe himself, who travelled through Italy in the 1780s, formulating his ideas a revelatory text that called for a re-examination of our propensity to reduce plants—and the world—into immutable parts.
Drawing richly from scientific ideas, the novel plunges into a whirl of ever-expanding themes, and the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban life and the countryside, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and ‘song and stone’. At the heart of the book lies a tussle between different ways of seeing—those who fix and categorize, and those who free and unify.
Everything the Light Touches brings together people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet all is resonance, we discover; all is connection.
Mary: There’s so much to say about this novel: It’s written so beautifully, it has one character’s journey in verse form, it lifts up the homology and magnificence of plants, and it criss-crosses the experiences of four people on journeys. What led you to tell this story?
Janice: I think the books we write exist in us from the day we are born, perhaps even long before that. In some ways Everything the Light Touches feels as though it was propelled into being by my ancestors, by some cosmic force. It feels inexplicable to speak of “beginnings” in relation to a book that offers us a long perspective—that says the beginning of the universe is where all of us begin. At the heart of it, though, is the tussle between these ways of seeing—those who fix and categorize and those who free and unify—and being a child of more than usually mixed heritage, all my life I have struggled with who I am and where I’m from. Where do I belong? These questions cease to matter, I realise, when you place yourself, your species, within the long perspective. All categories fall away. And what you’ve left with is this something inexplicable and whole and true.
Mary: The long perspective is a good way of putting it. Can you talk some about the four main characters? The inspiration from Carl Linnaeus and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe seems to help to centralize the importance of botany and homeland among the characters. Why was it important for you to deal with this aspect?
Janice: I employ botany, or science, as a metaphor, a vehicle, for exploring the different ways in which we see the world. At the heart of the novel is an epistemological concern: how do we come to know what we know? How do we gather knowledge? And this is an important question because how you learn about something shapes how you relate to it. If we learn about the world, other people, plants, and animals in fragmented, mechanistic ways, we will relate to them in a similar manner. If we learn about them in a way that is relational, holistic, and intuitive, that will serve as the core of our relationship to them. How we see a plant, the novel offers, is how we see the world. Linnaeus offers us taxonomy—categories and names and labels. Goethe us imagination, intuition, unity, fluidity. A way of seeing that is what we see echoed in Shai’s story—the other shell of the book that cradles all the other stories.
Mary: I feel that there are lessons to be pondered from this novel, including a new (re-) connection with the natural world, a move forward from our history of neglecting women in science, a discontinuance of exploiting people and land, a realization of how language can help form perspectives, and understanding what it means to go home, which also seems to tie with respecting Indigenous roots. Do you have any thoughts on these ideas, and can you add to them?
Janice: To return to the long perspective is to return to the indigenous. Everything the Light Touches champions, without I hope romanticising, Indigenous ways of being and forms of knowledge. They offer us the sustainable solutions that we’re so desperately seeking. I place faith on the Indigenous. There’s an article in this rather wonderful magazine in India called Down to Earth that explores the politics of development, climate, and the environment, which speaks of how, despite many divisions, India’s tribal cultures remain the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation: in their age-old knowledge and value systems that promote long-term sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature, in emphasis on equality and sharing rather than hierarchy and competition, and in the resilience of dozens of movements against land grab by mining and construction companies. There’s a saying amongst the adivasis in Orissa, me matiro poko achhu (we are earth worms). The idea that these cultures live in symbiosis with nature is not the romanticised notion it is often dismissed as. Adivasi economics promotes a way of life based on non-monetised exchange labour and restraint in what is taken from nature.
In the face of the monstrosities of modern, neo-liberal capitalism, Indigenous cultures may well be the only hope for the future of our human species. They sing the songs of the Earth; they sing the songs of hope.
Mary: Thanks so much, Janice. I enjoyed talking with you and learning more about seeing our world as fluid and constantly transforming!
About the Author
Janice Pariat is a writer from India. Her most recent novel Everything the Light Touches is out with HarperCollins India, Borough Press UK, and HarperVia USA. It won the AutHer Award for Best Fiction in 2023, and was listed in The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2022”.
