How to frame your dragon: A Wknd interview with fantasy writer Indrapramit Das
His new novella is about a teen who seems to come from a long line of dragoners. Set in Kolkata, Das also uses the tale to ask: What makes someone a migrant?
Like all the best dreams, his felt more like a memory. He was in a misty garden; in his grandmother’s hands, a small bud turned into a baby dragon.
“It was a dream I woke up to about three years ago,” says author Indrapramit Das.
The scenes, which haunted him until he wrote them down, make up the opening pages of Das’s fantasy novella, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar (2023). The book follows a teenager in 1990s Kolkata as he struggles to make sense of his fantastical heritage, which seems to involve some form of dragon-slaying, great migrations, and no place called home.
Last month, The Last Dragoners… won the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards (SCKA) prize for best novella, in Glasgow. The book has also been shortlisted for the 2024 Locus Awards handed out by the US-based Locus Science Fiction Foundation, and for the 2024 British Fantasy Awards.
“It is wonderful to have one’s work be recognised in this way. I don’t think awards are the be-all and end-all, but there’s no denying they can make a difference to one’s career,” Das says.
The 40-year-old has already had a storied career. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and in anthologies such as Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction (2018). He has a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and was awarded the prestigious Octavia E Butler Memorial Scholarship in 2012.
The Last Dragoners…, his second book (we’ll get to the first in a bit), came about when Subterranean Press, a small Michigan publishing house focused on horror, sci-fi and fantasy fiction, invited Das to submit a draft of anything he would like to see published. That was in 2021.
“By then, I had had that dream. It stuck with me for a long, long time, before I wrote it down. And the story followed,” he says.
The early days of the pandemic and the racism that Das witnessed against Chinese-origin people in Kolkata shaped the book. It would become the story of Reuel George aka Ru, a gender-fluid teen trying to answer the questions: Where do migrants like him belong? How does one become a migrant, and what does that do to one’s sense of purpose?
With dragons thrown in.
Part family mystery, part love letter to fantasy, the tale follows Ru as he tries to get his parents and grandmother to explain why he is sometimes labelled Christian, sometimes part-Chinese or part-Naga, sometimes “the snake from nowhere”.
“We come from nomadic people,” is all they will say. Or, even more mystifyingly, “We have the name George because St George once slew a dragon.”
Meanwhile, dream-like memories haunt him: of dragon’s eggs, swirling black bodies and iridescent wings. Amid it all, he strikes up a friendship with the neighbour’s daughter, Alice. Falls in love with fantasy fiction. And comes to recognise the truth of who he is: a dragoner, born on Earth, in love with Kolkata, and unwilling to recognise any of the other labels being attached to him and to others in his world.
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For years now, Das has been on a journey of self-discovery too. He was born in Kolkata, to a schoolteacher and a tea trader. He grew up on fairy tales, Roald Dahl and Stephen King; then JRR Tolkien, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri; and later Ursula K Le Guin and Japanese animation or anime. He fell in love with fantasy when he was about eight, he says.
He began to write, and study writing. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in English literature and creative writing from the liberal-arts Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. It was there that he realised, with a start, that he had “defaulted to writing about white characters in a Western context”. “It was such a jarring moment for me,” he says.
Das tilted his axis back towards the East. “I longed to create stories that translated the impact of the Studio Ghibli movies into literary form, but set in an Indian context. Those films focus on the down-to-earth moments of our mundane reality, and expand on them in these cosmic, fantastical ways. I wanted to be able to do that. The movies remain an inspiration for a lot of my work.”
His debut novel, The Devourers (2015), would be his first major effort in this direction. It is a dark look at an alternative world in which a historian in modern-day Kolkata discovers shape-shifting werewolves.
The Last Dragoners… plays with complex themes. It explores, for instance, what it was like to grow up in a post-colonial, just-liberalised, Anglophone India, where one simply couldn’t pin one’s identity down without at least glancing off the frames of reference left behind by colonisers.
“My first language, for instance, is English,” Das says, indicating that as much as this has given to his identity, it has taken something from it too. “I’ve always felt an in-betweenness,” he adds. “A regret at never being able to fully inhabit my Bengali heritage.”
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Why fantasy and not just fiction?
Almost all of art is fantasy, he says. He describes the genre as “a collective dream to help us deal, as a species, with everything that is unknowable about ourselves and the universe… and with the anxiety, the irrepressible euphoria and dysphoria of being able to see things in our minds that don’t exist”.
After decades of being niche and under-explored in Indian publishing, it is good to see it get more attention, he adds. Developments such as Westland launching its speculative fiction imprint, IF, this year are encouraging. “Still, overall, Western publishing remains the broader avenue for this kind of work. That’s where there is also a cultural ecosystem for it, with awards, magazines and active literary criticism.”
Das is certainly doing his bit to boost interest in the genre. In October, his first anthology as an editor will be published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press. Titled Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, it brings together 10 writers from around the world, including the award-winning Vajra Chandrasekera from Sri Lanka and Lavanya Lakshminarayan and Samit Basu from India, to imagine art and artists in futures near, far, and deep into the cosmos.
These are stories that matter, Das says. As our world gets stranger and more dystopian — amid the systemic horrors of capitalism, fascism, the demonisation of the poor and of truth-tellers, bombs falling and ecosystems being murdered — art, too, is under attack, by corporations and the tech industry, he adds.
“Look at the ecologically disastrous, labour-stealing plagiarism engine of generative AI,” he says. “But art will persevere, as long as humans do. And even now, there are probably other civilisations in the universe, with other art, somewhere, even if we don’t ever meet them.”
