'I'M IN THE business of telling lies - believable lies - because that's what all good authors do,' says Kunal Basu. 'I'm a great believer in fantasy, in daydreaming, in going beyond one's own demographies.'
Basu has certainly gone beyond his. The Indian-born, US-educated author's first novel followed the opium trade through India, China and Malaya. His second chronicled the life of a miniaturist in 16th-century Mughal India. His harrowing latest novel, Racists, is set in Victorian England.
The story is about 19th-century racial science - the science of the differences between the races. What Basu describes as 'an indecent and dangerous curiosity' to determine the superiority of the races has fostered many streams of science, from craniology to intelligence tests, genetics and eugenics. Racists focuses on craniology, the science of measuring skulls to determine brain capacity. But Basu forgoes dry scientific theories in favour of describing an inhuman experiment: a test to determine which race is superior.
The story takes place on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, after British craniologist Samuel Bates makes a bet with French rival Jean-Louis Belavoix. Two infants, a black boy and a white girl, are raised on the island by a mute nurse in silence and deprived of human contact. They are monitored twice a year by the scientists. Bates, a white supremacist, believes the girl will emerge the winner. Belavoix predicts that neither will be superior, but that one will eventually destroy the other. It's Lord of the Flies crossed with Darwin's The Origin of Species, disturbing and thought-provoking by turn.
'It's still a mystery to me why I thought about it, particularly because I don't suffer from a minority syndrome, nor have I experienced the heat of street racism,' says Basu. 'As an author and academic, I've by and large given race a miss. But I wanted to write a novel, not about racism per se, but the enduring fascination with the puzzle of human variation - how societies through the ages have tried to rank humans as superior or inferior.'
Was it difficult to write a novel with such unlikable protagonists? 'I had to resist the temptation to slang back at the race scientists, given their extreme views and the hurtful references to the savages and heathens to whose lot I surely belong,' says Basu. 'But once I had gotten over the absurdity of it all, the intricacies of measuring human heads with complicated devices had me intrigued. Hard as it is to approve of the two racial scientists of my novel, I construed them as men of their times, not evil characters. So my novel doesn't condemn Bates and Belavoix, but the underlying ideology of their enterprise.'
The two children were equally challenging to depict. 'In portraying them, I sought to explore the tricky borders between civilisation and savagery. Were they actually civilised beings on the island where they lived, or were they savages bereft of the most precious of human gifts: language? I wanted to leave some ambiguity - tantalise the readers.'
