‘We’re all storytellers’: Shobha Tharoor on India, inheritance and the universality of stories

For Shobha Tharoor-Srinivasan, being at home in more than one world began early.

Her parents were diasporic Malayalis from Kerala. Her father left for London as a teenager; the family later lived in (then) Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi before Tharoor eventually came to the United States as a teenager and “a very proud Indian and Malayali,” who made the Bay Area her home.

But the lesson she carried from childhood was not to choose between cultures.

Her father would tell his children that they should be "as comfortable eating with your fingers on a plantain leaf as you are using your cutlery on a western table." She stresses that they never “shirked heritage,” but were raised “to embrace everything we were exposed to.”

That idea of embracing, rather than choosing between, different worlds has stayed with Tharoor and found its way into her writing. "I've always seen myself as a global citizen because that's how we were raised and that’s how I raised my children," she says.

Her own children grew up as Indian-Americans in the Bay Area, while retaining their Indian heritage. The family travelled to India every year, allowing them to remain connected to a culture that was simultaneously familiar and distant.

When Tharoor eventually began writing children's books, she found herself returning to that intersection of cultures almost instinctively. Yet she does not see her books as being exclusively about South Asian identity.

"Ultimately, you know, the notion of affection, friendship, belonging, these are all universal themes," she says. "These are not just South Asian themes, they are global."

That belief is evident in books such as Parvati, the Elephant's Very Important Day, which introduces children to Malayalam words while opening conversations about ecology, conservation and animals. Her most recent book, Bird Dog, takes the idea of connection even further: it is co-authored with her granddaughter, an American child born and raised in the United States.

The book tells the simple story of an unlikely friendship between a bird and a dog. Beneath that simplicity, however, Tharoor sees larger questions about desire, contentment and the tendency to want what we do not have.

The collaboration itself mirrors the book's larger idea. Grandmother and granddaughter, living in different towns and belonging to different generations, found a common language in a story.

Tharoor's forthcoming Indian edition of Indi Alphabet, meanwhile, takes young readers on a journey through India using geography, history, literature and poetry. There is even a small interactive element: a bus appears on every page, a nod to the question her grandson repeatedly asked when looking at the American edition, "Where's the bus?"

For Tharoor, children's books are anything but static objects meant only for a particular age group.

"Whether you're reading it, or you're being read to, you're looking at the pictures and hearing the sound. If you're reading yourself, you're discovering language and phonics. If you're still older still, you're asking important questions about the subject," she insists.

A book, she says, can keep revealing itself as the reader grows.

That philosophy extends to her writing for adults, too, perhaps most poignantly in the book she wrote about her mother. Initially, reluctant when Penguin approached to write her mother's story, Tharoor eventually “fashioned the biography as a self-help” with 13 chapters, each following the chronology of her mother's life while also offering what she calls a "teachable moment."

Her mother, now 90, is beginning to forget some things herself. The book, Tharoor says, has consequently become something of an aid-memoire not only for the family but for her mother.

But its reach surprised Tharoor most.

While travelling through India to speak about the book at women's groups, men's groups and literary salons, she repeatedly heard from readers who recognised their own families in her mother's story.

"People would come to me saying, 'Oh my God, this reminds me of the story of my mother,'" she recalls. Others saw echoes of their mothers-in-law or aunts.

It reinforced something Tharoor had come to understand through her writing: a story does not have to belong to a famous person or an extraordinary life to matter.

"Whose stories do we tell? It doesn't have to be the dragon slayer," she says. "There is a story, there is something that touches every heart."

Perhaps that instinct for stories began even before Tharoor thought of herself as a writer.

She grew up in a household where reading was woven into everyday life. Her father subscribed to five or six newspapers every day, she tells us. As children, she and her siblings began with the comics and gradually moved on to other sections.

There was little television. “We only had a television set at home when I was a teenager and entertainment often meant conversation, storytelling or words,” she narrates, as she reminisces playing word games with her younger sister, once writing "Constantinople" on a piece of paper, setting a five-minute timer and challenging each other to make as many words from it as possible.

"These were our pastime activities, that was our joy," she recalls. "We loved it."

For Tharoor, words were not simply a means of communication. She loved "the sound of words, the meaning of words." Her childhood environment encouraged that fascination, although she is careful not to suggest that growing up among books automatically produces writers.

What it does, perhaps, is teach us that stories are one of the ways people make sense of one another, and of the world around them.

"We're all storytellers," she says. "In fact, that's the way we make connections."

That storytelling does not have to take the form of a book. It can happen through theatre, dance, performance, song, or simply a conversation.

"Whether you do it in the written word or in your theatre acting or your artistic performances, we're all telling stories,” insists Tharoor, as we speak to her at the sidelines of the SALA festival, where Tharoor appeared as a panellist and read from her poetry. Her own writing continues to move between children's literature, poetry, memoir and cultural memory.

Across all of it, however, the impulse remains the same: to find the story that connects one person to another, and to our surroundings.

Perhaps that is what Tharoor inherited most enduringly: the conviction that somewhere inside every life, however ordinary, there is a story worth telling.