Girls of Mumbaistan result of my understanding of women: Author Piyush Jha

 

The lockdown period has fostered the growth of OTT platform. Also a lot of web series or cinema showing the dark sides of human nature have became popular. Do you think we love to watch the dark side of our characters? Why do we watch these according to you?

 

To me the essence of a crime-thriller of crime-fiction is the talking about the society's ill. A crime-thriller filmmaker or a crime-fiction detective writer talks about things which have gone wrong in the society within the lives of people and how they can be corrected. Obviously the ills of society is an obsession of every crime-fictional writer who is always looking to bring that out and provide a sense of catharsis to the reader.

 

You had women protagonist in the two parts of Girls of Mumbaistan which is a novella. Sadly we have lesser women protagonists in Indian cinema. So while you chose women protagonist, you had any fear?

 

True. Female protagonist is not popular in this country. Perhaps it's because of the society that we have and may be I have been also kind of responsible to not look into it previously. I was not aware of it. My first three novels were very much male-oriented. It was only in the fourth novel, I had started using female semi-protagonist or antagonist depending on the way we look at it. 

 

 

After the fourth novel, which was Raakshas: India's No. 1 Serial Killer, I started getting interested in exploring this (making female protagonists) further. So my next novel took a little bit of time to arrive at what I really wanted to do. But I really wanted to go back and kind of understand how certain things affect women in our country and how people take advantage, how women can be deceived and how they get themselves out of that deception. So that was something which I began to explore and the result is Girls of Mumbaistan. I have not stopped only at women but also I have portrayed a transgender in the third novella. 

 

Tell us about the portrayal of transgender in you novella. 

 

I always wanted to write about transgender community, specifically the Hijra community. I have grown up in Mumbai so I have grown up with the Hijra community as a part of our daily lives around us and I always wanted to kind of reflect something about their lives but I didn't know what to do because most of the time I read about the atrocities faced by them. The atrocities which they face is absolutely true but then to me it was important to understand where do we go from here. 

 

 

Given that the Hijras face atrocities, I always thought how can my protagonist rise above this. Then I started seeing that the Hijra or transgender community has been legally accepted in various government jobs. When I started exploring that, I found there were two police people from the transgender community who have been absorbed in the police service, one in Rajasthan and the other in Chennai. Mumbai doesn't have one. So I had started imagining the story of Mumbai's first transgender police officer and that's what I have Inspector Rani Kumar (in the novella).