Back in September 2019, I set aside a day to organize the piles of books I knew I’d have to read in order to write I Am on the Hit List. “It’s like wilting spinach,” a friend said. We take everything we’ve read and chop and blend and season and simmer, and if all goes well we end up with something new and nourishing.
My book’s central subject is the 2017 murder of an incredibly brave and vibrant journalist named Gauri Lankesh, in Bangalore, India. Gauri had devoted her career to battling the rising right wing in India, so her story was a window into the climate of hate and the triumph of autocracy that had gripped the India she loved. There was so much I needed to explain—first to myself, then to my readers—and those piles of books grew taller and taller.
I started writing about India over a decade ago, partly because I’d married into an Indian family. But as an American, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with writing about India as an outsider. That’s good—it should make me uncomfortable, and if I’ve ever written anything about India worth reading, that discomfort has been the catalyst. My top concern is always to get it right.
I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with writing about India as an outsider. That’s good—it should make me uncomfortable
I’m always aware of writing for multiple audiences: an American audience that might know absolutely nothing about what I’m writing, and will need everything explained from scratch, and an Indian audience that will know much of what I’m writing about far better than I do. The challenge is to make it work for both audiences at the same time: clear and engaging for a reader who comes in knowing little, and also, somehow, with enough fresh insight to make reading worthwhile even for someone who knows a lot.
I quickly found that it’s often those terms that seem the most obvious—for example, “Hinduism” or “caste”—that are the trickiest to explain. It turns out that this is one of my favorite jobs as a writer: stepping back from a concept or a word I’d previously taken for granted, finding that it’s actually so complex as to defy definition, and then slowly finding a definition anyway, triangulating everything I’d learned to arrive as close to a fact as I could, without sacrificing either complexity or clarity.
This meant spending months in India talking to as many people as possible—dozens and dozens of interviews, often lasting hours. Then I had to read: hundreds of books, thousands of pages of police and court documents, uncountable newspaper and magazine articles. (I owe a huge debt to Indian journalists who’ve been closely following the Gauri Lankesh case, such as Johnson T.A. of the Indian Express and K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj of The Hindu.) Trying to exhaust the literature and reporting on subjects that are, in reality, inexhaustible is how I blew my deadline by three years.
Often these texts were in languages I don’t read—Kannada or Tamil or Malayalam—so I hired translators to unlock them for me and for my English-language readers. I commissioned one of these translators, Amulya Leona, to translate two memoirs written by Gauri’s parents. But the realities of what’s going on in India kept intruding. One day, Amulya messaged me to say she’d be delayed with some translations because she’d gotten so involved in the mass protest movement against the bigoted new citizenship laws that the Indian government had passed. The next thing I knew, she’d been arrested and jailed for sedition for something she’d said at a demonstration. Nineteen years old, she instantly became public enemy number one on India’s right-wing news channels, and her story became an important chapter in my book.
Photo of Rollo Romig by Eva Garmendia.
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