Interview | If You Write A Straight Historical Novel, You’re Lying: Indian-Origin German Author Mithu Sanyal

Kozhikode: In Germany, author Mithu Sanyal says, she is "very Indian." In India, she is unmistakably German. "For decades, Germany officially denied the existence of race as a category, partly as a response to its Nazi past. Yet the lived experience of mixed-race Germans told a different story. People were encouraged to be 'only German' while simultaneously being told they were not quite German enough," Sanyal told Eenadu-ETV Bharat at the 2026 Kerala Literature Festival, which is popularly known as KLF.

At KLF, Sanyal held a session on January 24, 2026, about memory, representation, and identity in collaboration with Sandbox Collective, a women-led organisation that curates the Feminist Library within the pavilion. On the same day, she also engaged in conversation with author Sanjana Ramachandran on 'Body, Desire And The Politics Of Representation'.

Sanyal's work, from her pioneering cultural history of the vulva to her explorations of postcolonial memory, feminism, and race, refuses euphemism. Her debut Identitti explored the complex relationship between identity and race. She insists on naming what societies prefer to obscure. The fact that it took nearly a decade for her first non-fiction book Vulva to be recognised globally reveals not its provocation, but our collective discomfort with precision.

The Cost Of Naming Things

If memory is contested, language is explosive. Sanyal’s work has long insisted on naming what societies prefer to obscure. Her book on the cultural history of the vulva did exactly that. The inspiration, she explained, was linguistic absurdity. We routinely use the word "vagina" to describe the visible external genitalia, when anatomically that is incorrect.

The vagina is an internal canal; the visible structure is the vulva. "We wouldn't say 'testicle' when we mean 'penis'," she pointed out. So why this error? The answer, she suspected, had a history. The lack of accurate language reflected centuries of discomfort with female anatomy... not ignorance, but avoidance.

When the book was published, it did not immediately change the world. It took nearly 10 years before it was rediscovered and recognised globally, suddenly becoming essential reading at feminist gatherings... even at events hosted by institutions as unlikely as the World Bank. The delay, Sanyal suggests, says less about the book and more about our collective unease with precision.

Memory, Power, and the Politics of Forgetting

"In Germany today," Sanyal told us, "postcolonial studies have become politically contested terrain. Right-wing groups weaponise accusations of antisemitism to shut down conversations on colonial violence." As Sanyal pointed out, this is not how serious scholarship operates. "In universities, Holocaust scholars and colonial historians often work closely together," she said, recognising that histories of violence do not compete but rather illuminate one another. It is only on public stages, in political discourse, that memory becomes a zero-sum game.

For Sanyal, identity was never abstract. Her first memory is not a toy or a book, but her mother's relief upon securing her a German passport in 1975, the year women were finally allowed to pass citizenship to their children. This detail, which could easily be dismissed as bureaucratic trivia, is in fact revealing. Citizenship, which is often framed as a neutral legal category, is one of humanity's most powerful fictional constructs. It determines who belongs, who is protected, and who is expendable. For Sanyal’s mother, that passport was an act of survival.

Modern states manage populations through documents, databases, and categories. Sanyal’s life demonstrates how those systems seep into the most intimate corners of memory.

For decades after the Second World War, Germany officially denied race as a category, a move intended to distance the nation from its Nazi past. On paper, this was moral progress. In lived reality, it was something else entirely. As Sanyal pointed out, mixed-race Germans were encouraged to be "only German," while being constantly reminded (through glances, questions, and exclusions) that they were not German enough. The category of race was erased, but racism persisted, now unnamed and therefore harder to challenge. This is a familiar historical pattern. When societies refuse to name a problem, they remove the language required to resist it. Silence becomes policy.

The Rise, Fall, And Return Of "Feminist"

Sanyal wears the label feminist without apology, though she recalls a time when doing so invited hostility. There were years when feminist was a word that came with an implied "but" (as in, she's a feminist, but she's actually quite nice). Then, briefly, feminism became fashionable. And then, just as quickly, it became contentious again... caught in the crossfire of culture wars, misrepresentations, and political backlash. Feminism, like all movements that question power, becomes inconvenient when it starts working too well. Sanyal’s refusal to abandon the term, even when it is unfashionable, is itself a political act.

She is also one of the main judges for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the German-speaking world. The process, she explained with visible amusement, is entirely public. Readings, critiques, disagreements... everything is televised. For five days, literature becomes a spectator sport. It is an unusual ritual.

In most cultures, art is either revered from a distance or consumed in private. Here, it is dissected live, scored, debated. That this event draws journalists, television crews, and crowds who treat the judges like royalty says something about Germany's relationship with literature: stories still matter enough to argue about in public.

Time Travel As Intellectual Honesty

Sanyal’s latest novel Antichristie is a time travel narrative: a choice she made, she says, "during lockdown after watching too much Doctor Who!" But beneath the humour lies a serious philosophical stance. She distrusts traditional historical novels. "If you write a straight historical novel, you’re lying," she said bluntly. You cannot truly know how people felt in the past. Time travel, by contrast, is honest. It admits the presence of the present.

Her novel deals with anti-colonial resistance, armed struggle, and figures such as VD Savarkar, focusing on his time in London at India House in the early 20th century. It is meticulously researched, yet hybrid: part history, part fiction, part interrogation. Every account of the past is filtered through contemporary concerns. Sanyal’s time travel device foregrounds this fact.

Belonging Without Resolution

At the Kerala Literature Festival, Sanyal moved easily between conversations on feminism, colonial memory, German literature, and Indian history. Yet there was no sense of a neat conclusion, no final answer to the question of who she is or where she belongs. Perhaps that is the point. As our conversation ended in Kozhikode, amid festival noise and the soft chaos of overlapping waves on the beach, it was clear that Sanyal does not offer comfort but clarity.

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