Ramayana has influenced how I think about stories: Tash Aw on his epic quartet

That wariness of validation and institutions runs through the work of Tash Aw, whose fiction has insistently mapped the social and emotional history of Southeast Asia across generations. He talks to The Indian Express on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival, where he was presenting The South, the first novel in an ambitious quartet spanning a century of change in the region.

Tash Aw reimagines what an epic is

The South is frequently described as a coming-of-age novel, but Aw sees it as something larger and more unsettled. It is a book about land and inheritance, about the Asian financial crisis, and about families bound not only by blood but by precarity and historical interruption.

It is also part of a deliberate attempt to rethink what an epic is. Writing a single, monumental epic was never the plan.

“I was not willing to give ten years of my life, twenty years of my life, to writing one book,” Aw says. Instead, he chose a quartet. “The reason I’m writing a quartet is to have something that is looser, to have an epic that is much more fluid.”

The influence is both ancient and contemporary. “More, the Ramayana,” says the British writer of Malaysian origin, when asked whether he was inspired by South Asian epics. “It is something I know quite well, and it has always influenced the way I think about stories involving multiple people over a long period of time.”

What appeals to him is not scale alone, but variation. “They’re not consistent. They vary in form and style. Sometimes they are quick, sometimes they are slower. They have different tones.”

That instability, Aw argues, reflects lived experience. “We live really in the moment, and then that moment is gone. And then we look back and think, ‘Oh my God, where has that gone?’”

History, like memory, arrives in fragments. “We experience time in a really fragmented way now. We’re always trying to catch up with it.”

Who gets to be at the centre

Aw has previously described an epic as a “hyper-masculine” form. The default literary subject “is dominated by a Western person…it is dominated by a male person…it is dominated by people who have achieved so-called great things in life.”

His writing projects on the other hand foreground characters who traditionally do not belong in the foreground of literature.

For him the exclusions are intimate. “It is not so much queer people, not so much women, not so much lower middle-class or working-class people. But those are the people I grew up with.”

For Aw, who as a queer child grew up with women, queerness is not a marginal experience. “If you have grown up in the body, in the skin of someone who’s queer, you don’t think of yourself as being on the margins,” he says. “That is your world. That is your everything.”

Seen from there, an epic could only look different. “When I thought about writing an epic, obviously it was going to be about those people,” he says.

The metaphor of rotten orchard

In The South, these ideas surface most clearly through land. The novel’s fruit orchard evokes Edenic myths of fertility and inheritance, only to undo them. “The moment that idea came,” Aw says, “it was already ruined.” The orchard is “already rotting. Everything is no longer producing. It is already barren.”

The metaphor is deliberate. “I wanted to challenge the idea of the natural fertility of land,” he says. “We grow up thinking everything has a natural order — that people should be a certain way, men should be a certain way, women should be a certain way, the country should be a certain way.”

And like an Eden that needs to be nourished, Aw believes relationships — even one between a country and its citizens — need work.

“Nothing exists naturally,” he says. “There is nothing that is natural. Even love. Even motherhood. They have to be worked at.”

Politics from a West POV

When the conversation turns to contemporary politics, Aw expresses his worry on the global drift toward conservatism, particularly in the West. “A lot of the people who are now agitating from much more conservative values are people who consider themselves progressive,” he says.

The West, long positioned as the progressive hemisphere, is to him increasingly retrograde and a source of failed imagination. Change in Asia may be uneven, he says, but it is real — from the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India to legal same-sex marriage in Thailand.

Aw is more unsentimental when he talks on how the West deals with immigration. “If the West doesn’t sort out its relationship with immigration very quickly, it’s going to implode,” he says, adding that Western societies cannot sustain themselves, economically or demographically, without migration.

His focus, though, is more on how immigration within Asia is going to be sorted out. Movement across borders — from South Asia into Malaysia, for instance, is already reshaping everyday life.

On power, language, and projection

Aw is more cautious when the conversation shifts to geopolitics, pointing out he is a novelist and not a geopolitician.

“I’m very hesitant to use phrases like ‘Chinese aggression towards Taiwan’,” he says. Such framing, he argues, is not only misleading but symptomatic. It is, in his view, “factually untrue,” and also “a manifestation of American fantasies about China.”

What troubles him is how quickly complex histories are flattened into moral shorthand. Such phrasing, he suggests, imports a pre-scripted narrative — one that leaves little room for ambiguity, regional context, or historical specificity.

“It’s something we all have to disengage from,” he says, referring to the way global power struggles are often narrated through Western geopolitical imagination.