Samrat Upadhyay is on sabbatical. Which is to say he’s working harder than ever and upending expectations.
A longtime professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, the 60-year-old author—best known for his debut story collection, Arresting God in Kathmandu (2001), and first novel, The Guru of Love (2003)—is widely heralded as the first Nepali-born author to be published in English. But after more than 20 years and six books, it’s a mantle he’s ready to shrug off.
“The world has changed now,” he says from his home in Bloomington. And with those changes, Upadhyay and his work have evolved. While treading lightly on familiar themes like the strife of arranged marriages and the displacement that comes with the immigrant experience, he’s also ventured deep into the dynamics between mothers and daughters, sexual assault, and queerness within the South Asian landscape.
But his latest novel, Darkmotherland (Soho, Jan. 2025), is a 768-page surrealist saga that lands him firmly in new territory. The book follows the citizens of a Nepal-esque country in the aftermath of a massive earthquake, as a dictator called PM Papa takes power and insurgents plot to unseat him. “I expect some pushback from readers who are hoping I will be writing Arresting God again,” Upadhyay says. “But I have to challenge myself as a writer, and I hope readers will go along for the ride.”
Born in Kathmandu, Upadhyay grew up the son of “middle-class but highly educated parents,” both of whom had master’s degrees. His mother was a high-ranking official at a government food corporation, and, he says, “I always think about how she handled herself in such a male-dominated industry, and when she came home, she still did all of the housework. She did everything. When I look back, it just seems incredible to me. It informs a lot of my female characters.”
His parents put a heavy emphasis on education. “I attended St. Xavier’s school, run by American Jesuits, and they had a pretty good library filled with mostly English books,” Upadhyay says. “In my teen years, I gravitated more toward those books. I was an indiscriminate reader—Dickens, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, whatever I could get my hands on.”
And while books were a source of entertainment—there was no television, Upadhyay says, in Nepal in the early 1980s—he never considered a career in writing. “Books were what engaged us,” he recalls. “And I was the editor of the school magazine, all of that. But I didn’t realize you could make a living as a writer. The expectation was, be a doctor or engineer.”
Instead, he started studying commerce at the collegiate level before moving to the United States for college in 1984 when he was 21, first attending Coe College in Iowa and then the College of Wooster in Ohio. “It was all based on who gave me the most money,” he explains, adding that he dabbled in theater and journalism, eventually majoring in English. “But I wasn’t sure you could make a living. Then Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children came out, and I realized I could actually write about Nepal.”
Inspired by Rushdie, Upadhyay got his master’s in English from Ohio University in 1992, and then a PhD in creative writing from the University of Hawaii at Ma¯noa in 1999, where he started writing short stories. One story, published in the university’s Ma¯noa literary journal, caught Amy Tan’s attention, and she included it in 1999’s Best American Short Stories. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published the Best American Short Stories series and, Upadhyay says, one of the editors, Heidi Pitlor, called him asking if he had other stories. “I said, ‘I do,’ and scrambled to put them in some sort of book form. And they were interested! They asked me if I was a serious writer, if I had other things I was working on, and I did—two novels at the time. So, for the short story collection, she said it was their standard offer of $10,000. I was a poor student, so I was like, ‘Wow! Sounds good to me!’ ”
Arresting God in Kathmandu was published in 2001 and went on to win the Whiting Award for fiction. “This was around the time Jhumpa Lahiri published Interpreter of Maladies,” he says, “and I kind of got caught up in that wave of South Asian voices that followed.”
Despite being known as the first writer of Nepali descent to be published in English, Upadhyay has come to view representation as a burden. “I write what moves me,” he says. “I’m not thinking like, I’m gonna represent this or that. And especially at the time, as a young writer, I was just writing stories. But there was a lot of scrutiny. There are some erotic moments in Arresting God in Kathmandu that I got... feedback on. It was a lively time.”
More importantly, he says, “I had readers who said reading the book made a difference. It inspired them. Seeing someone who looks like you doing something really makes it very tangible. Rushdie was that for me, and Amitav Ghosh. Rohinton Mistry. There were so few at the time. But those were the people who made it tangible for me.”
Arresting God was followed by The Guru of Love, the story of a love triangle born out of a fraught arranged marriage. Upadhyay’s since published the 2006 short story collection The Royal Ghosts, the 2010 novel Buddha’s Orphans, the 2014 novel The City Son, and a 2017 collection, Mad Country, all rooted in Nepali culture but delving into subjects like infidelity, politics, religion, roots, and rootlessness.
“Something I tell my students is that you have to think of yourself as a writer for the long haul and not be distracted by your rejections or even acceptances in the moment,” he says. “Treat the work like work. In Hawaii, I became a much more disciplined writer, and I saw it as a job. I need to sit in front of my computer and write. Don’t wait for the muse.”
During the past five years, through the pandemic especially, Upadhyay has been prolific, completing Darkmotherland and drafting several shorter novels, too. “I used to feel guilty about saying this,” he says, “but creatively, it’s been amazing—like the second leg of my writing career.”
Still, Darkmotherland, a project 10 years in the making, changed and morphed and took on several incarnations before landing in its final form: a sprawling, bird’s-eye epic about a country in decay, the dictator who pretends to heal it, and the transgender mistress who becomes a both literal and figurative goddess meant to heal the cracks in the aftermath of the earthquake. The novel follows multiple families at the center of a drama that becomes both personal and political.
Despite the book’s lofty premise, the story is rooted in his parents’ lives. After the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, “my parents had to live in tents outside, so it was quite traumatic,” he says. “And I just started thinking: massive shake-up, and then the dictator comes to power. What happens next? But then still all those domestic dynamics, between mother and daughter, husband and wife. Zooming in, zooming out. And given the world, I wanted to have fun with it.”
And writing the book, Upadhyay says, felt new to him, as if he were growing and experimenting. “There’s a level of joy, as a creative, in that I wasn’t rehashing my old stuff. This was challenging for me, and I think I need to have that as a writer.”
The book skewers many of the ills that plague both the East and the West today: family politics, gender idealism, religion and blasphemy, poverty and obscene wealth. Deeply influenced by both the pandemic and the Trump presidency, the novel carries a sharp undercurrent of anxiety that reflects what Upadhyay calls collective trauma. “The world kept changing,” he says, “and so the book kept changing.”
And thus, so must he, as a writer. “When I was first writing fiction, at the time, there was a stronger separation between the South Asian milieu versus American,” Upadhyay says. “There was this sense that the West hadn’t touched the East. But now, I’ve spent more time in America than in Nepal—and that’s a unique thing I can bring to my fiction. All the expectations have been upended at this point. And that offers a lot of freedom to explore.”
