An Interview With Sujata Massey

by Grace Topping

On Sunday, November 18, 2018, The Washington Post released its list of Best Books for 2018. Among them was Sujata Massey's audiobook of The Widows of Malabar Hill, narrated by Soneela Nankani of Recorded Books. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sujata when her book was first released. Since then, The Widows of Malabar Hill has garnered all kinds of accolades. It's a pleasure to present the interview again for those who may have missed it last year. 


I first discovered Sujata Massey through her award-winning Rei Shimura mystery series set in Japan. Everyone around me seemed to be reading her books, starting with The Salaryman’s Wife, which won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for the Barry and Macavity Awards for Best First Mystery and the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original. She went on to win or be nominated for a number of other awards, including the Edgar. When I learned that she was writing a suspenseful historical fiction series set in 1920s India, I was delighted and contacted her to learn more about it.

The Widows of Malabar Hill Jacket Copy

Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes women’s legal rights especially important to her.

Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen examines the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. What will they live on? Perveen is suspicious, especially since one of the widows has signed her form with an X—meaning she probably couldn’t even read the document. The Farid widows live in full purdah—in strict seclusion, never leaving the women’s quarters or speaking to any men. Are they being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous guardian? Perveen tries to investigate, and realizes her instincts were correct when tensions escalate to murder. Now it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are in further danger.

Amazon.com

Welcome, Sujata, to Writers Who Kill.

The Widows of Malabar Hill is the story of the fictional first woman lawyer in Bombay, Perveen Mistry. What inspired you to write about a woman lawyer, and why in the 1920s?

Sujata Massey

 Actually, the setting was the original driving factor. I wanted to write a mystery set in 1920s India, a period that I fell in love with while writing my 2013 novel, The Sleeping Dictionary. While going through history and memoirs, I learned that in the Edwardian period, a significant number of young Indian women studied at colleges in India and Britain. These students wanted to take on professional jobs in their home cities. I discovered that India’s first two female lawyers worked in the 1890s through the 1920s; both shared a similar religious background, progressive parents, and an Oxford education—as well as hailing from Maharashtra, the western coastal state that was called Bombay Presidency during British rule. I believe a woman lawyer would have more freedom than other females to ask questions of people and become involved in dangerous situations such as theft, kidnapping and murder. Thus, a heroine was born!

Although Perveen Mistry is a lawyer, she is prohibited from appearing in court. With that limitation, how can she practice law? At what point could women lawyers appear in court? 

Perveen Mistry has completed all requirements for a Bachelor of Civil Law degree at Oxford University. In the British system, legal advocates either are barristers (arguing cases in court before a judge) or solicitors (the ones who draft contracts and formulate the arguments for barristers to use in court). Prior to 1922, Oxford allowed women to study there but didn’t grant women academic degrees. The London Bar and Bombay Bar wouldn’t admit women as barristers until Oxford and Cambridge’s prohibition against female degrees was ended.  India had one woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji, who worked from the 1890s through the 1920s. She was a solicitor who specialized in offering service to female clients. Cornelia’s clients—typically wealthy or royal Hindu or Muslim ladies living in seclusion--were sometimes exploited by their families or household agents. Her interventions saved women their fortunes—and sometimes, their lives. 

Perveen represents the interests of three widows of a Muslim. Why does she go to such great lengths to protect their interests, especially since they are all willing to sign away rights to their inheritances?

Interestingly, Muslim law protected women in a way that was different from Hindus, Sikhs and Christians. In Islamic law, a man pays dowry to a woman in two parts: the first half given at the marriage, and the second at the woman’s time of being widowed or (unlikely) divorced. Perveen knows a little about Muslim law so she is intrigued when a letter arrives at the law firm, ostensibly signed by three widows of a wealthy businessman named Omar Farid (Muslim men could marry up to three wives). The letter states the Farid widows wished to give up all their dowry. Perveen is suspicious whether all three women could understand the English document. She decides to meet them, to make sure that they really understand what they’re about to give up. And from that point, the adventure begins.

Perveen’s job as a lawyer in India sounded quite complex with different laws for different groups of people. For example, she has to address the issue of Muslim law as it pertains to the rights of inheritance. Also, a Muslim woman could not be ordered to appear in a court of law. Are there still different laws in India? 

When the British began formal rule of India in the mid 1800s, they sat down with leaders of the Hindu, Muslim and Parsi community to draft family law that was consistent with each group’s specific desires. Sikhs, Christians, Jews and others were governed by British common law. Customized laws made the various communities more likely to comply with British rule. The separate religious legal systems have endured to the present days, although many of the laws surrounding divorce have been liberalized. 

The widows of Malabar Hill live in a section of a house called a zenana and lead a purdah life. You wrote that after taking a short tour of a zenana, you felt that the life of an Indian maharani or a Muslim begum living in a zenana seemed like imprisonment. Why?

I toured the Udaipur City Palace in Rajasthan, the seat of the Mewar royal family, where one maharani lived in purdah through the 1970s. Although the rooms were gorgeously decorated and furnished, all the windows were shielded by jali screens. One literally could only see fragments of the outdoor view--and that gave me a very closed-in feeling. Many royal women grew up confined in these environments and socialized exclusively with other women and children. They would only see a father or husband if he came to the zenana quarters. If such ladies traveled, they went in a purdah carriage or car with curtains that kept outsiders from seeing them. It’s true that they were beautifully dressed and did very little work—but that doesn’t seem like a prize given how much else in life they missed.

Life was hard for women during this period. Has much changed for women in India?

Things have changed tremendously! Seclusion is no longer practiced, except in some rural areas. Two-income marriages are the norm, and there are many women with good jobs in STEM fields. There are more love marriages, more divorces, and some women who choose to remain single are adopting children. Women have freedom of dress, drive personal cars and taxis, and pilot planes. Life for an Indian woman is a lot like that of her American sisters.

The Widows of Malabar Hill is not the first book you wrote featuring Perveen. Please tell us about other books you’ve written about her.

I have a novella, Outnumbered at Oxford, which is a prequel novella: a mystery taking place during Perveen’s college years in England. Outnumbered was published within an anthology of my short India fiction called India Gray Historical Fiction.

Perveen’s best friend, Alice, an English woman newly arrived in Bombay, appears on the surface to have more freedoms than Perveen, but also faces many restrictions. What will life in India be like for her?

Alice Hobson-Jones is Perveen’s best friend from Oxford. Alice is typical of the British women whose fathers had prestigious careers in the British Indian government. M.M. Kaye, who wrote The Far Pavilions and other novels set in British colonial India, wrote a series of memoirs about her life as the daughter of a top Indian Civil Service officer in the early 20^th century. Mary Margaret Kaye always had a grand house to live in but was expected to represent her family in a very proper manner. There was a scarcity of European women in India, so she was widely courted by young Englishmen working for the government. After marrying, Englishwomen could do charity work in India—but little else. It wasn’t seemly for an Englishwoman to work for an Indian, because Indians were supposed to be underneath the British. However, British females sometimes worked for Indian nobility as governesses, or in the employ of religious groups as missionaries and doctors or nurses. Alice is of their ilk—seeing Indians as fellow human beings with a lot to teach her, rather than as servants.

Will we see more of Alice in future books?

She will reappear in Book 3, I hope!

This book was so rich in detail. Did you travel to India to do research?

It’s always a challenge to decide how much of what I’ve learned can be included without distracting from the story line. I started my research for the book using the memoirs of India’s first woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji. After I had half of the book written, I traveled to Mumbai (as Bombay is now called) to fill in details on setting and also meet with Parsi and Muslim women to learn more about their traditions. I plan to visit India frequently as I continue working on this series. It’s a real pleasure for me, because I have friends and family in several cities.

I enjoyed your Rei Shimura series immensely—along with everyone I worked with. With parents from India and Germany, what inspired you to write a series about a Japanese-American living in Japan? Have you lived in Japan?

I wrote the Rei Shimura books because I had the great luck to live in Japan for the two years that my husband worked as a medical officer for the U.S. Navy. We were stationed in Yokosuka, about an hour south of Tokyo. I wanted to write a mystery set in Japan that explored the cultural arts I adored studying: flower arranging, food and antiques. I also worked as an English teacher, which is a pretty common job for foreign women in Japan, and that influenced Rei’s character.

There are more references to India and Germany in my Indian novels than the Rei Shimura series. This is because a long cultural interchange between Germany and India runs all the way from a German passion for movies made in India in the early 1900s, to Indian freedom fighters going to Germany for help during World War II.

You’ve won the Agatha and Macavity awards and been a finalist for the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark prizes. Does having earned such acclaim put more pressure on you with each book you write?

Awards are such a surprising and delightful gift. I don’t see them as negatives for the writing process in any way. Awards ebb and flow—they shouldn’t define success for a writer. In the end, what counts is having loyal readers who stick and the ability to bring new readers to your work. 

What’s next for Perveen Mistry? I hope we’ll be seeing more of her.

I don’t yet have a title for Book 2, but I’ll tell you a little about it. Only forty percent of the Indian subcontinent was under British rule—the other sixty percent was a patchwork of hundreds of princely kingdoms that agreed to pay the British with crops in order to retain their right to self-rule.

In this next mystery, the British government asks Perveen to travel to a princely kingdom near Bombay to investigate the welfare of the Yuvraj, an eleven-year-old boy who’s supposed to inherit the throne at eighteen. The Yuvraj’s father, the last maharaja, is dead, a twist allowing the British government to consider the Yuvraj their ward. While interviewing the Yuvraj’s family and servants at the palace, Perveen gets the sense his life might be in danger. At the same time, she has to deal with an attraction that is completely out of bounds. And because this is a story set in the jungle, monkeys, dogs and tigers also have character roles!

Thank you, Sujata.

To learn more about Sujata Massey and her books, visit http://sujatamassey.com.