Podcast with Rohit Manchanda, author of “The Enclave”

Enclave

Maya, the protagonist of Rohit Manchanda’s novel The Enclave, should be happy with her life. She’s newly single, her net worth steadily rising in the booming India of the 2000s. She has a cushy, if slightly unfulfilling, job in academia. But she struggles: She wants to write, but can’t summon the energy to do so. She juggles several relationships, each one slowly imploding as the novel continues. And she butts heads with an oblivious and pompous bureaucrat, nicknamed “The Pontiff”.

 

 

The Enclave, Rohit Manchanda (Fourth Estate, May 2024)
The Enclave, Rohit Manchanda (Fourth Estate, May 2024)

Rohit Manchanda is a professor at IIT Bombay where he teaches and researches computational neurophysiology. His first novel won a Betty Trask Award, was published with the title In the Light of the Black Sun and was republished in 2024 titled A Speck of Coal Dust.

The Enclave is Rohit Manchanda’s second novel, coming decades after his first published work. In this episode, Rohit and I talk about his writing career, the themes of The Enclave, and the very real struggle of wanting, but not having the energy, to write.


Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.