With Academia Under Attack, This Novelist and University of Mississippi Professor Is Shaping Her Syllabus With Conviction

Until now, Sheila Sundar has oscillated between two of the great loves of her life—balancing her devotion to education with her desire to become a novelist. She began her career as a secondary school teacher who wrote in her spare time, going on to earn her MFA and ultimately becoming an English and creative writing professor, all while refining her own writing. A lifetime spent in and around the classroom has culminated in her literary debut about a curious, wide-eyed scholar, someone Sundar can relate to.

“I always knew I wanted to write, but I had a career before as a teacher, and that was my passion for many years,” Sundar recently told Vanity Fair. “I knew I was becoming good enough to take the work seriously—and it took me a long time to believe that, because you hold up the books you’ve loved the most and you ask yourself, Am I ready to be as good as the writers I love? Am I ready to really stand on their shoulders?”

In Habitations, the author places readers smack-dab in the mid-’90s as Vega Gopalan’s migratory life is taking shape. Through Vega, Sundar zeroes in on what it takes for a woman to create her path, while telling the story of an Indian immigrant jostling with caste, a human exploring her sexuality, and a student managing sociology coursework as her view of the world starts to blossom.

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“You spend so much time with a character—you build them and you nurture them—but then they develop into people that operate independent of me,” the author said. “I feel that when I talk about Vega. It’s strange to let her go and know her story’s going to continue and I’m not going to have anything to do with that. It’s in the imagination of people, the same way my favorite characters I’ve ever read exist in my imagination.”

Habitations is far from auto-fiction, but Sundar and Vega do share some similarities that add to the richness and intricacy of the novelist’s storytelling. Both having roots in Chennai, studying at Columbia, and having family in New Jersey allowed Sundar to borrow from her own world when creating the rich tapestry of her protagonist.

Ahead of the release of Habitations, Sundar spoke with Vanity Fair about the beauty of flawed characters and teaching creative writing during a time when books are being banned.

Vanity Fair: I’m curious about the idea of living in different places—your habitations, if you will. How does that come up in your personal life and the book?

Sheila Sundar: I’ve always known I’d be a pretty peripatetic, migratory person. I was raised in New Jersey, my parents are immigrants, and I grew up surrounded by immigrants in a very vibrant immigrant community. What you know from that experience, without anybody telling you, is that people move. People migrate and carry parts of their culture, but our place is not a fixed one. From when I was very young, I had a sense of all the places I would visit and eventually live. Of course, literature activates that imagination and you imagine yourself in all these places, real and imagined. So after college, I did that. I was in New York for a good long while, where I started my teaching career in New York City public schools. I had my first child in New York, then moved to DC and Virginia because my husband joined the Foreign Service. I studied Arabic for a year to ultimately plan for a move to Cairo. I lived in Cairo for two years before settling in New Orleans.

Even now that I feel much more settled in the geography of my life, I still move back and forth between New Orleans and Oxford, Mississippi, where I teach at the university. In a way, my life has become sort of pan-Southern, and there’s a constant echo, relationship, memory, and hum of Chennai in South India, where my family is from, because you carry that with you. There are so many ways your sensory relationship with a place just stays with you over and over. What I hadn’t anticipated was the emotional weight of that. I think when you’re younger and you imagine being an adventurer, it’s all gain and no loss, and it has to be that way when we’re imagining our lives. But what comes of the richness in moving from place to place is there is a loss that accompanies that.

How long has Vega been in your mind as a character? Where does she come from within you?

I’ve been thinking about a woman like her for a long time. I really believed there was a woman out there that I wanted to write about who came from a corner of the world that I felt very connected to and who was part of this rapidly globalizing world. Her world is changing and connected in a way that her parents’ generation had not experienced. And she has her own ideas that have come from all the places she’s lived and the books she’s read. She enters into a world where there’s a vibrant exchange of ideas, and she wants a seat at the table. But that intellectual sturdiness doesn’t mean that she has it all figured out and that she’s not vulnerable and full of desire that she sometimes pursues at disastrous cost to herself and to others.

I like the idea of a flawed character. I always tell my students that if their characters are either reticent or cocky, it might be because they haven’t revised them enough to bring them closer to the page, to either undo some of that reticence or undo some of that certainty they have. It takes draft after draft to write a character that is genuinely questioning themselves and the world around them, and who is able to speak up in moments and also unsure how to in others. They’re really certain in our initial drafts, and as we revise and revise and get to know them better, we recognize the particularities of their vulnerability.

There’s also the journey to find yourself as a friend, daughter, mother, and partner. Especially if you’re someone whose work relates to humanity and whose intellectual life relates to the condition of other people. You’re understanding how to be a decent person who meets obligations. A person who reciprocates love and affection and who is honest about ourselves and our desires. We’re learning how to be that person at the same time that we’re becoming a person whose work responds to the needs of the world.

The way you write about sex in the book is really interesting and true to life.

Those were the first chapters I wrote of the book, and they started out as a short story. The only thing I knew about Vega then was she was on this academic journey as a sociologist and she had this affair with her professor. If I was going to put her in a sexual relationship with somebody, I was really committed to understanding why she was there, or I couldn’t have written it. I felt like I needed to fully believe with every part of me why Vega was in that room, how it felt for her during, and how it felt for her afterwards. That intellectual curiosity about somebody—you probe it a little bit, and sex is sometimes the natural place you end up. Every single sexual encounter she had was one she really did need to have because it sharpens her sense of self. Sometimes the desire she’s able to act on sharpens it, and sometimes what comes of regret makes us more aware of who we are.

When Vega goes back home and starts building her life there, you explore the dynamic between her and other young Indian women she meets. Vega returns changed after going to school in the United States, and you really delve into the intricacies of Indian society through conversations around caste. Why did you want to explore that?

Vega’s understanding of caste is something I didn’t want to avoid on the page. I couldn’t because she’s a sociologist and she can’t not think about it. When she comes to the US, she can’t not think about race. I really wanted for her to develop her sense of how these forces operated in distinct societies, but also in ways that were quite similar. She goes from being someone with caste privilege that she starts to deconstruct because she’s still young when she leaves India and she’s just starting that journey. Then she goes to the States, where she experiences the world as a brown woman, but she also experiences the reverberations and effects of that caste privilege and the way she inherits it. She’s a native English speaker, and she was educated in these elite Indian institutions that, for reasons of caste and class, are walled off from the vast majority of Indian society. I wanted her to come to the States and not avoid understanding those forces. There’s no end to that journey, of course; we’re all on it. But the complexity of her identity is something I wanted on the page in terms of caste, brownness, and the way in which she sometimes has the privilege that would be afforded a white woman when she enters academia, and then sometimes not. It moves very quickly.

There’s a really concerted focus right now with academia to poke holes in these institutions and what they’re teaching. What is your role as a professor like right now?

The University of Mississippi is an interesting place in a lot of ways. It’s a place that always reflects America, so it’s reinventing itself and pushing rules and old notions of what it used to be. It’s a hard place to be a student of color, but if you are growing up in Mississippi, this is your university and you have a right to it. It’s yours. So our cultural notion of who owns this university is something that students are chipping away at, which is just extraordinary. That too is hard—especially for Black students that are Mississippians…who were told this place is not for them. But it is absolutely theirs as much as it is anybody else’s. To watch students come here and claim their space on campus, it reminds you of the reasons we should all be a little insecure. In those moments, you step back and watch people do the work.

These young people are coming of age and pushing their institution at the same time, and it’s the most humbling thing to watch. I spend a lot of time in the classroom, like many professors, thinking really hard about the journey of my syllabus and the journey I take my students through. The classroom is a space I own, command, and I believe in every text we read. I believe in the way the conversation we have about the text is something we have to shape, and I believe it has to respond to the moment we’re in, but also recognize the breadth of history. I shape the syllabus with a lot of pride and a lot of conviction. But when I’m moving through campus, I’m watching the ways in which people just reshape their small institution, and it’s reflective of the way they’re reshaping their world. They do it with a lot of courage and a lot of might. Being a professor, we have the privilege of owning some part of the cultural conversation, but also observing a lot of the cultural conversation and learning from that too.

How does it feel to be so close to putting your first book out into the world while there’s an active campaign to ban books in this country?

As readers and defenders of books, we are so hyperaware of the ways they come under attack. I have a heightened anxiety around this because I’m also a parent seeing up close that I am one force that shapes the lives of my children, but they’re also raised by cultural institutions and books. The idea that we’re supposed to live in a world where parents raise their children and create them in their own image is terrifying. In reality, children have to grow up in a world that’s dynamic, with ideas that are wildly beyond the imagination and the realities of their homelives. I find it extraordinary to watch my own kids and students read books that I have nothing to do with and to access conversations that I wouldn’t have prompted. When I see that up close, the thought of that being under attack is scary. There’s also a beauty in watching the pushback because you realize how emboldened you become. When you ban a book, sometimes it’s the greatest thing you can do for that book. Maybe we are being pushed to defend an art and part of our culture that we didn’t realize we needed to defend. I do feel that when I’m writing, that’s not the world I exist in. The level at which I have to be in tune with my characters, I can’t think about where the book’s going to end up. Sometimes I might walk into a bookstore and imagine it on a shelf, but I have to set that aside and really be in the world of my characters.

As I start my next project, I’m aware it’s going to come out in a world that’s different from the world in which Habitations was launched. It may be the wrong book for that moment—too political or not political enough. But if I’m too worried about that, I’m not going to do the work of being in lockstep with my protagonist, seeing the world through her eyes. I have to follow her wherever she goes. And once it’s done and I set it aside, even for the day, I want to go back to being the outspoken defender of books that we all need to be right now.