Parini Shroff Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Parini Shroff talks how a visit home in India inspired her debut novel, The Bandit Queens

Dear Reader,

On February 14, 2013, I repaid the last of my law school loans. By that May, I'd quit my firm in Los Angeles to move to Austin, Texas to write. That summer, before I began my MFA program at UT, I visited my family in India.

While in Gujarat, my father, my brother, and I drove to the village of Samadra, to attend a women's meeting of microloan group my father was involved in financing. I'd viewed my debt as shackles to a job for which I wasn't particularly suited. To these women, however, loans were a boon, a buoy offering life and independence. Money lent them agency—so long as the men around them permitted it, that is.

By the time I was on a plane to Texas, Geeta and Farah were born within a short story and had forged an economic alliance to "get rid" of Farah's money-siphoning husband. They were unsuccessful back then and the story ended with a quiet fizzle.

It was not until years later that I had the thought: But what if they actually did it? Not only that, what if other women wanted in on the action?

This book is set in a fictional village in Gujarat, where its denizens have recently acquired city comforts such as toilets and solar power. Despite these struggles specific to developing ...