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Published on January 23rd, 2025 | by Jen Bryant

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Storytelling Is About Love: A Conversation with Tara Dorabji

Tara Dorabji is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and writer. Her debut novel Call Her Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2025) is a multi-generational saga of resilience and hope.

Set in the fictional village of Poshkarbal in the Himalayas, the novel follows Aisha and her family from 1969 to 2022. Living in a rural setting beset by militarization and colonialism, Aisha is confronted with dangerous situations and difficult decisions as she fights to defend her family and culture. Along the way, she discovers a legacy of secrets that threatens to upend everything she thought was true.

With empathy and compassion, Call Her Freedom explores family dynamics, the intergenerational impacts of war, and what it means to call a place home. Dorabji doesn’t reach for easy answers; instead, she leans into the messy complexity of her characters and the ways we both hurt and heal those we love.

I stayed up late devouring Call Her Freedom, drawn in by its powerful female characters: headstrong Aisha, independent Nalja, stubborn Noorjahan. They evolved in astonishing ways as the story progressed, and each one felt so real that I found myself getting anxious when the dangers that threatened them pressed too close. By the time I finished my copy of the book, it was dog-eared and highlighted, messy notes scribbled in the margins. I couldn’t wait to talk to Dorabji and learn more about her process as she crafted the novel.

Dorabji and I spoke in early January. During our interview, she shared insight into her inspiration, research methods, and the many decisions she made while bringing this narrative to life.

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JEN BRYANT: I loved Call Her Freedom — it was so engrossing. Can you tell me about what your creative process looked like for this book?

Tara Dorabji: Call Her Freedom was over 14 years in the creating, and the process was definitely part of my life journey. There were a few things that were essential. One was being in community with other writers through my writing group.

I’m an exploratory writer, so I redraft. I was actually sitting down before the interview reading the first few pages of the book, and it was a little different than I remembered because I’ve rewritten it a few times. I let the characters drive me, and I learn as I create, which is really satisfying for me as an artist.

I also did a lot of research in Kashmir, which is an occupied zone. I was able to listen to the Kashmiris’ stories and create them as documentaries and other forms, so it was helpful to me to be able to work across different formats.

Tara Dorabji, Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

JB: As I read this novel, I was struck by the nuances of each character. It was clear that time and care went into crafting each one. Which character do you relate to most? Who was difficult for you to identify with?

TD: Nalja is probably who I relate to most because she comes in at a contemporary time. She’s a photojournalist, and there’s a rebelliousness to her spirit. She’s a similar age to my daughters now, so she feels like a match for my current reality.

I would say Noorjahan is the most complex. She really drove the story, and I never wrote from her perspective. So there’s a mystery around her — a complexity, a wisdom — that allowed her to haunt the book in a way, because her character was somewhat bigger than I could contain.

I challenged myself with the complexity of the characters — letting someone that we’re deeply empathizing with then turn a corner and do something that we don’t agree with, or trying to understand what’s motivating some of the most unlikable characters and build empathy and humanity in them. I also liked working on the nuances and complexities of relationships and giving them air to breathe over decades.

JB: That aspect felt so relatable, especially with Noorjahan and Aisha’s character arcs. We’re all deeply flawed; as we try to love and support each other, we don’t always do it in ways that make sense.

While reading, I also considered the roles that colonialism and military occupation play in your novel. Although the village in your book is fictionalized, there are similarities to the lengthy occupation of Kashmir, as you touched on earlier. What made you choose this setting for your story?

TD: Early on, the inspiration came from my family, which is from Bombay. My dad migrated to the US when he was in college, and there were all these letters that he had saved, and a lot of folks from my family that had passed away. And as I was getting into those voices and characters and inventing, this other voice came through that was really strong, unrelated to the family, and clearly in the militarized zone.

And so I was already writing in Bombay and learning a lot about the independence movement in Kashmir at that time. It was a couple of years after the Arab Spring, so there had been major uprisings, and folks in Kashmir were asking questions like, “What does freedom look like, and independence, without a nation as a state?” I was really drawn into some of the discourse and the movement, and curious, and so I decided to set my novel there, which led me to Kashmir on a couple of research trips.

And as I wrote, I continued to explore that question of what it means to orient something to a place. It contains the story in a way, which is really powerful and potent, but you’re also bound to it. So I wanted to expand the novel out.

When you look at post-colonial conflicts around the world, you see patterns. I wanted those to be able to emerge, and I was very committed to this deeply censored atrocity of Kashmir, so I both wanted to shine a light on it and place it in a global context that was more allegorical.

JB: The standout characters in Call Her Freedom are mostly women. What drew you to place their stories at the heart of the book?

TD: I come from a strong line of women — my families have been very female-centered, and there are so many incredible women around me whose stories I know intimately.

When we look at figures in independence movements on a global scale, who do we talk about? You have MLK, you have Gandhi, you have Cesar Chavez — all these men that are the banners of independence movements and freedom movements. Coming up in movements and social justice work myself, I saw so many women doing the labor, propelling the movements, holding the cultures, tending the family, and so I wanted to bring those stories to the forefront. There are so many incredible and powerful women that I’m in awe of, so it was easy for me to draw content from them.

I had a lot of fun with the male perspective and voices, too. In some ways, those characters would come to me a little easier because they were so far from myself. Sometimes when writing, you have to try not to transpose or get in the way. That happened to me a lot with Aisha — I would get too close.

And at a certain point, too, with the whole manuscript, I cut out anything that had to do with my family’s story, lineage, and migration. I would write nonfiction essays about that, but I had to let the fiction be pure and drive itself.

Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

JB: Without revealing spoilers, Call Her Freedom tackles questions of home, family, and healing intergenerational trauma. Did you make a conscious decision to focus on these themes or did it happen organically as the story emerged?

TD: I definitely wanted to write a story about militarization and occupation based on Kashmir and how censored that was, and I knew women would be at the center of it. Women face double impacts in occupied zones, because they’re facing the oppression from the occupying forces in a different type of way, and then a lot of times there’s so much pressure within the family that they actually have another layer of violence within the home. And so I wanted to explore that.

In the beginning it was like, “This is a political rant, not a story.” I went through that phase and had to get it out of my system. I would go back and forth because everyone had an opinion — too much political context, not enough — and at a certain point I had to decide what I needed to do to tell this story. I also took a workshop with Maaza Mengiste, who really pushed on the story part.

So much of storytelling is about love. It’s about home. It’s about the imperfections we face, and the ways we hurt each other while trying to support each other, and so that’s what came through on the page.

I think the structure helped me a lot, too. Writing through multiple perspectives meant that I could create a war landscape over generations. Being able to pop into different people’s perspectives even when telling the story from another person’s point of view also helped. So much of life is these strange misunderstandings, or somebody concealing truth from somebody else, and so you have these struggles within the home and relationships. Looking at the cycles of violence and the ways they echo between our communities, selves, families, and systems was something I was interested in exploring, and there’s no way to look at anything within the human experience without looking at how we love and care for each other, too. So that became the base.

JB: Why did you feel that it was important for this story to unfold over three generations and multiple decades?

TD: When you look at the current global context that we operate in, things like the US’s hegemony and India’s partition are not that old. I was also thinking about my parents’ lifespan, and how starkly different the world was when they were born compared to where we are now. There wasn’t this infighting before; you had communalism, with different religions all living together. Then you had freedom, but that actually meant “We’re going to partition the country and carve it up, and then they’re going to fight, and because they’re fighting it’s easier to control the region even though we’re not formally controlling it.”

It’s interesting to think about the legacy of Indians partitioning — that’s where my dad’s from — and the tensions between India and Pakistan. My mom’s from Germany, which was also partitioned, but has been reunified in our lifetime. And so it was important to me to look at the context of violence within a larger strategy for domination and control and also ask how it impacts a person when they are growing and changing as the land changes. Using that as a parallelism felt really important because it hasn’t always been like this, and the narratives we hear of why it’s like this don’t look at the root issues, and so I wanted to go back in time to do that.

Where the novel ended changed all the time. During Covid, there was a part of me that was like, “Do I let it end here, or do I project it through?” Ultimately, writing into the future helped me land the book. Because I started writing this book asking a question. How do people live in freedom when their rights are eroded? And we’re in a moment, globally, where so many people are experiencing the erasure of their rights just based on where they live. Writing into the future allowed me to open different possibilities, and hope, but I had no idea that I was going to do that when I started.

Photo by Ab. Waheed on Unsplash

JB: I love that you ended on a note of hope because so many things that happen in your book have echoes throughout time, and even now we can see similarities globally. Unfortunately, a lot of the experiences your characters had are very real and are continuing to happen. And so I think that feeling of hope is a powerful place to end the story.

In addition to being a novelist, you’re also a seasoned journalist and award-winning filmmaker. Do you feel that Call Her Freedom is in conversation with your prior works, and if so, in what ways?

TD: The novel is definitely in conversation with my three-part documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir. The films came out of my research; I became an accidental filmmaker along the way. Oddly, it was a faster process getting the films done than getting the book out. The third film is “Call Me Azadi,” which means freedom, and it was titled before the book was, so that’s a beautiful sort of echo. With the documentary films, I loved that I could create a container for people to experience what Kashmiris are going through every day in their own words and their own language, in their own place, on their own terms, which is powerful.

I also love fiction because there’s a deep emotional heart and pull to it. You can look at some big meta things, and it allows folks to access information that they may not otherwise come to, and enter worlds, and develop empathy and learn that way.

My radio journalism helped me along the way, too. The first time I went to Kashmir to research the novel, the civilian mass graves were being verified. I started meeting and interviewing all these people, and then I could share and amplify their stories through radio. It was immediate and felt urgent and important. The novel had a different timeline, but the mediums really worked together.

I have another novel too, so for a while I was trading off between the novels, but the films were great because I was working with other people, and the content was similar. I would get to listen to and sit with the stories in great detail and then that would imbue the writing in a different sort of way. It’s sort of magical how everything happened. It wasn’t planned, but it worked well for my brain and creative practice.

There have been blocks and “no”s along the way with both forms — rejection, difficulty, denial. When one project would hit a hurdle, having something else to work on was helpful so I could come back later and look at it with fresh eyes.

JB: You’re one of our editors and contributors here at MUTHA. How has motherhood shaped your writing and creative practice?

TD: Motherhood has been at the heart of my creative practice. I was an artist before, and then I had twins. That first year and a half, I wrote about motherhood, I wrote about birth — I had a homebirth of twins — and it was all very tactile, and it’s all I had room for, but I documented it so much.

Writing has always been something that I’ve carved out time for. It’s been hard getting time as a single mom, especially for something like a novel, but it’s also fed me and made me super efficient. If you give me a weekend, I’m like, “Okay, I’ll turn this 300 page manuscript around for you!” Because that’s what motherhood is like. There’s no room, and you only have so much time.

I’ve just started having rituals recently — maybe I’ll ring my Tibetan bowl before I start writing, or make it warm, or beautiful —  but usually it’s like, Okay, 45 minutes, go!

When I first started writing the book, my daughters were three. I would model the character Aisha off of them, and then as they got older, it was fun because we’d lived all these stages. With the character of Nalja at seventeen, too — now my kids are teens, so it’s helped me look at that world. My understanding of mother-daughter relationships also changed once I was a mom. They help me see more, and I love that duality.

This book would not exist without my daughters. They have changed me, and it’s been beautiful to be on the journey with them.

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About the Author

Jen Bryant is an editor at MUTHA Magazine and a creative nonfiction reader for Mud Season Review. Her work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Ms., BUST, Hip Mama, and elsewhere. She has participated in readings and storytelling events at the Columbus Arts Fest, Wild Goose Creative, and Two Dollar Radio. Originally from the South, she currently resides in the Midwest.



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