Jerry Pinto & Ratna Pathak Shah explore how dark times shape uplifting fiction

MUMBAI: Can fiction find hope in the darkest chapters of history? Author Jerry Pinto and actor Ratna Pathak Shah explored the question at Godrej Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest 2026, discussing how personal stories can illuminate troubled times without losing sight of the possibility of change.

The conversation, titled “Mumbai Maketh The Man”, took place on the first day of the festival at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). Shah spoke with Pinto about Yuri And The City, the sequel to his book The Education of Yuri. Set against the upheaval surrounding the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the novel explores family, friendship and life amid social turmoil.

Pinto said that writing about despair does not mean abandoning hope. Instead, confronting darkness through literature can be a way of encouraging readers to reflect and act.

“No writer, however despairing, gives up hope. When there is despair, when there is anger and there is darkness in the writing, it is because the writer feels that by talking about this, perhaps we will all do something about it. We will also step away from the dark,” he said.

The discussion also examined the varied experiences of people caught up in the communal riots of 1992-93. Pinto cautioned against treating the experiences of religious communities as uniform, stressing that fear is shaped by individual circumstances.

“It is not possible to talk about the Muslim experience or the Hindu experience of the riots, even the Christian experience of the riots, because there is no single experience,” he said. “The experience of fear is individual and specific to the person experiencing it, and each person responds differently.”

Shah reflected on the difficulty of representing uncomfortable realities in art, particularly when the events themselves are painful to revisit.

“Real things happen, unhappily, offstage. But on stage, the event itself is rarely shown. So we have a natural dislike, it seems, of representing the uncomfortable in art…” she said.

The conversation also turned to nostalgia and why younger generations sometimes look back fondly on periods they never experienced. Shah suggested that such longing may stem from the difficulty of finding hope in the present.

“At least we could buy into that lovely little dream world at that time. Now buying into any kind of dream is so hard. So you’re borrowing nostalgia,” she said.

Across the discussion, fiction emerged as a way to examine history through the intimate realities of ordinary lives. By bringing together political upheaval, personal fear and the pull of an imagined past, Pinto and Shah considered how storytelling can confront difficult truths while keeping open the possibility of a different future.