Sayantani DasGupta's Fresh Take on Jane Austen in 'Debating Darcy'

Professor, physician, and New York Times best-selling author, Dr. Sayantani DasGupta, speaks with us to discuss her young adult debut novel, Debating Darcy. Her story is a retelling of Jane Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice, and her heroine is Leela Bose, a member of her high school’s speech and debate club, who has met her match in Firoze Darcy, a student from a rival debate club. DasGupta said,”…[In] Debating Darcy, I decided to re-imagine my beloved Pride and Prejudice with multicultural faces, with brown and black and all sorts of different ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations and what have you within it.” Having grown up without seeing representations of herself on screens and books was a major motivator for DasGupta when writing this novel. She wrote this version of the story not only for her own children, but also for her younger self. “…It was for that 12-year old girl, that 12-year old reader, who still lives inside of me somewhere, who never got to see herself even in her beloved, beloved tales, and so I…decided to do this to celebrate, to include all sorts of different faces within Austen’s beloved tale, to reclaim it, to say Jane Austen belongs to all of us.”

When doing research for her book, DasGupta discovered some unfortunate truths about the realities of debate culture in high schools. Initially, she had included sexism and misogyny to complicate the debate experience for her characters. However, after exploring the topic further, she found actual, real-life accounts from high school students who courageously spoke out on social media about the sexually inappropriate behavior that happens quite frequently in the debate circuit. “…Certainly, I was deeply moved, saddened, but also inspired by the bravery of these young people speaking out against what was going on in debate culture in high school… I really wanted to create a space in Debating Darcy to honor the scariness, but also the importance and bravery of being able to use your voice, and speech and debate is about using your voice, and speaking out against injustice is about using your voice, so that’s where that was coming from that I included it at the heart of Debating Darcy.”

What does DasGupta think of the Netflix series, Bridgerton, which boasts an exceptionally diverse cast of characters? She delightfully remarked, “It is incredibly gratifying, especially this season, to see dark-skinned Indian women being centered, being beloved, being considered beautiful. It was not something I ever thought that I would see on American television in my lifetime…There’s something extraordinarily powerful about representation, I think the more representation we all get, the more all of us benefits. Not just those of us who see ourselves on screen finally and feel that mirror confirmation, right? But all of us, I think everyone benefits when we have a…myriad group of faces, myriad group of heroes… and heroines available to us, and I think that that’s beneficial to absolutely everyone.”