In “Kairos,” Jenny Erpenbeck’s International Booker Prize-winning novel, a doomed love story mirrors the defeated idealism of communist East Germany. Set in the 1980s, the story revolves around Katharina and Hans and their tumultuous romantic entanglement as the promise of their country starts to fade away. As the Berlin Wall comes down and the city becomes one again, Katharina witnesses the contours of a capitalist state for the first time, shattering her hopes of a communist idyll.
“With her eyes, which in this other half of the city are a stranger’s eyes, she sees how every conceivable need is catered for by some product or other in the shops, the freedom to consume seems like an India rubber wall to her, separating people from any yearnings that might transcend their personal and momentary wishes. Is she about to be another customer?” writes Erpenbeck, illustrating Katharina’s skepticism about the future.
I’ve read countless expositions of how the hopes of East Germany were crushed with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but by looking at West Germany through Katharina’s eyes, I was able to really feel the contrast between two opposing political ideologies and how they affect individual lives.
Much like Germany in the late 1980s, India today is going through profound ideological changes. In the last decade, divisions along class, caste, religious and gender lines have been magnified under the rule of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A populist and divisive leader, Modi came to power in 2014 on the back of a Hindu ethnonationalist ideology that seeks the creation of a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation) in the country. During his time in office, India has witnessed increased marginalization and persecution of religious minorities; Dalits, or the oppressed castes; Adivasis, or tribal people; journalists and women. Communal tensions, lynchings, attacks on women and censorship of the media have become commonplace.
The sweeping ideological and political changes of nations are often tackled via nonfiction writing. The history, economy, social science and academic sections in bookstores are piled high with texts that can illuminate every aspect of a political era. In India, popular books include titles on Hindu nationalism and pop culture, biographies of Hindu nationalist leaders, memoirs of growing up Muslim in India and Modi’s politics, among others. Boasting meticulous research and investigative work, these books deal with a wide range of subjects that capture the vast expanse of India’s sociopolitical identity. Many stories, however, are to be found beyond the limits of the reported word.
With human interest stories disappearing from newspapers and television news, their complexity having been reduced to patterns, trends and statistics, personal-political stories have found a home in fiction. In the pages of a novel, the writer can explore a multifaceted life, which interacts with the political and allows readers to get a sense of the texture and character of a place and time.
In recent years, several contemporary Indian novelists have written in direct response to ongoing sociopolitical changes in India. Through fiction, these authors have painted an intricate picture of what it means to be young and disenchanted in a deeply polarized country. By turning the home, workplace, university and village into microcosms, they have dissected the many ways in which divisions within Indian society have become more entrenched and pervasive.
For instance, in “Summer of Then,” Rupleena Bose’s debut novel published last year, she sets the personal against the backdrop of the political, making the protagonist’s struggles reflect the larger ideological tensions of the 2010s, when Indian society was undergoing a transition and paving the path for the rise of Hindu nationalism.
The novel tells the story of an unnamed English literature professor as she negotiates her work, romantic entanglements and her family’s complicated history. As she moves between the cities of Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai, we witness her being trapped in a loveless marriage, struggling to make ends meet on her meager salary as a temporary professor and falling in love with her husband’s best friend. All of this plays out as the India she knows morphs into a country where misinformation on WhatsApp fuels family feuds and turns relatives into “fascist uncles and aunties.”
“The personal and the political (are) the core of the novel, in the way the narrator as a teacher of literature negotiates the world and the dichotomy of teaching modern texts and looking at the deep-seated feudalism of modern cities,” Bose told New Lines.
On the margins of the narrator’s culturally privileged life are those whose lives have been impacted by the politics of the time far more immediately than her own. These include her friend’s chauffeur Dharmendra, whose real name was either “Bilal or Bashir, he couldn’t remember.” He escaped the horrors of the 2002 riots in Gujarat in which over a thousand Muslims were killed, including his mother, whose throat was slit.
When the professor’s Muslim student Salman is murdered for being in a relationship with a Hindu woman, the narrator is unable to do anything substantial to bring her student justice. For the first time, the distant threat of Hindu nationalism becomes real for her and begins to affect her personal life.
“Salman’s murder in a way brings her face-to-face with the biases of the world in a way that she had not imagined. It shatters her comfort and infringes into her comfort zones as a student and a teacher. It also leads to a larger realization that the country is changing and equal spaces are a privilege,” explained Bose.
Essentially, “Summer of Then” communicates larger political changes through the human experience. Compared with the magnitude of a decade of political change, economic collapse and religious polarization, the narrator’s personal stories might seem small but are not insignificant. The universal and the personal parallel each other in the novel, drawing each other out until there’s no telling them apart.
If the novel is a space where the personal and political meet, it is also one where differing voices can be explored. In “Quarterlife,” Devika Rege pitches competing political ideas against one another, inviting the reader to make up their own mind.
Set around the same time as “Summer of Then,” “Quarterlife” looks at India post-2014, when a popular and divisive leader (hinting at Modi) is elected to the top office, promising a new age of economic growth and stability in the country.
In this new India, three characters arrive at their own perceptions of where the country is headed and what it needs from them. A U.S.-based management consultant, Naren Agashe, is enamored by the economic promises of the Hindu nationalist prime minister’s 2014 electoral win and decides to return to Mumbai and invest in its financial future. Rohit, his brother, is a directionless young man in search of his cultural roots. Amanda, Naren’s collegemate from the U.S., is in Mumbai on a teaching fellowship, working in a Muslim-majority slum.
While some characters in the novel are politically opportunistic and ambiguous, like the Agashe brothers, there are also those whose politics are etched in stone, like their leftist cousin Kedar.
Through these voices, Rege orchestrates a clash of opinions, a battle of ideologies on a complicated intellectual terrain. What emerges is a cast of characters who are motivated by diverse impulses, shaping their sociopolitical identities.
Naren’s endorsement of the right-wing “Bharat Party,” for example, is driven entirely by an economic motive; he envisages a booming financial market held together by a capitalist-leaning and authoritarian leader. Rohit, on the other hand, begins to find meaning in Hindu cultural nationalism as a result of a tour through the Maharashtrian countryside exploring his family’s history and caste background. Kedar, on the other end of the spectrum, believes that bringing the “Bharat Party” to power was always a choice. “It was between weak governance and fascism.”
Such arguments plainly reflect present-day drawing room debates where tempers soar, accusations fly and one’s political views become the basis for judgments of character.
In a tense scene set in Rohit’s house, we witness Iffy, Rohit’s Muslim friend, walk out on the party after Rohit belittles Muslim lives lost to acts of Hindutva violence. “When people are fighting for three meals, it’s their lives versus the lives Hindu nationalism will cost us if it gets out of hand. Sure, riots are a more visible tragedy, but it’s still a freak event,” he declares before Iffy storms out.
Scenes like these reflect a displacement of the “everyday”— the domestic and private — by the politically extraordinary. Characters become far more vocal about their ideological stands, something they wouldn’t typically do within the confines of a traditional novel.
Every time Naren or Rohit make an argument in favor of the prime minister or Hindu nationalism, Rege makes sure to challenge it with counterarguments put forth by Kedar or Rohit’s liberal-minded colleague Gyaan. While Naren accepts the Bharat Party’s economic promises as gospel truth, Kedar always points out the failures of capitalism and the state-capital nexus. Similarly, Rohit’s growing Hindu nationalism and caste pride is always undercut by Gyaan’s insistence on historical facts and verifiable truths.
Such competing voices reflect a very real schism in society brought on by the BJP’s rise to power, buoyed by followers who have bought into the party’s Hindu nationalist politics. In drawing our attention to ideas of cultural nationalism, identity politics, corporate greed and religious marginalization, “Quarterlife” shows us just how brazen preexisting hostilities toward women, Dalits and religious minorities have become in the last decade or so.
“Quarterlife,” like “Summer of Then” and others, is an English-language text that allows for such dissenting voices to exist. Because regional languages are far more easily understood in nonmetropolitan areas, English-language texts aren’t as widely read in India. If they were written in regional languages, scrutiny from right-wing critics would have made it difficult to write novels of such political urgency and tenacity. English-language novels, by contrast, have a limited readership, mostly in urban regions.
Most of the journalists who have been harassed, attacked and silenced in the country have reported in regional languages. Earlier in January, Mukesh Chandrakar, a Hindi-language journalist, was brutally murdered for exposing local corruption in Chhattisgarh, a state in eastern India.
“Someone like Kedar, a journalist and activist writing in Marathi, is a lot more incendiary and vulnerable than me. The degree of repression changes depending on your language, your medium, your publics, your impact. As a debut novelist in English, you’re more likely to get sued than shot,” Rege said in an interview with Public Books.
This is also why there is a dearth of in-depth reporting and analysis of the government’s actions in mainstream media. Barring a few English-language news outlets that are critical of the government, a majority of newspapers and news channels in India toe the state line. News, analysis and expert opinions have made way for misinformation and nationalistic rhetoric.
Journalists who don’t conform to these new power dynamics are intimidated, threatened and sometimes killed, as in the case of Gauri Lankesh, an independent woman journalist who used to publish a Kannada weekly until she was fatally shot by an unknown assailant in 2017.
In such a context, Rege’s novel uses personal stories to explore how larger political and historical wheels can set individual lives in motion. Rohit’s turn toward right-wing propaganda and his susceptibility to such divisive ideas don’t exist in isolation: His story is the story of countless young people who become enthralled by ethnonationalist politics and feed the larger political beast of Hindutva.
The story of India today is also the story of people like Rohit and Naren who stand by when Muslims are lynched in the streets and the media is systematically stifled.
As the novel makes space for multiple political voices, it also functions as a counternarrative to state positions. Fiction has become a space where mainstream propaganda about the state of the country can be challenged.
A recent novel that comes to mind is Atharva Pandit’s “Hurda” (sorghum in Marathi), which retells the story of the rape and murder of three sisters in a small Maharashtrian village in 2013. Told through multiple voices, the book traverses the lives of the various characters involved in the sisters’ disappearance and the eventual investigation of their murders.
Anisha, the eldest sister, who was last seen wearing a green top, becomes the talk of the town, inviting both a vulgar curiosity and derision. “Very clearly I remember this, bhau [brother]. Anisha, that eldest sister, she was wearing a green top, very sexy top, you know, between you and me, a top through which we can see things. We don’t need our imagination, kay?” says one eyewitness to the journalist investigating the crime. Her green top is seen as an indication of her sexual promiscuity as well as an open invitation to rape.
In the novel, it matters little who actually committed the crime. The author’s focus is on exposing the deep-rooted misogyny endemic to Indian society. While gender-based violence is extremely widespread in the country, in the last few years it has become more visible and normalized
Cases of sexual assault, especially those involving Dalit victims, are often not investigated at all. A First Information Report is often not even filed by local police, who are more keen on dismissing victim testimonies and protecting privileged caste perpetrators of gender violence. If cases are filed, rapists are let off easy or even garlanded and feted by Hindu nationalist groups. A pliant media also drops reporting on such stories, and they fall out of public memory as the news cycle resets. This tussle between memory and forgetting is the crux of Pandit’s novel. A determined attempt not to let the case of the three sisters fall to the wayside, “Hurda” challenges our collective failure to remember atrocities.
“What happened to justice for those children in Morbi who died in the bridge collapse? Most of us have forgotten about them. Most of us have moved on,” Pandit told New Lines, referring to the collapse of the pedestrian bridge over the Machchhu River in Morbi, Gujarat in 2022, which killed 141 people, a large number of whom were children. “My question is, how can we? We as a society are so cruel towards the vulnerable, so forgetful about their justice, their rights, their humanity, and yet have the gall to chest-thump about the value systems of our culture.”
With a dearth of serious reporting on cases of brutal sexual assault and their intersection with caste, class and religious identity, the novel has become a new site for the production of radical perspectives and progressive politics. Pandit’s strategy of using multiple first-person voices to tell the story makes it harder to look away from the sheer ubiquity of sexism.
“I think writers are bound to reflect on the things that they see happening around them in the society, particularly when society is going through such a profound churn,” added Pandit. The author’s writing functions as a source of both concern for the victims and criticism of institutions that protect the gender status quo.
In his last novel, “Leila,” former journalist Prayaag Akbar told the story of a woman, Shalini, as she tries to find her missing daughter while living in a dystopian totalitarian future India. In his latest, “Mother India,” he dives deep into the manufacture of misinformation in the country.
The last decade has seen a proliferation of hate content targeting religious minorities, and such videos, memes and texts have become a part of India’s daily diet of WhatsApp forwards, generated in large part by the social media wings of political parties and groups. It is in this world that Akbar locates his protagonist, Mayank Tyagi, a 20-something who works with a right-wing content creator in a dingy basement office in contemporary Delhi.
Tasked with coming up with a striking image of Mother India (a personification of India as a mother and a goddess), Tyagi scours the internet for a woman’s face that embodies all the qualities (femininity, fertility, motherliness, spirituality) that Mother India possesses. He goes through many social media profiles before landing on a photo of Nisha Bisht, a pretty young woman working at a mall in Delhi.
Unbeknownst to her, her photo becomes the face of Mother India in a video clip where the figure is being attacked by Muslims. “Once he was done he evaluated the four-second clip, and despite himself, as he watched, Mayank’s chest began to tighten. His breath felt shorter. These two Muslim boys. Throwing rocks like they did at our soldiers in Kashmir. Against brave policemen when Babarpur and Gokulpuri went up in flames, Daring to raise their hand and voice against country. Against mother. Against all our mothers.”
In the novel, Akbar explores an individual mind engaged in the production and reproduction of hateful content. “We all worry about what Hindu nationalism has done for the place of the Muslim in India, and that is rightly a concern. But what about the effect Hindu nationalism has upon the psyche of the Hindu? How does this majoritarian moment infiltrate our thinking, the thinking of my fellow citizens? I see such thinking erupt from time to time even within my professional and social circle, which is presumably more liberal than larger society. Fiction allows me a lens to examine this,” Akbar told New Lines.
Tyagi’s actions affect Bisht directly. People immediately make the connection between her and the AI-generated image of Mother India. The resemblance fuels debates online, everyone clamoring to hold forth on whether it is indeed her in the clip — scrutiny that Bisht had not asked for.
At the same time, being personified as Mother India doesn’t help her, and she is judged and admonished for daring to assume that it is her face in the Mother India video. She might look like Mother India, but as Nisha Bisht, she isn’t extended any form of respect or privacy. Her critics decided she “had the vibe of a snooty bitch in the posts available online, that she was just another in the long line of people hunting for fame or notoriety on social media.”
The novel throws light on what it means to be right at the heart of the fake news machinery and the information warfare it directs from dark and claustrophobic basements.
“One aim, with the book, was to try to get inside the mind of someone who works at a right-wing YouTube channel. I wanted to write about someone like that with empathy. Perhaps this was my own way of trying to understand the millions of young people who vote for Modi, who see him and his party as (agents) of economic change and opportunity,” Akbar added.
All four novels paint a picture of India that is complex, complicated and fraught with differences. Each of them reflects on how individuals negotiate the changes around them, both challenging and compromising with new ideas. For fiction writers, personal experiences of larger political changes become a way to interrogate and explore the psyche of the citizen.
In addition to the texts discussed above, there have been many more novels that chronicle the lived realities of modern-day India. Annie Zaidi’s “Prelude to a Riot,” Siddhartha Deb’s “The Light at the End of the World,” Anjum Hasan’s “History’s Angel” and K.R. Meera’s “Assassin,” among others, tell the story of our times and its tumultuous shifts and transformations. They allow readers to rethink and reframe what it means to be living in contemporary India.
Almost like historians, contemporary authors are functioning as recordkeepers of the present moment, committing to paper that which is often left unsaid.
“I try to think about my principal characters in their entirety, their families, their upbringing and social position, what has brought them to the point in their lives when we meet them,” said Akbar. “This is the job of a fiction writer. If I cannot empathize and render that empathetically then I am not doing my work.”
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