raven | A Suitable Boy

I am sleeping very badly and suffering unexpectedly from jet-lag. I hate my brain. Hence my sleeping until three today, and doing nothing of any productivity. Graargh.

But, actually, I want to talk about something else. A while ago,

yiskah recommended A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth's 1400-page novel about post-independence India, and reminded me I'd always meant to read it, and never got around to it. (Well, I got it out of the library once. 1400 pages, a one-week loan. You understand.) Then Shim found it in Oxfam for a couple of pounds (in terms of sheer verbiage, the best-value book purchase he's ever made) and I had a couple of translatlantic flights this week. The time had come.

I just finished it. I am a teeny bit disappointed with it for a stupid reason I am going to put under a cut. I think she picks the wrong man! Of the three potentially suitable suitors, I think she should have picked Amit, the poet. He was much more romantic. I'll shut up now about that and try and say something more profound.

That aside, I am incredibly impressed with the novel, its depth, and scope, and a little drawn out of my skin by it - which is understandable, I've been reading it for a week, occasionally for several hours at a time - but it's also because it creates an entire world and then pulls you into it so, so well. The writing style is so deceptively simple, sometimes even archaic - when was the last time you read a contemporary novel with an omniscient third-person narrator? - that you don't realise you care for the characters until you've been doing so fervently for 700 pages. It's wonderfully done.

The book jacket says that the novel is: "at its core, a love story; the tale of Lata's - and her mother's attempts to find a suitable boy, through love or exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is the story of India, newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis as a sixth of the world's population faces its first general election and the chance to map its own destiny."

That sounds pompous. But oh, it's right, too - it really is that. It really is an attempt to show us that world, that post-1947 world where everything was new and just the same, how India started out, by means of showing us some Indians - of different families, castes, and religions, all tied together by Mrs. Rupa Mehra's quest to find a suitable boy for her daughter - and how they come to be what they are.

And I know us brown people are always making such a fuss about people who aren't us writing about us, but here, right here, is the reason why: Seth writes about Indians with a mixture of knowing acerbity and warm, warm affection, because he is those people. His characters are sweet, funny, unspeakably corrupt, occasionally horrible, warm and loving, hideous, and they are Indian. In 1400 pages there are about sixty named characters, and they all know each other and they are connected and interconnected and everyone knows everyone else's business except when to do so would make life more efficient, and that rings marvellously true to me. They're wonderful characters. Lata, who is the closest of any of them to being a main protagonist, is marvellous: she's a university student, intelligent - more so than her mother - and trying very hard to navigate a world in which everyone suddenly wants to get her married. Her mother's endless emotional manipulation is just right. So is her brother Arun, a wonderfully done brown-sahib of just the most irritating type. And the languages they speak - the casual mix of Hindi, Urdu and English, the religious and post-colonial battles that are fought on linguistic territory, I just wanted to climb into the book and roll around in the rightness of it. (When the outraged citizenry start protesting their Home Minister, Lakshmi Agarwal, and chant: saanp ki zafar, insaan ki khaal / yeh hai L. N. Agarwal!, I kind of had to clutch at my heart and gasp.)

And then there are surprises. The couple who have an arranged marriage in the very first pages, Savita and Pran, are supposed to be orthodox and boring - and turn out to have a wonderful love story of their own. Another family, the Chatterjis of Calcutta, have a brilliantly sparkling habit of talking in rhyming couplets. Their eldest member, Amit, is a published poet, and Seth takes great pleasure in writing poetry to put in his mouth. The Congress politicians fight it out in the background and foreground, and their stories ought to be boring, too, but aren't. Surprisingly, the wife of the Revenue Minister, Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, and her garden, are the epicentre around which the political stories revolve, and it's a strange narrative choice that works beautifully. There are subplots within subplots, there is intelligent treatment of such varied things as mental illness, shoemaking, tree surgery and sectarian conflict.

Sectarian conflict - yes. The thing that I find most amazing, about many things that I do find amazing about this book, is that the Hindu and Muslim battles are fought in the background of one particular love story between Maan, the Hindu son of the Revenue Minister, and Firoz, the Muslim son of the local Nawab. Their relationship is, well, interestingly handled - I want to say ambiguously, but for all that we never see them sleep together, or even kiss, it's not ambigous, and the part of me that just thirsts for literary queer Indians of any kind wishes there were more about this aspect in the novel. But at the same time, it doesn't flinch from depicting that they love each other dearly, and that it drives them to do extraordinary - and extraordinarily awful - things. Given what they then begin to symbolise to their respective religious communities, I think I have to acknowledge that it is satisfying, thematically. I just wish there were more.

And the thing I got out of it all - other than all these scattershot ramblings - is, well, a sense of self and history. The India in my head is a curious place. Having never lived there as an adult, I have a strange mixture of my childhood memories, my adult observations, my own hang-ups about it all and the post-independence India of my parents, that they told me about when I was small, that they still look for vainly when they go back. I have heard so much about this time: Nehru's India, the one my parents were born into, a mixed-economy world dominated by government bureaucracy and people's first stumblings towards becoming themselves. It's in the details: the Chatterji family, in the novel, discuss how they changed their name to the anglicised Chatterji from the original Chattopadhyay. In the same way, my surname is not the same as my grandfather's. A character reads for his IAS exams - my grandfather did the same. In 1951, the year the novel is set, my grandfather was working for the IAS in the department of natural resources. (And, as he often told people in the decades to follow, as part of his job, he worked on the first computer in India.) Another character has been sent to boarding school in Shimla, a fate my parents assure me would have been mine, too, had things been slightly different. Even the fictional setting, a university town called Bramhpur, bears a distinct similarity to Roorki, the university town near Delhi where my father grew up. It's rather wonderful to have this whole, solid book full of people and places and things, that I can read, reach out and touch.

Seth claims to be writing a sequel, called A Suitable Girl (what else?) to be published in 2013 and set at the time of writing. I really, really hope this does get written. I want to see what he does with India, now. Come to think of it, I rather want to see what we do with it.

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slasheuse.livejournal.com

This was really interesting - it's one of many books I've always been meaning to read...!

Question, though - you say you've never lived in India as an adult. This is going to be one of those STUPENDOUSLY embarrassing 'something I should have known for years' moments, probably but - how long were you there for as a child? I don't know why - maybe you mentioned primary school or something - but I thought you'd been born up North, over here.

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waking up to shape the land

A Suitable Boy

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