It was a moment of shock that firmed up my wavering desire to re-read a novel of almost 1,400 pages. The BBC television adaptation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy meant that the book was back in the culture pages. I had a few hazy memories of reading it two years after its publication in 1993. The story of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s quest for a husband for her daughter Lata in the fictional north Indian town of Brahmpur forms the main thread of a great web of interwoven narratives. Set in the 1950s, the age of India’s post-independence promise, and published in the 1990s, the era of India’s post-liberalisation fervour, what would it be like to re-read this mammoth work in 2020? I found an old hardback copy at my parents’ home, the date of purchase pencilled on the first page. As I skimmed over a few passages, I did some mental arithmetic. When I first read this book I was exactly the age of Lata. Now I am the age of Mrs Mehra. Once the jolt of dismay had subsided, this neat reflection of the passing of eras seemed like a strong sign. A re-read was inevitable.
I could only express my memories of the novel as feelings, a hazy sense of wellbeing in its capaciousness, an impression of gratifying drift. While key plot points and characters escaped me, a few images floated into view: musicians tuning their instruments in a courtesan’s home; a meeting of a small-town literary society; a crumbling palace reflected in a river. When I asked friends what they remembered of it, they mostly spoke of how they had read it. One friend said she could remember reading it in Shimla in the Himalayan foothills over a long summer vacation, chapters punctuated by currant buns, samosas and tea. Another said he would treat himself to a few pages every night while he wrote his PhD thesis. Another friend said she read it in the afternoon hush of her home, seated at the dining table as though she was in a library, the book too heavy for her to hold up in bed.
Enthusiastic re-readers often quote Nabokov: “one cannot read a book, one can only re-read it.” A first reading, he argued, is a way of finding our bearings, line by line, locating that world in space and time. True artistic appreciation can only come through a later reading, when we are free to take in the work as we would a painting, eyes swooping over the entirety of its surface, picking out details at will. The sense of a book as a broad canvas is apposite for A Suitable Boy. In the foreground would stand a callow university student and her fretful mother, flanked by three suitors in different poses. And the expansive background would be populated by a great array of scenes, many appearing to have little connection with each other but all concerned with the growing pains of a republic, from the passage of land reform legislation to a disputed religious site. Having rooted ourselves comfortably in the story, our eyes would be able to linger over the institutional politics of an English department in a small town's college, the dwindling audiences for a courtesan’s music performances or the tanneries and shoe-making industry of Kanpur.
However, as I made my way through the novel this time, a different metaphor came to mind. Reading the book today felt like constantly switching between a pair of telescopes. The first is the one that Seth looked through, its lens pointed at India’s Nehruvian journey. And the second is my own, providing a vantage on the era when the book first appeared. About a third of the way through, Mr Justice Chatterji, head of one of its exuberant families, expresses “a great sadness for what had happened to the country he had known since childhood...” The distinguished judge’s thoughts are fixed on the ruptures of independence and Partition. But the same sentiment was often expressed in the months before the novel’s publication, following the 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque by an extremist Hindu mob in Ayodhya, a pivotal moment in modern Indian history. And when I returned to those words in August 2020, in the next room images from the site of the demolished mosque flashed across a television screen. Sanctioned by the Indian Supreme Court, a temple will now be built on the site and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was participating in the ground-breaking ceremony, stating that the “day was as significant as the day India gained independence.” Under the festive images, India’s world-beating daily coronavirus infection numbers scrolled across the screen.
The same dual vantage provides a new dimension to the novel’s Zamindari Abolition Act, which allows compulsory acquisition of landlord estates for redistribution to tenant farmers. Seth departs from the legislation’s arid clauses and noble objectives to take in the linguistic pyrotechnics that it engenders in court, the chicanery that ensues across towns and villages to avoid its consequences, and the friendships and family ties that are ruptured by its intent. It is a masterful example of fiction vividly bringing to life a reformist policy to reverse hundreds of years of entrenched social and economic inequality. Less than three years prior to publication of the novel, a real-life landmark policy had been announced by the Indian government. The implementation of the recommendations of the Mandal Commission relating to quotas for government jobs and higher education would transform the conversation about caste-based positive discrimination. Today these conversations of how, or indeed whether, to address historic inequalities continue to dominate the political agenda and Seth’s work continues to feel relevant to the state-sponsored or abetted land grabs of successive governments.
How has the book’s language fared over the intervening years? What struck me most was the way in which Seth’s prose revels in India’s multiple Englishes. In the nineties, Indian literature in English was still beset by questions of representation and authenticity, stemming from the mere fact of writing in English; mercifully, today there is less of an impulse to revisit those debates over whether or not English is really an Indian language. Seth has enormous fun with Indian English usage, whether in film notices (“A Rainfall of Melody, Acclaimed, Applauded, Admired by All”), tourist brochures (“the palace was not less than a heaven where beauty and charms were scattered freely”) or papers presented to literary societies (“Eliot: Whither?”) Family letters, religious disquisitions, court judgments, blithe rhyming couplets: it seems like no form of syntax or cadence is left unexplored.
“What use is English?” asks Maan, the indulged son of a powerful politician while chatting to a farmer on a train. “If you talk in English, you are a king,” comes the response. Today English can probably stake a much greater claim to being the language of professional opportunity, accessible to more Indians than ever before, and has been annexed and moulded into potent amalgams with different Indian languages, the ubiquitous modern lingo of TV shows, advertising and tweets.
But Seth concerns himself with languages other than English too. The theme of the loss of the linguistic and artistic traditions of Urdu in a post-Partition landscape recurs through the novel. Unusually for an Indian novel written in English, Seth is a careful signposter of language, not only consistently indicating whether a character is speaking in Hindi, Urdu or English, but also pointing out a change in Hindi dialect or accent. In doing so, the impression we get is of the rippling, roiling transformations of “Hindi” as we move around the fictional state of Purva Pradesh and further afield. This is in stark opposition to what Professor Alok Rai calls “artificially sanskritised Hindi,” a monolith that “lays claim to the real (but also mythical) excellences of ancient Indian culture” and which is so bound up with a particular type of “culturally exclusive, socially divisive and ultimately upper caste and anti-democratic politics.”
Language aside, critics today might take issue with the relevance of a book with a marriage plot, grousing that even the mention of Indian arranged marriages is to tumble into a pit of clichés. While there may have been a time when marriage could be crafted into a satisfactory metaphor for order and stability, surely that time has passed? This, however, would be a misunderstanding of the continued importance of marriage as the fulcrum of Indian society. Today the questions may cover wider ground, encapsulating who we ought to marry, who is legally permitted to marry, whether we should marry at all—but for the most part, marriage remains the elemental constituent of society. Yes, people arrange to marry for companionship or to start families, but a vigilantly constructed endogamy remains the way power is consolidated, wealth is shared and social mobility is sought. The recent Netflix show Indian Matchmaking lit up social media with its carefully edited idiosyncrasies of professional matchmaking, generating a deluge of memes and snark. But stories on social media also revealed the continued pressure on young people to marry in conventional ways and the resulting conflict, ruined family relationships, and physical and mental health problems.
It may have been a foregone conclusion in 1950s India that Lata’s family would flatly reject her Muslim suitor. But in 2020, an Indian jewellery brand has felt the need to withdraw an advertisement featuring a Hindu wife and her Muslim mother-in-law after a storm of online outrage and protests from Hindutva activists outside some of its stores. In a grimly predictable twist, the Seth adaptation, aired in India on Netflix, has itself been caught up in a controversy: a scene showing Lata and her Muslim boyfriend kissing on the premises of a temple formed the basis of a police complaint, registered by a member of the youth wing of the governing BJP, against executives of Netflix India for “hurting religious sentiments.” This coincided with the Uttar Pradesh government’s recent promulgation of an ordinance prohibiting religious conversion on a “fraudulent” basis, which has since been used to target inter-faith marriages. And of course, along with religion, caste continues to be paramount. While Mrs Rupa Mehra deals with the issue of caste as though it is routine and immutable, coolly enumerating the castes she finds acceptable, the fact remains that even in 2011 the proportion of inter-caste marriages remained lower than 6 per cent. One of the most arresting—and truthful—sentences in the novel appears when Lata visits a tannery: “somewhere within her had risen an atavistic revulsion against the whole polluting business of hides and carrion and everything associated with leather.” Seth denies his heroine, the representative of a so-called new age, any kind of fig leaf to mask her caste prejudice and presents the ugly line with little warning. He knew it to be true of millions of upper-caste homes then, just as it is now.
As I made my way to the final chapters, weeks after I had begun, it struck me that the novel’s most prevalent character is perhaps the Indian constitution itself. This was a document forged broadly by elite consensus but which aimed to codify fundamental legal rights in a profoundly hierarchical, diverse and unequal society—and to go even further and also address questions of social and economic justice, the state’s equidistance from all faiths, and access to good education and public health. In spite of its flaws, the spirit of the constitution gusts through the novel as a profound aspiration, the only dependable blueprint for a nation that survived such a traumatic birth. It is present in the shoe manufacturers’ strike in their fight against the traders, in the public life carved out by the female relatives of the Nawab of Baitar, and in the jockeying of candidates preparing for the first elections of independent India.
“It was the early winter of 1950 and India had been free for over three years.” Appearing on the fourth page of the book, the word “over” in this sentence is an accomplished sleight of hand. It leads us to expect a significant passage of time and then we are caught short by the breathtaking newness of the nation. Seth writes about this newness with his poet’s rhythms, expansive knowledge and mischievous wit, but also endowed with four decades of hindsight. Revisiting the book, I was equipped with almost three more decades of hindsight. A few days after I had finished my re-read, I walked down a street in Bangalore, a high wall running down its length. Tiles were set into the wall at regular intervals, aimed at dissuading men from stopping there to urinate. Normally these kinds of tiles feature the images of Hindu deities but here some of the tiles were different: they depicted Jesus, the Virgin Mary, a mosque-like structure with a crescent moon hanging above it. The tiles showing Hindu gods were all intact. The others had all been defaced, their surfaces chipped, cracked or in some cases almost entirely gouged out.
In A Suitable Boy, the temple-goers prevail in the matter of a disputed holy site. To mark this triumph the Raja of Marh orders a massive Shiva-linga to be carried from the banks of the Ganga to the temple site, eschewing winches and pulleys, and insisting on 200 men pulling it up the ghats for dramatic effect. As the men strain and struggle with the weight of the linga, the ropes snap and it rolls back over the steps, injuring men as it crashes back into the river. “The Shiva-linga rested on the bed of the Ganga once more, the turbid waters passing over it, its bloodstains slowly washed away.” In the grand tableau that the book presents to a re-reader, this is the image I am most likely to recall.
