There was a time when Indians thought that boys who went to a British public school and then Oxbridge were bound to be very special. They would do great things when they returned. Aurobindo was one such. There were other revolutionaries who turned mystic but Aurobindo was in a class of his own. Then people discovered he was boring and stupid. The same thing happened to Nehru. Perhaps, lads who went to America would be different? Sadly no. JP had collected some degrees in the US. He was utterly useless.
With Vikram Seth, however, things might have been different. After all, after British Public (that is private) School and Oxbridge, he did a PhD at Stanford and learned Chinese. Surely, sunny California might have rendered him utile? Sadly, his return to India to write 'Suitable Boy' foreclosed that possibility. But even India was growing and developing. Seth returned to England- an insular island from which Canute turned back Time's wasting tide.
Mahesh Rao has an article on 'Suitable boy' in Prospect magazine.
A suitable re-read: What I learned from Vikram Seth’s great novel, second time round
Twenty-two years after A Suitable Boy came out, this masterly novel feels as relevant as ever to modern India
It was shit and painted a distorted picture of India in the Fifties. Why? Seth's Mum wasn't just a college graduate. She was a stenographer with a good job with the railways. Even at that time, women weren't just a set of ovaries to be married off. During the war, Indians has seen fine English ladies doing clerical work or undertaking nursing duties. In Delhi, the 16 year old daughter of the American Ambassador was bicycling too and from a Hospital where she volunteered. Girls like Vikram's Mum were admired. Her marriage was 'semi-arranged'. A smart and sensible woman of such fine character was indeed a 'suitable girl' for any self-respecting man who wanted to rise through hard work, enterprise and strong family values.
Back when Vikram shat out 'Suitable', few thought that the Bench- which his mother had adorned for over a decade- would end up with more power than the Legislature. It would be Mummy and her brother Judges, not Rahul Baba, who decriminalized the type of naughtiness Vikram was getting up to.
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 confess, I wasn't able to watch it through. Why couldn't they put in better looking actors?
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.
None of any great intrinsic interest. I suppose, back then, we might have seen Seth as being like Gurcharan Das- i.e. a champion of private enterprise and American style 'know-how'. But Seth backed away from anything so full throated. So did Das. He turned out to be a cretin.
Set in the 1950s, the age of India’s post-independence promise,
when there were good harvests and the Brits still owed India a lot of money
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?
Disillusioning. India has changed for the better. Seth, and the sort of England he represents, has changed for the worse.
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.
Perhaps Mahesh is non-binary
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.
While wearing saree- no?
I could only express my memories of the novel as feelings, a hazy sense of wellbeing in its capaciousness, an impression of gratifying drift.
It was an easy read. That is true enough. There's a pretty girl. Who will she marry? Since Mrs. Mehra is sensible enough, the answer is- some suitable boy. Mummy and Daddy had just such a marriage. I like kissing Mummy and hugging Daddy.
While key plot points and characters escaped me, a few images floated into view: musicians tuning their instruments in a courtesan’s home;
as opposed to the patrons tuning their instruments on the courtesans. We appreciated Seth's reticence. Mummy and Daddy may have had sex. That is a topic we'd rather not think about.
a meeting of a small-town literary society;
standards had fallen since those halcyon days. I once heard of a Bengali Professor of Literature at Columbia or Cornell. There was a rumor that the lady could speak grammatical English. I am happy to say it was wholly unfounded. Back in the Fifties, however, Indians could write good English even if they had trouble speaking it intelligibly.
a crumbling palace reflected in a river.
as opposed to an open sewer. India continues to progress by leaps and bounds.
When I asked friends what they remembered of it, they mostly spoke of how they had read it.
Or hadn't. That's the problem with big doorstoppers you take with you on holiday. Having actually read it means you didn't get laid or, at the very least, try hard enough to get laid.
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.
and not getting laid- which is okay if you are a girl.
Another said he would treat himself to a few pages every night while he wrote his PhD thesis.
he definitely wasn't getting laid.
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.
where she wasn't getting laid.
Enthusiastic re-readers often quote Nabokov: “one cannot read a book, one can only re-read it.”
They don't say that to me. They just say 'I can't read your book. A monkey with a typewriter would have made a better fist of things.'
A first reading, he argued, is a way of finding our bearings, line by line, locating that world in space and time.
Mahesh read Seth line by line. Gradually, it dawned upon him that he was reading about India. Also, the librarian requested him to kindly not insert tome up rectum.
True artistic appreciation can only come
if the thing is actually artistic. We don't have to re-read middlebrow shite to appreciate its modest attractions.
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
a Hindu girl. Her mum will marry her off by the end of the book.
and her fretful mother,
domineering
flanked by three suitors in different poses.
No. Three 'interested parties'. But the Muslim isn't very interested- a Hindu bride might be a liability in the Diplomatic service- and the Bengali lacks virility and belongs to a different caste. So, there's only one real offer on the table.
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,
Fuck off! Vikram is writing about boring middle class Khattris in an inconsequential backwater. There is some anti-Muslim bigotry- Mians fuck their own sisters, right?- and anti-Brahmin bigotry- Brahmin girls fuck anything in trousers- and anti Jan Sangh bigotry (though 'Justice Chatterjee' is likely to have supported Sir Ashutosh's sprog who founded the BJP) .
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.
What it lingers on is the utter callousness of 'Mrs Rupa Mehra' and her extended family for those Khattris- i.e. people of their own caste- who had been killed or who had had to flee from Pakistan. Not a single one of them has lifted a finger to provide shelter or seek compensation for their co-religionists.
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...”
Chatterji wasn't sad that his own people had been and were being slaughtered by the Muslims. How is it not a single refugee has been granted asylum under his capacious roof?
The distinguished judge’s thoughts are fixed on the ruptures of independence and Partition.
But not on people named Chatetterji or Mukherji who were being killed or who, having fled East Pakistan, were now homeless.
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.
This cunt, like Seth, has no objection to Hindus being slaughtered- e.g. in Kashmir Valley. He only cares about mosques. Why won't he convert to Islam? Is it because he is a gay?
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.
This cunt shat himself because only mosques are good. Temples are very evil. Have you watched 'Indiana Jones- Temple of Doom'?
The same dual vantage provides a new dimension to the novel’s Zamindari Abolition Act,
Seth shows a Muslim female from a Zamindari family valiantly defending the right of Ashraf Muslims to suck the blood of the Hindu tenants. The bisexual nutter Seth approves of has a Congress-wallah Dad who is seeking to rise by clinging to the coat-tails of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. Does Seth expect us to believe a clever Congi Khattri merchant really wanted to take land away from his own ilk and give it to backward castes?
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.
Or vice versa. Seth's account is ignorant. Nehru's autobiography had shown that at least since the early Twenties, the land reform movement was led by Hindu preachers. The masses understood that the Muslim dominated administration had to be dismantled. Nehru explains that he will oppose this. That's what gave him salience in the Doab- among corrupt cunts and blathershites.
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.
No. Power to do land reform had been handed to the elected Premiers in the Provinces in 1937. What was important was that Nehru chose Hindus and kept out of alliances with clever Muslim barristers like Yunus in Bihar or Fazl ul Haq in Bengal.
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.
Dalits wept as their traditional oppressors rose.
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.
Rubbish! Seth gave us a Jane Austen novel in a post-Independence India seen through rose-tinted glasses. His book was like one of those interminable BBC TV series about the Raj which were broadcast during the Eighties. Then Seth's book was turned into a shitty TV serial featuring ugly actors. My memory is that Art Malik got his first break playing a wog in some Raj TV series. Nobody's career has been advanced by participation in 'Suitable'.
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.
There is Babu English and there is Bureaucratic English but they are one and the same because Babus are Bureaucrats.
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.
It isn't. Rahul's Hindi is better than his English.
Seth has enormous fun with Indian English usage,
he truly is the Indian Doestoevsky- if Doestoevesky was actually Noel Coward.
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.
No. Only limp wristed shite is explored. Voice it out for yourself. You will sound like a mincing catamite.
“What use is English?” asks Maan,
who fucks the bloke he will try to kill
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.
Sethji is writing very deep book. It must have been lodged at least 8 inches up his large intestine.
Today English can probably stake a much greater claim to being the language of professional opportunity,
Which is why England has fallen so far behind Singapore
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.
English doesn't matter. Hindi does. Modi's Hindi is okay. He will get a third term. But then Nehru's Hindi, not his having been to Harrow, is what got him the top job. There's a reason Mahatma Gandhi took the trouble to learn Hindi. On the other hand, if Rahul wants to stay in Indian politics, he had better learn Malayalam.
But Seth concerns himself with languages other than English too.
He learnt Chinese to do his PhD on Chinese demographics. Nothing came of it. Still, the boy had a high IQ. Pity he was a typical Khattri bigot- albeit a bisexual one.
The theme of the loss of the linguistic and artistic traditions of Urdu in a post-Partition landscape recurs through the novel.
The truth was even Muslims outside urban areas didn't speak Urdu in Bihar or UP. Listen to a speech by Akhilesh. How many Urdu words does he use? Modi uses many because he is a Gujarati speaking Hindustani. But Akhilesh speaks in exactly the same way that rural Muslims and Yadavs speak. The guy knows which side his bread is buttered on. An immigrant from Pakistan, like Sahir, might drone on about how we killed Gandhi and Ghalib, but the Nehrus were one of a handful of Hindu families which spoke Urdu. Even amongst them, the wives- like Kamala- were Hindi speakers. Also, if daughter is marrying Muslim- which is what Vijaylaxmi did- some Mahatma will break up the marriage and find suitable Brahmin boy. This made Khattris very jelly.
Unusually for an Indian novel written in English,
book is not about Mummy and Daddy and Nannee and Phupi and Soosoo and Tutu. I'm kidding. No such novel can exist. At least, Seth does not depict himself fucking his brother the way Arundhati does (being Gay, he didn't need to lust after sister the way Salman did in 'Midnight') . But that is also why he couldn't get Booker. Sad.
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.
What happens when nice Hindu boy learns a few Urdu words? He stabs his bum-chum. The lesson is clear. Stay the fuck away from Muslims. Also, all Brahmin girls are sluts.
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.”
Rai is the grandson of Premchand- i.e. a Kayastha. Being 'sickular', he is cool with Tamils speaking pure Tamil or Pakistanis having to speak Persianized Urdu. His problem is with Hindi speaking Brahmin Pundits, from certain lineages, speaking Hindi the way their ancestors did. Anyway, since Rai and Seth- however much they hate Brahmins- are considered 'forward caste', whereas Modi is 'backward', they can go fuck themselves.
Language aside, critics today might take issue with the relevance of a book with a marriage plot,
The Mum was important. A stenographer with the Railways in Calcutta who becomes a Chief Justice and member of the Law Commission is worth commemorating even if she did pick up a degree from Loretto. Interestingly, the husband too had vocational training. Neither was a blathershite or virtue signaling cunt.
grousing that even the mention of Indian arranged marriages
Indian arranged marriages feature astrologers and professional match makers. This was a case of a guy with a diploma in boot making getting hitched to a steno-typist. The stars didn't matter. The couple would rise by hard work.
is to tumble into a pit of clichés.
i.e. the place where Mahesh most likes to wallow
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?
Mahesh's Granny used to beat the fuck out of his Grandfather. His Mum blew up his Daddy on their honeymoon night. That is why Mahesh thinks marriage can't symbolize order and stability.
This, however, would be a misunderstanding of the continued importance of marriage as the fulcrum of Indian society.
In Amrika, marriage is not fulcrum of Society. Sodomy is.
Today the questions may cover wider ground,
Mahesh may marry goat. Their honeymoon may cover a lot of ground depending on how frisky the goat happens to be.
encapsulating who we ought to marry,
goat should not be of Hindutva type. Also it should have dick. Mahesh has somewhat higher standards than Mrs. Rupa Mehra
who is legally permitted to marry, whether we should marry at all—but for the most part, marriage remains the elemental constituent of society.
I suppose the cunt means most peeps are 'born in wedlock'. Sadly what constitutes a society relates to what defends it or pays for its defense.
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.
Nonsense! Nobody gives a shit about the caste of your husband or wife. Feroze wasn't a Brahmin. Neither was Sonia. That doesn't change the fact that Rahul is a Brahmin, while Muhammad Ali Jinnah's descendants are Parsi.
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.
The matchmaker kept saying 'lower your expectations. You really aren't as cute or young as you think.' What was wrong with that?
But stories on social media also revealed the continued pressure on young people to marry in conventional ways
Mummy tried to make Mahesh marry a non-goat.
and the resulting conflict, ruined family relationships, and physical and mental health problems.
Which is why it is important to 'beat your mother while she is still young'. You look a fool blaming some toothless hag for the way your goat husband ruined your life by eating all your precious manuscripts. I'm not saying that's what happened to me. It's the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
It may have been a foregone conclusion in 1950s India that Lata’s family would flatly reject her Muslim suitor.
But there was little point flatly rejecting her Muslim rapist if they lived in a Muslim majority area.
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.
But in 1950 plenty of Hindus were still having to runaway from Pakistan probably because of all the nice necklaces their rapists' mummies wanted to give them.
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.”
Kissing should be confined to mosques. Sodomy should only be depicted as occurring within the Vatican.
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.
In Nehru's time things were simpler. As Mahatma Gandhi noticed, Congress workers simply slaughtered Muslims regardless of whom they loved or whether they were kissing in temple or fucking in mosque.
And of course, along with religion, caste continues to be paramount.
Mahesh is of the wrong caste. Goat is refusing to marry him.
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.
Because 'jatis' evolved to solve 'the stable marriage problem'. Mahesh thinks it is only because of social attitudes that more Merchant Bankers aren't marrying coolies.
One of the most arresting—and truthful—sentences in the novel appears when Lata visits a tannery:
tanneries are smelly.
“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.
She'd have been looked up to if she married a guy who owned a shoe factory, not one who worked in it.
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.
Which has had the fuck amended to it, when it wasn't suspended.
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.
But Ambedkar dismissed his contribution to it as 'hack work'.
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.
No. It was historically accurate. India had been free since the autumn of 1947. Bihar had had an elected, autonomous, administration ten years prior to that.
It leads us to expect a significant passage of time and then we are caught short by the breathtaking newness of the nation.
No we are not. On the other hand, maybe Mahesh got caught with his goat. No doubt that was very breathtaking indeed.
Seth writes about this newness with his poet’s rhythms, expansive knowledge and mischievous wit, but also endowed with four decades of hindsight.
Seth could have written about things which were new. But what was new was an Indian administration at the Center. The Delhi portions of his book are shit. Daddy attended St. Stephens but, back then, it was a shit college. Then Daddy went to England and learned how to make boots. New Delhi wasn't interested in him or his stenographer of a wife. ایاز قَدر خود بَشَنْاس. Ayaz should know his place.
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.
Did Mahesh bash in those tiles with his dick? That was naughty of him. Still, hopefully, nice goat will love-jihad him or, if he demurs, stab him to death
In A Suitable Boy, the temple-goers prevail in the matter of a disputed holy site.
They killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and chased more away. India was a disputed political site. The Muslims got Pakistan. The rest was for non-Muslims.
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.
Vikram was interested in lingas.
“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.
When Mahesh first read the book he identified with Lata. Now he identifies with Mrs. Mehra. Quite naturally, it is this crude bit of propaganda which sticks in his mind. Still, one day, he may make a goat very happy. Not perhaps a very choosy goat. But, it will be a goat better able to digest Seth's oeuvre than myself.
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