Meena Kandasamy’s latest novel Fieldwork as a Sex Object has two epigraphs. The first is a quote from the Manusmriti, and the other a Twitter comment about the primary purpose of sex being to “fecundate the female” and that anything beyond the 2 minutes required to do that would be “perversion, degeneracy and socialism”. Using this framing, Kandasamy unites far-right Hindu commentators and online incels (also called the “manosphere”)—two groups that not only overlap but also share a number of goals, including the curtailing of women’s autonomy and reversing the legal-material gains of feminism.
Fieldwork as a Sex Object is structured as a series of first-person vignettes and episodes written by Amrita Chaturvedi, aka “Amy”, a London-based student activist who’s evasive about her posh-girl background (her father is a Supreme Court attorney). A vocal critic of the Indian government, Amy’s world is turned upside down overnight after a sexually explicit “deepfake” video featuring her goes viral. Soon she is shunned by her supposed friends, patronised by her family and trolled non-stop by the Indian manosphere.
“It’s so funny and strange how Indian incels and their Western counterparts have very similar opinions about women, about sexuality, female pleasure, and so on,” Kandasamy says. In the last few years, a number of novels set in India have hinged on online videos going viral. Prayaag Akbar’s Mother India, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning and Aravind Jayan’s Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors come to mind. Kandasamy’s novel, however, is fundamentally different because it keeps its focus squarely on the incident’s profound emotional and psychological impact on Amy.
“In an earlier era, unless you were a very famous public figure, criticisms of you or your work would largely be private,” the author says. “Generally speaking, people did not know what was being spoken about them behind their back. But with the social media environment of today, Amy faces a lot of public judgement and scrutiny, and even if she logs out, someone can still capture a screenshot and send it to her. So there is no real escape, even temporarily.”
Amy’s past comes back to haunt her. People, especially Indians, are quick to blame her because of her perceived transgressions of the past—participating in Leftist student politics in Delhi, appearing in a short-lived reality show, kissing a woman on camera, and so on.
In such a turbo-charged world of instant judgement, stable allies are crucial to one’s well-being. Amy is deeply touched, for instance, when her friend Nimmi takes care of her in the horrid first few days, bringing her home-cooked meals and distracting her with humour.
But Amy soon begins to sprout romantic feelings for Nimmi and contemplates making a move, despite understanding that this will not end well for either woman. A kindly (but also performative and tone-deaf) white acquaintance named India offers Amy shelter at her home following a particularly rough patch. But Amy is continually judgmental and dismissive of India and her efforts.
“Amy is quite allergic to India’s privileges as a white person, and her performative use of language,” Kandasamy says. “But India is also a genuinely nice person who wants to take care of a woman under attack from all quarters. What Amy doesn’t understand is that India’s privileges as a white person are so very similar to the privileges Amy herself enjoys back home in India as the daughter of an important man.”
Along the way, Kandasamy gives us searing insights on the contemporary internet via Amy’s occasional standalone rants. A single-page chapter titled Case Study: Gen Z sees Amy skewering the “psychotic moral pedantry” of Gen-Z, noting that this is the only cohort that looks at the nonconformist members of the previous generation with disdain. Kandasamy writes: “When it comes to these pick-me puritans, it is like listening to your parents. They are the most sexually conservative generation in decades.”
Elsewhere, a two-page chapter, Manthropology, reads like a poem. It unfurls in the form of call-and-response couplets where each first line sets up a situation in a woman’s life and each second line records a chauvinist response by a perennially online Indian man.
One of the most important connections Kandasamy makes is between how boys are raised in Indian joint families and the kind of political views they later endorse as adults. A superbly-written flashback scene depicts a war of words between Amy and her entitled, misogynist cousin. He calls her a whore and worse, and she responds in kind. Later, we see him leading an organisation of keyboard warriors paid to attack the political opponents of Hindutva.
“We’re now heading into the AI era or perhaps we are already in it,” Kandasamy says. “We should always remember that these new technologies, whether it’s social media or large language models, they become tools of political power and political capture in the end.”
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.