BackOpinion | From midnight to matchmaking: Fiction reflects the truth of India
Great novels foresaw Indian modernity as aspirational and assertive rather than liberal and open
PremiumYou too will marry a boy I choose," Rupa Mehra said, partly out of confidence, partly out of hope, as she watched her daughter Lata, all of 19, at the wedding reception of her older daughter, Savita. Widowed eight years ago, Mrs Mehra had the responsibility of seeing her four children settled, and Lata was the next in line.
India was a new country; it had only recently gained independence, and the wounds of the Partition were still fresh. Gandhi had been assassinated, and refugees were trying to build new lives. Jawaharlal Nehru was forging a nation out of the debris of two centuries of colonial subjugation. Zamindars were reluctantly coming to terms with the uncertainty haunting their feudal holdings. The first parliamentary elections were imminent, marking the biggest exercise of universal franchise ever (something that happens each time India votes, since China isn’t about to turn democratic). A new beginning: What would freedom do to Lata, and what would she, studying literature, do with her freedom?
What was she thinking?
Over the 1,349 pages that followed, Vikram Seth’s sprawling saga, A Suitable Boy took us on a journey through the Gangetic plains. I had read the novel when it was published in 1993 on a 42-hour train journey from Singapore to Bangkok. I kept turning the pages, keen to know what happens next, as three vastly different men—the handsome Kabir Durrani, the soft-spoken Amit Chatterjee, and the practical and jovial Haresh Khanna—pursued Lata. Who among them will be the suitable boy? And in the end, who would decide—Mrs Mehra or Lata?
As A Suitable Boy premiers this weekend on BBC, it is worth reflecting on the novel for three reasons. One, the time A Suitable Boy invokes is fading from memory, and if India’s present custodians have their way, it may never return. Two, it is probably a coincidence that a series on how the great Indian big fat wedding is planned has just premiered on Netflix. And three, A Suitable Boy offers a sunnier vision of India than the darker India we see in another blockbuster novel that deals with that time, “not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially", to borrow Jawaharlal Nehru’s phrase. And that is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published a dozen years earlier, but bringing us till the late 1970s, and not stopping mid-sentence in the early 1950s, as A Suitable Boy does.
Seth’s novel ends as the Indian story is beginning—recall the song Prem Dhawan wrote for the 1960 film, Hum Hindustani (We Indians), Chhodo kal ki baatein, kal ki baat purani, naye daur mein likhenge mil kar nayi kahani (Leave aside old tales, those tales are all hoary; in the new era we shall write together a new story).
Stepping away from the past is important, but tradition matters, as Tevye sings in Fiddler on the Roof: liberalism and broadmindedness are Nehruvian virtues, but these have limits. Lata ends up marrying not the dashing cricketer who is Muslim, nor the dreamy poet, but a practical man who will keep her happy and not disrupt the order of things. “We adjust," in the words of Sima Taparia, the matchmaker in the Netflix series, Indian Matchmaking.
A Suitable Boy is an elegant still life of an era now disappearing. The time seems gentler, but that’s what nostalgia does— it reminds us of the past without the pain. There is a religious dispute, a riot, a murder, and a long section that reveals harrowing poverty. We don’t know then that, if left unchecked, these could presage the Babri Masjid dispute; massacres like in Nellie in 1983, Delhi in 1984, and Gujarat in 2002; or debt-ridden farmers taking their lives, or workers walking home after the recent lockdown invoking Partition-era images, fending for themselves, being atmanirbhar, a macabre interpretation of what Nehru may have meant when he spoke of self-reliance. You are on your own.
Brasher India is more assertive and yet fickle; more prosperous and yet unable to shake off traditions; seeking better tomorrows without discarding the burdens of yesterday or today—the prejudices of caste, faith and colour. That’s what we encounter in Indian Matchmaking. Nadia is American, “looks" Indian, but is from Guyana— will she pass the caste test? Who would willingly have gone to Guyana in the 1850s? The joke is not on the matchmaker; she observes, she comments. The joke is on those who have acquired the trappings of modernity without the requisite outlook. Those who can afford a Rolex may not know the value of time.
That brings us to the dark present that Rushdie anticipates—an India where midnight’s grandchildren are as old as Lata. Rupa Mehra saw stability in Haresh, even if Lata was wistful about Amit, but no baba, not Kabir, he’s not our type!
But then what of Saleem, who on that midnight was probably Shiva, the child with whom he was exchanged at Dr Narlikar’s nursing home—out of malice, or was it a mistake, or was it fate? Who knows? Bleakness followed, then wars, and then the Emergency, with midnight’s children getting handcuffed to destiny, “unable to live or die in peace".
Is truth stranger than fiction? Or is fiction real?
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York. Read Salil’s previous Mint columns at www.livemint.com/saliltripathi
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