Three Noteworthy Novels by Young Indian Writers
The article was published in The New Indian Express, Jan 23, 2016, in a somewhat altered form. This is the original version.
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Three novels by young Indian writers, all released in the past couple of years, have convinced me that Indian writing in English faces no impending crisis. These novels deal with sexuality, sex, and companionship—as these themes pertain to teenagers, young adults, and not-so-young adults.
The first, Manan by Mohit Parikh, a debut novel, was published by Harper Collins India in 2014. Marketed as a young adult work, the paperback has illustrations by the graphic artist Urmila Shastry. However, Parikh’s tale, beginning with the eponymous fifteen year old boy attaining puberty late, is one that withstands adult reading. As one reader in Goodreads said, it feels like you’re reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as written by James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. Manan, who is shown to be living in a non-metropolitan town in India, is someone who is able to think about his social reality by dissociating its different components. In this way, he problematizes his own physiological development with the sexual awakening that is due in the society around him. At the end, Manan is left dissatisfied.
The second, A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor, is also a debut novel, first published by Hamish Hamilton in 2014. Here, a twenty year old woman gets into a sexual relationship with a twenty-eight year old man, who becomes her gateway to pleasure, to drugs, to the city of Delhi. The city, otherwise so out-of-bounds for a lone woman, is suddenly observable for Idha, the protagonist. In Kapoor’s writing, Delhi is presented in a new language, and one feels as if one is accessing a reality about the city that has never been spoken about before. The smog, the badly-lit roads, the roadside dhabas, shanties, middle class residential towers—everything comes alive. Eventually the love story degenerates into one of violence and anguish, and even that seems to have a likeness to the city it all happens in.
The third, No Direction Rome by Kaushik Barua, is the author’s second, published by Harper Collins in 2015. It is about a man named Krantik, presumably in his early thirties, who lives and works in Rome and has had a broken engagement recently. Krantik has become, in fact, a hideous Bartleby, a type to describe the lonely 21st century worker who calls himself an expat but is actually in exile. He wields an expressionistic vein of cynicism that is very entertaining to read, yet always reminding of the soul crisis that the person wielding it is in. At one point in the novel, Krantik says, “If I don’t fill my soul with wind and bluster, the world may know it’s empty and crush it like a Coke can.”
Read one after the other, these novels coalesce the unique experiences of Indian youth, where the growing up years are still remembered as exercises in being chaste, young adulthood is the period of sexual and economic liberation, and adulthood itself is a massive zone of disenchantment.
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Three novels by young Indian writers, all released in the past couple of years, have convinced me that Indian writing in English faces no impending crisis. These novels deal with sexuality, sex, and companionship—as these themes pertain to teenagers, young adults, and not-so-young adults.
The first, Manan by Mohit Parikh, a debut novel, was published by Harper Collins India in 2014. Marketed as a young adult work, the paperback has illustrations by the graphic artist Urmila Shastry. However, Parikh’s tale, beginning with the eponymous fifteen year old boy attaining puberty late, is one that withstands adult reading. As one reader in Goodreads said, it feels like you’re reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as written by James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. Manan, who is shown to be living in a non-metropolitan town in India, is someone who is able to think about his social reality by dissociating its different components. In this way, he problematizes his own physiological development with the sexual awakening that is due in the society around him. At the end, Manan is left dissatisfied.
The second, A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor, is also a debut novel, first published by Hamish Hamilton in 2014. Here, a twenty year old woman gets into a sexual relationship with a twenty-eight year old man, who becomes her gateway to pleasure, to drugs, to the city of Delhi. The city, otherwise so out-of-bounds for a lone woman, is suddenly observable for Idha, the protagonist. In Kapoor’s writing, Delhi is presented in a new language, and one feels as if one is accessing a reality about the city that has never been spoken about before. The smog, the badly-lit roads, the roadside dhabas, shanties, middle class residential towers—everything comes alive. Eventually the love story degenerates into one of violence and anguish, and even that seems to have a likeness to the city it all happens in.
The third, No Direction Rome by Kaushik Barua, is the author’s second, published by Harper Collins in 2015. It is about a man named Krantik, presumably in his early thirties, who lives and works in Rome and has had a broken engagement recently. Krantik has become, in fact, a hideous Bartleby, a type to describe the lonely 21st century worker who calls himself an expat but is actually in exile. He wields an expressionistic vein of cynicism that is very entertaining to read, yet always reminding of the soul crisis that the person wielding it is in. At one point in the novel, Krantik says, “If I don’t fill my soul with wind and bluster, the world may know it’s empty and crush it like a Coke can.”
Read one after the other, these novels coalesce the unique experiences of Indian youth, where the growing up years are still remembered as exercises in being chaste, young adulthood is the period of sexual and economic liberation, and adulthood itself is a massive zone of disenchantment.
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