A richly satisfying re-read

~ A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth ~

It’s been almost three decades since I, and the world, read and loved this novel. Most beloved books get re-read from time to time, but the sheer size (literally. 4.2 lbs on my kitchen scale) of this book was rather daunting, and the time commitment seemed impossible.

Until now. Here we are, largely at home, as are most people, and the tome called from its shelf of honour.

I’m here to say that A Suitable Boy stands up wonderfully to the test of time. It is about four families over a mere eighteen months in 1950s India. That simplistic description belies its reality. The book has often been described as like a river with eddies, but I prefer to think of it as like a fractal: the closer you get, the more details emerge. Each family has many members and personalities and inter-relationships, each person’s life and thoughts and history are laid out for the reader’s pleasure, each setting is described with a marvellous specificity, and the book as a whole is both a broad and wide picture of 1950s North India.

Central to the novel is the fictional town of Brahmpur, in the fictional state of Purva Pradesh, which is lovingly described:

One day in late December, a couple of months after Savita’s wedding, when the honey-scented harsingar had still been in blossom, when the roses were in their full flush, when the sweet alyssum and sweet william had begun to bloom, when those beds of feathery-leafed larkspur were doing their best to recover in front of the tall ranks of equally-feathery-leafed but untempting cosmos, there had been a tremendous, almost torrential rainstorm.

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(I did wonder why Seth had set the novel in a fictional town, when other real-life cities like Calcutta, Kanpur and Lucknow also feature in the novel. If anyone knows, do tell.)

There are charming vignettes of small-town cultural life. At a meeting of the Brahmpur Literary Society, the pompous Dr Makhijani reads his own bombastic poetry:

Let me recall history of heroes proud

Mother-milk fed their breasts, who did not bow.

Fought they fiercely, carrying worlds of weight,

Establishing firm foundation of Indian state.

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Seth, of course, could go on in this delightful vein for hundreds of pages if he wanted, but he restrains himself and throws in just enough to keep the reader chuckling.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of this book are the characters. (I say ‘perhaps’ because so much of it is so appealing). The title refers to the search for a spouse for Lata Mehra, aged nineteen; her mother Mrs Rupa Mehra’s dialogue might be stereotypical, but she is drawn with fondness, and her concern for her daughters’ welfare is portrayed sympathetically. Lata is sensible and sheltered, but also intelligent and curious. Varun, her brother, is a mass of nerves, browbeaten by his older brother Arun. Arun is the prototypical ‘brown sahib’, sneering at the Indians who are not British enough for his taste. His wife Meenakshi (née Chatterji) is a clever, careless, self-absorbed socialite. Maan Kapoor is handsome, indulged, charming, thoughtless, dissolute, while his brother Pran is steady and caring. Firoz Khan is the ‘flower of Muslim manhood’.

As on the first read, the Chatterji family is lively and entertaining, bearing many similarities to the author’s own family, and given to rhyming couplets.

O my darling, don’t be heartless.

Hold my hand. Let us be partless.

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and the family is enthusiastically sarcastic about Amit Chatterji’s literary output.

On this reading, I found myself less invested in Lata’s choices of suitor. Her inner analysis of them never quite made sense to me, and it hardly seemed to matter whether she chose the intellectual Amit, the romantic Kabir, or the matter-of-fact Haresh. Perhaps this was the point.

Instead, I found myself engrossed in the political episodes, a microcosm of the post-Independence changes of that period and place. In 1951 the Zamindari abolition bill is pending: it will give sharecroppers a right to the lands they have farmed for generations, and reduce the power of the wealthy landowners. An apparently noble cause, yet almost immediately subverted by the landowners who updated the land records to show that they themselves had been farming the lands, leaving the sharecroppers with nothing.

Much of the socio-political detail appears quite current: in Brahmpur, a Hindu temple is being built right next to an ancient mosque, with both the Hindu and Muslim residents full of simmering tension. There are arguments in the state Parliament about the imposition of Hindi on the Urdu-speaking inhabitants. The electioneering seems sadly modern too: the analysis of vote banks by caste and creed, and in the end, unsavoury and illegal methods used to turn the vote.

‘The Muslims are behind you and behind the Congress, the scheduled castes are behind the Congress whether they are behind you or not, a few of the upper caste Hindus will go for the Jan Sangh and that other party, but they don’t form much of the population. “

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Maan’s ill-fated passion for Saeeda Bai, the enchanting singer and courtesan, and Saeeda Bai’s own past and present struggle to pull herself out of the red-light district and to protect her sister from her own lifestyle were hauntingly sad.

There are countless minor characters (as befits the fractal notion), each delicately sketched with a sense of life stories beyond their portrayal in the book. Bibbo, Saeeda Bai’s mischievous servant. Kishen Chand, Lata’s cantankerous grandfather. Hans, Kakoli Chatterji’s German beau. Baba, the village patriarch. Bhaskar, Maan’s mathematically inclined nephew. The many priests at the Pul Mela. And so on. A scale this vast lends itself to endless pleasing digression.

[Bhaskar] had decided to train himself in the metric system, although it was not yet in use anywhere in India. The advantages of this system over the British one became immediately apparent to him when he started using volume measurements. [..] For instance, if he wanted to compare the volume of Brahmpur Fort with that of Savita’s baby-to-be, he could do it instantly, without converting from cubic yards to cubic inches. It wasn’t as if that conversion presented great difficulty to Bhaskar; it was just that it was inconvenient and inelegant.

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In one section of the book, Maan spends a month in a village with his Urdu tutor Rasheed, and is exposed to the relentless feudalism at every level and the utter helplessness of those at the bottom of the hierarchy, completely dependent on their superiors.

The old woman started trembling. “Apart from our land, what do we have, Munshiji? We will starve if you take our land away. “

“Go”, said the munshi. “I have heard enough. You have your hut. Go and parch grain. Or sell your withered body. And tell your son to plough someone else’s fields”.

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Despite its physical weight, the writing in the book is simple and straightforward, yet thoughtful and deeply sensitive. It was originally published in 1993, and if its size has discouraged you in the past, technological advances since then have solved the weight problems. There’s always a pleasure to turning paper pages, but this strikes me as the perfect Kindle book — easily transportable, and allowing for searches in case you forget a name or relationship.

A silver lining to quarantine, indeed.