A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

I’ve neglected this blog along with everything else in my life due to a period of very high workload and I should have returned to it by now, but I guess I got distracted. Thankfully, I’m forced back by Goodreads’ character limitation; so here is a humongous review of a humongous book. Enjoy! (I’ll try to add all other reviews I’ve posted on GR since November 2020 later.)

After 13 months I’m finally done with this 1500-pager. What absolutely splendid time we had together! I’ve rarely enjoyed a book so much in the last decade or so. I put it down for weeks at a time, reading other things, and went back to it like to a favourite spot. I built a relationship with its stories and characters that is rather hard to achieve with most books these days.

The novel is nothing short of a masterpiece of contemporary literary realism. The world it conjures up, made up of equal parts real and imaginary places and events, is the richest I’ve encountered so far in literature. What expert knowledge of 1950s India, what unerring insight into its newly minted sense of independent self, what gentle and wise understanding of the collective psyche of this brand-new modern nation.

The stories over the 1500 pages cover a year and a half in the lives of hundreds of characters, with 35-40 major ones whose personal journeys intersect, bounce off and then either go on their separate ways or come around to merge in the end. The overarching story has a beautiful harmony to it, flowing into smooth peaks and troughs of drama, mundane and high-octane events, constitutional law minutia and torrid emotional journeys; framed as it is by two weddings with identical exchanges between mother and child in need to be set up with a suitable boy or girl. As it is so sweeping, there inevitably are long boring passages with blow-by-blow descriptions of cricket matches or court arguments in favour of and against the constitutionality of proposed legislation for land redistribution, or a languid retelling of the Ramayana as recreated by the characters in a celebratory parade with costumes, song, and acting, or an expert-sounding primer in classical Indian music. But those afford the setting and story unmatched depth and believability, fully immersing the reader into the here and now of 1950s India, whether the relevant plotline takes place in a Muslim-majority village, Calcutta, a university campus, an ancient nawabi palace, or the local legislative authority of the made-up state of Purva Pradesh and its capital city of Brahmpur.

The overarching plot concerns Lata, a 19/20-year-old student whose mother is searching for a suitable match for her while she falls in love with a fellow student who is as far from suitable as possible. The other major arc that runs parallel to this one involves Maan, the brother of Lata’s brother-in-law, whose own love story is similarly outside the boundaries of acceptability, but also of respectability and even decency. Around these two threads dozens others also unspool and follow their own paths to their logical resolutions in a decidedly unhurried, comprehensive and thus utterly satisfying way: Brahmpur’s celebrity courtesan and musician Saeeda Bai and her secluded sister and numerous renowned customers; Lata’s sister Savita and her husband Pran (Maan’s brother) and their perfect marital happiness; the sisters’ mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra (who would be the main character, if one had to be picked out), and their brothers, Arun and Varun, living under the same roof in Calcutta with Arun’s glamorous and higher-caste wife Meenakshi; Meenakshi’s own delightfully quirky, free-spirited and close-knit family, the Chatterjis, made of poets, dreamers, musicians and one sober lawyer; Maan and Pran’s parents – state Revenue Minister Mahesh Kapoor and his quiet, hardworking, unassuming wife who meaningfully isn’t given a name, and their sister Veena with her husband, 9-year-old mathematical genius of a son and rather oppressive mother-in-law; the Muslim family of the Nawab Sahib of Baitar: his two sons, Firoz (best friend and once-lover of Maan) and Imtiaz; and Haresh Khanna, an extraordinarily passionate shoemaker and salesman with a tragic love story in his past and a future marked by unrelenting ambition and love for his work. Dozens of other stories develop in the background or alongside the major ones, highlighting vivid characters, tracing uneasy philosophical dilemmas and internal struggles with an assured hand, and enhancing the novel’s richness and heart.

The author has a remarkably cordial attitude towards his characters, I’d even call it parental of sorts – he’s unfailingly gentle with them, even when he reproves their flaws or irresponsible actions or lapses of judgement. He loves to tease them lovingly, in the way we do our friends whom we love unconditionally but whose follies still amuse us. I noted some reviewers have found this a bit much, too cutesy or sentimental; I personally love it. I’ve read quite a bit of postcolonial literature, chiefly Indian, and it tends to take a harsh, ironic, exoticizing, or in any case a markedly sober view of the respective culture it explores; it’s a breath of fresh air to me to have a luxuriously epic in scale novel in English about India that is nevertheless kind and warm in its approach to people, place and culture. There’s no mocking, all criticism is meted out with double the measure of compassion or at the very least refusal to really judge, and there is profound, heartfelt understanding oozing from every page for the time, the place, and the characters that people this sweeping paean to life in all its ordinary glory and wonderous mundanity. There definitely is a good deal of drama, the author tackles some subjects that loom large on the page, there’s tragedy, violence, passion, intrigue, suspense; but it never veers into melodrama, nor does any of it ring shallow, despite the light overall tone of the book.

As can be expected from a work of this size, <i>A Suitable Boy</i> tackles a great variety of topics and what is even more impressive, it does so with a considerable degree of expertise and insight, even down to the technical level. Those include:

• local politics and law – with detailed scenes of daily operations in the state legislature and the interpersonal conflicts and power struggles of local politicians;
• central politics and young democracy – with Jawaharlal Nehru as one of the characters and an insightful analysis of post-Independence idealism hurtling towards cynicism and corruption, as exemplified in the machinations within the very party of Nehru and Gandhi, the Congress, once a beacon of the Independence movement, now devolved into a vehicle for personal ambition and gain. The first General Election of the new Indian state, held in 1951, is given plenty of page space and thought and used to explore the origins of political powerplays in a democracy that is new, tenuous and ripe for exploitation;
• religion – apart from the scenes of daily worship and religious festivities peppering the lives of the characters as the seasons change, the novel is permeated with the painful conflict between the two faiths, fresh post-Partition. There are families split after Independence, with half remaining in Pakistan; others had to flee and leave everything behind. There is a truly horrifying, heart-pounding scene where these simmering hostilities, continuously felt but expressed mostly in words so far, escalate and ultimately culminate in barbaric violence with lynching in the streets of Brahmpur, stoked by a Muslim and a Hindu festival of very different tones that happen to coincide in 1951. Two of the main characters find themselves on the path of the bloodthirsty mob lynching people on sight, which is one of the most suspenseful several pages I’ve read in quite some time. And this isn’t even the only blood-soaked religious event in the novel, as it features a gruesomely detailed stampede at a Hindu pilgrimage, the Pul Mela, on the banks of the Ganga;
• academic life and politics in the fictional University of Brahmpur – the way a senior professor tries to dismiss or hire new faculty staff based on personal preference or possible future benefits for himself shows the kind of inbuilt, everyday corruption that slowly but surely undermines even the best laid social structures. There’s also an amusing minor plotline about the curriculum (pro and anti Joyce) that highlights the natural hang-ups of a traditional culture even in the context of academic endeavours;
• caste – inevitable I guess; Dalits make very minor appearances in this story about the new Indian middle class, but they do appear and we get a (rather heartrending though not at any point melodramatic) peek into their point of view. There are less serious caste chafings between the khatris and the brahmans but those are played as unimportant enough as to allow line-crossing for marriage (albeit reluctantly);
• class – caste is just one of the hierarchies in Indian society; social class is no less important or impactful and here, in 1950-1952, it’s especially prominent as it’s in a state of flux, as seen in the major subplot of the Zamindari Bill written and proposed by Revenue Minister Mahesh Kapoor that seeks to bring the new country over from what are essentially medieval fiefs to a modern concept of landowning in an equitable (at least on paper) society. The bill threatens large landowners, such as the Nawab Sahib of Baitar, who’ve made their fortunes and subsequently taken their place at the top of the class system through inherited lands; it threatens to shock the incumbent class system to the core and is naturally fiercely opposed by the influential rich. As a bonus, it provides personal drama, too, as the architect of the bill and one of the most prominent zamindars who stands to lose the bulk of his wealth under it are close friends and former freedom fighter comrades;
• cricket – these were the only places I sort of scanned the pages. I couldn’t make sense of the sentences anyway;
• trade – two of the characters are in the shoe trade, which is somewhat contentious as it involves dirty leather work. The author finds the time and apparently has the knowledge to explore both the technicalities of actually making a pair of shoes, from the tanning process to the finished product, and the unfair, even brutal trade chain starting with the desperately poor jatavs who process the leather through the middle-men who profit off their labour to the major chains who profit off of everyone else down the chain;
• city life – with superb descriptions of both real Calcutta and fictional Brahmpur and deep dives into social etiquette, academic life, the religious calendar, social clubs, work culture in the big companies of the time, leisure activities, communal spaces, modernisation and westernisation, social and religious tensions expressed in the logic of urban spaces and invisible boundaries, female spaces and their expansion in a rapidly changing culture, battles between holdovers of old times and the pressure of new ideals, etc.;
• village life – admittedly, to me these were some of the more boring parts of the story, not to mention rather depressing, because village life seemed to be cruel and perennially precarious;
• the internal world of characters – well obviously, it wouldn’t be a novel without it;
• the arts – the heart and soul of the novel I thought. Even though the author shows impressively in-depth understanding in a wide array of subjects (law, cricket, shoemaking, land distribution, electioneering, education, Islam, Hinduism, horticulture, mathematics, etc.), nowhere does his prose shine brighter or feel more authentic than in the places dealing with music, architecture, mythology, and especially poetry. More on this below! Suffice to say poetry is not just one of the topic or themes of the novel, it’s an integral part of the language and of the plot, and it’s one of the main instruments for advancing the plot in both major plotlines;
• marriage – this is actually the anchoring theme of the novel. You can’t really miss it, as it’s proclaimed in the title, in the very first line, and in the framing of this entire behemoth of a novel, settled as it is between two weddings:

Lata’s coming of age, which provides one half of the skeleton of the novel, is marked by her choice of a husband among three contenders. When I saw people were bewildered by her final decision, I immediately realised whom she was going to choose – and it made complete sense in context. The clue is right there in the very first sentence of the book; that sentence may be a catalyst for conflict and rebellion and it may look like an obstacle for the heroine to overcome, but in the end, it proves a prophecy, a reaffirmation of the deep-rooted cultural norms governing and securing the happiness in the private realm for Indians. There are other major, major clues throughout: the entire time Lata is oscillating between the three men who want her, she has two very different models of marriage in her own family, the marriages of her two siblings, and it couldn’t be more obvious which one – Savita’s arranged marriage with a (socially) suitable boy selected by the mother or Arun’s love match with the (personality-wise) suitable girl who is a social superior – is the real success. Lata reflects on it herself on numerous occasions. The word „suitable“ functions as both a clue and a red herring; when looking at the three candidates, they are all suitable in different interpretations of the word and the answer lies in working out which one the author endorses. Kabir is suitable because Lata loves him, he is an instant, instinctual match, they connect immediately. I think he represents the Kama aspect of life – desire, going after what one wants. Amit, the Calcutta poet and her brother’s brother-in-law, is suitable in probably the most conventional western meaning: he shares her interests, they are a close match in terms of personality, and he actually sees her, understands her, senses how she’s feeling and what she needs. They have an intellectual connection that Lata thoroughly enjoys and finds comfort in in times of strife. I personally was rooting for him, but then, I *am* a westerner. Rom-coms purport to present a universal idea of love and partnership, but they are in fact extremely culturally specific, showcasing a concrete conception of monogamous heterosexual romantic love dating back to 19th-century Europe. We believe we have knowledge of universal concepts but more often than not what we deem fundamental to human nature is just something we’ve never encountered in a different context. Love, marriage and partnership have a very different historical and cultural foundations – and justifications – in India and it wouldn’t have rung true if Lata’s choice had followed the European logic of romance. By the way, this is mirrored in the other main plotline in the novel, Maan’s, whose wholesale pursuit of Kama, passionate love, proves to be his undoing, with tragic consequences that go beyond his personal life to echo throughout his community. So, when you put together the „Indian“ meaning of suitable (suitable in terms of caste and family compatibility, and sanctioned by the parents), the two opposing models for marriage within Lata’s circle, the devastating implications of abandoning all social and familial responsibility in favour of personal desires, and Lata’s own reflections on her mother’s unrelenting care for her children and of Lata’s own place within her family and how it provides both the environment and the means of her happiness and her identity, her choice becomes obvious. There is no conventional happy ending, and Lata herself remains uncertain of her choice until the end, but the reasons behind it cannot be more clearly articulated or better founded. It’s another strength of this book that it doesn’t pander, and it remains true to its internal logic as determined in no small part by the specific setting.

The title has another seriously difficult function, too – it singles out, among the many, equally detailed and equally important themes or topics of the book, one, elevating it as *the* theme of the novel – the theme of marriage and all its implications: family life, which spills into community life, and the ordinary course of life in general. Marriage serves as a double connector, both horizontal and vertical: it links various parts of the community, strengthening its cohesion, and it links past to present and future through new life and passing down values, traditions, and wisdom from generation to generation. As such, marriage is a stand-in for life itself, which is ultimately what this lovely novel sets out to explore to admirable success.

It’s trite to say that a book set in mid-century India deals with the ebb and flow of the old and the new, but it does – among many other things. As can be seen from the list above, the author leaves no stone unturned in his leisurely exploration of the infancy of modern India – the blueprint for its mature sense of self, the footing for its later expansion and settling into a recognisable, no matter how multifaceted, identity. Neither wins out entirely, but in a very Indian fashion, the new is absorbed into the old and the old is integrated into the new, yielding a homogenic cultural synthesis. Lata’s choice of husband is emblematic of this: while she plays with the idea of severing the tethers to essentially her cultural identity, she ultimately chooses to remain within their bounds because that is the environment whence happiness is born – or at least the sustainable, reliable sort of happiness she witnesses in her sister Savita’s married life. This is actually a motif I’ve seen in other English-language Indian works, too: briefly rebelling, only to come back to the fold of sturdy, familiar, lived-in Indianness. Elsewhere, the old yields to the new – the Nawab Sahib’s resignation with the new political and social order edging him out of any meaningful importance; Mahesh Kapoor learns the hard way that a wife is not a mere appendage to his social persona; Haresh abandons Anglicized spellings and chewing paan; both sisters pursue professional lives alongside their marriages.

And finally, a few words about the language, as it’s used as a powerful tool in the construction of the entire thing. Vikram Seth is first and foremost a poet, and boy, does it show! First of all, the thanks at the start of the book *and* the contents are in rhyme, which really tickled me. The text itself is full of various forms of poetry, as the author is obviously looking for any excuse to pop in a few rhyming lines: one of the four major families in the novel are in the habit of communicates through couplets („Foreign woman is a vulture,/goes against our ancient culture“; „Marry one, and what’s my fate?/Every Mehra on my plate“, etc.); there are several poetry readings through which Seth, with obvious glee, produces laughably bad, youthfully uneven, and great modern verse; one of the central couple establish their connection on the basis of a (fictional) medieval poet writing in urdu; one prominent character sings ghazals – unrhyming two-liners; one of the main characters is a poet and the reader is treated to quite a bit of his output; conservative older characters recite excerpts of various holy books rendered in poetic English; and even the political platitudes and battle cries during the elections are translated in rhyme! And that’s all besides the poetic bits hidden in the prose: subtle rhymes in characters’ speech, frequent alliteration, phonetic games, meaningful character names, and general playing with the English language as if it were a very pliable toy. The author’s cordial relationship with and masterful use of language to poetic effect is obvious and the prose is truly a pleasure to read – and to translate out loud in Bulgarian as I go.

I hope I have time to return to this treasure in the future. I could skip the boring procedural passages then and just enjoy the dramatic bits and character studies.