“A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth

Seth’s epic of nearly 1,500 pages centers around a few related families from Brahmpur and Calcutta, just after India’s Partition. The plot deals with religion, politics, gender roles, cultural traditions, and, particularly, family obligations. As India struggles with the birth pangs of independence, societal mores are changing in fits and starts. Socialists and Hindu nationalists contend with the Congress Party’s stranglehold on power. Those Muslims who did not leave for Pakistan try to integrate themselves into the new fractured society. Upper-caste Hindus assert their place replacing the British. Students protest for rights on campus and jobs after. Dalit cobblers strike for better terms with bazaar middlemen. Muslim sharecroppers are fitfully given new rights through land reform legislation. Zamindari feudal lords struggle to find new vocations, income, and purpose. Traditional Urdu songs and Bengali poems vie for attention with motion pictures, dance clubs, and pop records. The younger generation asserts new prerogatives, all the while careful to still defer to their elders.

Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s quest to find a suitable boy for her youngest daughter, Lata, propels the thrust of this novel. Mehra is an old school widow, devout in her prayers and completely devoted to the future of her children. She does not believe her youngest daughter should act in plays with boys, not to mention marry someone from another caste or, god-forbid, a Muslim or foreigner. Her children—Arun, a “brown-white” at a covented British Calcutta firm, Varun, a struggling student who drinks Shamshu and studies horse racing more than his books, Savita, the loyal daughter already fobbed off into an arranged marriage, and Lata, the rebellious student of English literature—all try her patience in varying ways. But for hundreds of pages at a time the Mehras fade into the background as the plot meanders through the stories of the Kapoors, Mehra in-laws from Savita’s marriage, whose patriarch is a local Congress cabinet minister, the Nawab of Baitar’s family, the local Muslim feudal lords, the Chatterjis, an eccentric Brahmo aristocratic family from Calcutta, who are in-laws of Mrs. Mehra through Arun, Saeeda Bai, a courtesan singer of alluring beauty who plies her trade for the best of Brahmpur society, Haresh Khanna, a shoe factory foreman from Delhi educated in England, Kabir Durrani, a history student more fond of cricket and poetry, Abdur Rasheed, a pious college tutor from a rustic Zamindari family, and many, many more. Even Nehru makes a few cameo appearances. As all of these diverse lives interconnect, Seth paints a picture of the tight web of relations within the upperclass Brahmpur community. But as characters strive to work for better futures for themselves their pasts are never far behind. “Look at history. It’s always been the same. The old men cling to their power and their beliefs, which admit all their worst vices but exclude the least fault and strangle the smallest innovation of the young. Then, thank God, they die, and can do no more harm. But by then we, the young, are old, and strive to do what little mischief they left undone.”