Discovery of India in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
In this continuing series of articles on the representation of
India’s prominent Indian writers, this week’s column examines how Vikram
Seth invents India in his masterpiece. The column is heavily drawn on a
paper entitled 'The Invention of India' in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
by Neelam Srivastava.
Vikram Seth’s novel is, at its core, a love story, set against the
post-independent India. This over 1470 page novel: the tale of Lata’s –
and her mother’s; Mrs. Rupa Mehra's – attempt to find a suitable boy,
through love or exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, the
novel, alternatively examines national political issues in the period
between Independence and the first independent election of 1956. Issues
such as inter-sectarian animosity, the status of lower caste peoples
such as the Jatav, land reform, academic affairs among other things have
figured in the long narrative.
The story commences in the fictional town of Brahmpur, located on the
Ganges between Banares and Patna. Brahmpur, along with Calcutta, Delhi,
Kanpur and other Indian cities, forms a colourful backdrop for the
emerging stories.
Lata is a 19-year-old college girl, vulnerable, but determined to
have her own way and not be influenced by her strong mother and
opinionated brother, Arun. Her story revolves around the choice she is
forced to make between her suitors, Kabir, Haresh, and Amit.
Significance of the novel lies in the myriad of socio-political
issues that it covers in the post colonial India. Prominent issues
covered in the novel include Hindu-Muslim conflict, abolition of the
Zamindari system, India’s land reforms and empowerment of Muslim women.
Formation of national identity
The period against which the novel is set, was the 1950s was an
important period in the formation of national identity of India. Neelam
Srivastava writes: “The fifties were a very important moment in the
consolidation of modern Indian identity, when ‘disobedience, resistance
and revolt were carefully dismantled and oppositional energies were
consciously diffused as the nationalist struggle was closed off and the
nation-state began to establish its dominance’ (Tharu and Lalita
1993:44).”
Many of the myths and conceptions of the nation that still survive
today, were established and circulated during Nehru’s India. In some
respect, the novel provides a cultural interpretation of the 1950s
nationhood based on liberal progressivism and Seth’s strong endorsement
of the progression. In other words, Seth’s secularism is articulated
within the boundaries of the nation-state. Compared to Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children (1981), which questions the viability of the very
concept of nation, Seth works within an idea of the nation, and is
concerned with more specific issues of making it work, such as communal
harmony and economic improvement.
As a parallel effect of the Nehru administration’s economic
development policies in the 1950s, the body of the state absorbed the
nation. The Indian state assumed full responsibility for the
marginalised groups that had not been the beneficiaries of the
transition from colonialism to independence.
The important factor which distinguishes Seth’s India portrayed in A
Suitable Boy compared with Midnight’s Children of Salman Rushdie is that
it deals with a contentious issues in a secularist approach to
nationhood, and, in a way that would promote ethnic harmony particularly
among the Hindus and Muslims albeit in a context of growing middle class
of India.
“He writes about nation-building from the point of view of India’s
rising middle class, informed by a secularising Nehruvian ideology.
Focusing on four upper-class Indian families, three Hindu, one Muslim,
the author makes no attempt to hide the essentially bourgeois viewpoint
of the narrative, which is contained in part within a progressive
teleology of the nation. Many events in the book can be seen as symbolic
moments in the nation-forming process, characterised by gradual, rather
than violent, social change.
The land reform acts implemented by the Congress Party during the
1950s are evoked in the novel by the fictional Zamindari Abolition Act,
which aims to abolish feudal land-holdings in the invented state of
Purva Pradesh. It is portrayed as the cause of one of the most important
social and economic transformations of post-Independence India. In the
narrative it symbolises the passage from feudalism to the rise of the
middle class, traditionally seen as a crucial moment of transition in
the development of a modern industrialised state,” Writes Srivastava.
In some respect, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is similar to
Gamperaliya by Martin Wickremasinghe as it codifies the passage of
transition from feudalism to middle class in India. As Gamperaliya
provides a national narrative in a seminal phase of the contemporary Sri
Lankan socio-political history and Seth provides a national narrative
which defined the contours of the modern nation state of India.
A Suitable Boy as a national narrative
Srivastava highlights: “In A Suitable Boy, the nation is an
all-inclusive concept that moves from the individual, to the locality,
to the regional state, and arrives to embrace the entire nation. Seth
invents a state, Purva Pradesh, whose regional, specifically North
Indian dimension is stretched to make it representative of India in its
totality. At the beginning of the novel, Lata Mehra, one of the central
characters of the novel, is daydreaming during her sister’s wedding,
musing on the small pyre in the middle of the ceremony.
The author constructs an organic idea of India through the microcosm
of Brahmpur, the capital of Purva Pradesh, in the tradition of R.K.
Narayan’s invented South Indian town, Malgudi. Seth claims to have based
Brahmpur on a mixture of Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Benares, Patna, and
Ayodhya. The move to create typical, rather than specific, North Indian
localities recalls the process of nation-forming itself, where it is
seen as an idealization and selection of historical events and religious
and linguistic traditions, made in order to construct an organic
ideology which can claim a national representativeness.”
A Suitable Boy opening and closing with a wedding, though this novel
is supposedly the story of a Hindu family trying to find a suitable
husband for their younger daughter, it represents a multiple realities
of India, and remains as a secular and realistic narrative of India.
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