A Début Novel Captures the Start of India’s Modi Era

E pluribus unum might be the proper political aspiration for a large and multifarious country, but when it comes to the novel people tend to applaud something closer to the opposite. The novel gets idealized as a liberal agora, a meeting place of competing voices, the space for a special kind of evenhanded “dialogism.” Joseph Brodsky praised Dostoyevsky for his ability to play devil’s advocate against his own Christian faith: religious readers, making their way through Dostoyevsky’s many-voiced fiction, might not become atheists, Brodsky said, but they finish his novels uttering “the creed’s dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.” Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was defended on similar grounds in 1989, after receiving its terminal review by the Ayatollah Khomeini. “Ours is an age of competitive languages,” the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote, ten days after the fatwa was issued. “The novel is the privileged arena where language in conflict can meet.”

This is true of Dostoyevsky, and true, also, of the Rushdie of “The Satanic Verses.” But it’s an idea mainly honored in the breach. Most contemporary novels are too narrow to allow for the truly dialogical: autofiction is a bedroom rather than an arena. Ours is an age of crazily competitive languages, yet, paradoxically, this renders us politically squeamish. For who enjoys being yelled at? Even novelists whose lenses are turned outward seem to lose their nerve when it comes to the risky art of extending the principle of charity, of endowing one’s political opponents with presumptive reason and comprehended motive. Not so the Indian writer Devika Rege, whose first novel, “Quarterlife” (Liveright), is a fearless achievement in multifarious listening.

Rege’s book is largely set in Mumbai, and takes readers back to 2014, when Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party, the B.J.P., ousted the establishment Indian National Congress, ending a long postwar period of one-party (and often one-family) dominance. Rege uses three very different protagonists, along with a large gallery of smaller roles, to explore the ideological ferment of that moment: a new Prime Minister promising to end corruption and “clean the holy Ganga”; young capitalists and ambitious amoralists eager to join a shiny new economy; fatigued old élitists and Brahmans willing to risk a vote on the intriguing strongman; fervent religious nationalists drunk on the idea of Making India Hindu Again; assorted skeptics alarmed at the religious demagoguery, suspicious of “the fanatics who changed Bombay’s name to Mumbai,” or convinced that the landslide election represents “the revenge of the plebs.”

Rege belittles none of these voices as she sets them at play and, finally, at war. She writes only from within her characters’ heads, in a close-third-person present tense that seems to confine the novelist to the job of hospitable stenographer. Short sections, each headed with a character’s name, proceed in nervous rotation. The effect is of an urgent, vital orchestration.

Naren Agashe is the first of the three central protagonists to appear in the story. Originally from Mumbai, well educated and wellborn, he’s badged with normative American successes—the Wharton School, a stint at Goldman Sachs. Naren, who’s in his early thirties, is a free-floating capitalist; he can do a “global Indian accent” when it’s called for. But after the crash of 2008 he soured on America, or it soured on him, and he has convinced himself that the Indian election is the right augury. So he is going home. “India won her political freedom in 1947,” he says, “and her economic freedom in 1991, but it wasn’t until this election that our political and business classes got aligned. And just in time.”

He speaks these words to Amanda Harris Martin, a friend from his university days, who is travelling with him to Mumbai. She has won an India Impact Fellowship, partly enabled by Naren, which will involve her photographing an impoverished section of the city. Amanda is blue-blooded and high-minded: one side of her family arrived at Cape Cod in 1643, and moved to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1743. She takes seriously a sentence on the tombstone of Willa Cather, who is buried in the town: “That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.” Privately, Naren disdains Amanda’s blanched do-gooding adventurism (“the usual white thing, coming for the poverty”), but he is haunted by Cather’s epitaph—which might well be the novel’s epigraph. Most of Rege’s characters, innocently and less innocently, are hoping to be dissolved into something great.

Not least Naren’s twenty-four-year-old brother, Rohit, the third of the central trio, and the most important. Rohit is the somewhat prodigal son—his life the comfortably wayward negative to Naren’s procession of achievements. A onetime druggie and band manager, he’s a club-goer who enjoys the tight community of his university friends. Now, apparently for want of anything better to do, he has started, with some of those friends, a video-production company. At first sight, Rohit appears as elastic and apolitical as Naren. The Agashe brothers are ideological opportunists; perhaps they, like their well-off parents, feel that after years of stasis and corruption they had no choice but to back Modi. (Their cousin Kedar, a leftish investigative journalist, pointedly disagrees with the Agashe family logic. “There was a choice,” he tells them. “It was between weak governance and fascism.”) While Naren has found his calling in capital, rudderless Rohit is ripe for radicalization. Recently, he has started to judge his Mumbai friends for their thoughtless hostility to the election result. He begins to see his old gang as a frivolous clique.

One of the novel’s achievements is its commitment to patience, to a wise narrative gradualism. Slowly, we see Rohit fill up his entitled emptiness with borrowed fervor. Intrigued and provoked by the rising Hindu atavism, he goes on what he posts as a #rootstour, a long journey to the Konkan coast, to the Agashe family’s ancestral village, and finally to Pune, a modern economic force and an ancient jewel of the Marathas. (Rege was born in Pune.) Easily swayed, Rohit begins to bathe in newfound Hindu “authenticity.” Momentously, it is on this “authenticity trip” that he meets Omkar Khaire, a young filmmaker who speaks poor English and basic Marathi, whose face is “brown and browy, the kind one has seen innumerable times behind counters or in queues at bus stops.” Omkar is poor, from a violent background; he describes himself as “backward caste, class, everything.” He is also a Hindu nationalist, the first Rohit has ever met. There is a touch, Rege hints, of noblesse oblige in the way the urban sophisticate takes the rough-edged provincial under his wing. “People hear nationalist and they think fundamentals,” Omkar protests. “Please, we are not the Taliban. We believe in reform, because how you can have unity if all castes and ranks are fighting? But reform is not meaning total rejection of our culture. . . . If I may be saying one thing. As per Supreme Court, Hindu culture is including four religions: Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Hinduism. All are arising south of the Himalayas, all are responses to the Vedas, so this is our way of life. Christianity and Islam are Western concepts.”

“Quarterlife”—the title has to do with the relative youth of its principals—is a rich, allusive, sometimes demanding novel. In a big, ideologically equilibrious composition of this sort, the variety of different viewpoints could resemble the wrong kind of orchestration: a TV show’s market-tested kind, where diversity is just the formal or political requirement for efficient entertainment. An abstract description of the book’s major and minor characters might sound rigged in this way. There’s a young gay Parsi man who suffers the abuse of his bullyingly traditional father. A Muslim businesswoman who wears high heels and drinks Martinis, and a Hindu man—Gyaan, a video-production colleague of Rohit’s—who is in love with her. But what the writer then does with this assemblage is everything, and Rege’s seriousness of purpose runs like an electrical wire through the book. Diversity is here the means of inquiry, inextricable from the questions the novel asks of diversity. What might it mean, in a very large, very diverse, religiously excitable country, to dissolve oneself into “something complete and great”? Can it be done without violence or discrimination? And what might “authenticity” mean in a culture as variegated as modern India’s? Or in a globalized India, where, as one character puts it while appraising a Sofitel menu that boasts ten different cuisines, “these days everything has everything in it.”

The objection might be made that most novels are essentially dialogical. What novelist would want to crack a unitary whip? In two ways, though, Rege’s novel is unusual in contemporary fiction. Its narrative liberalism is constantly testing itself by the hospitality it affords illiberal voices. Rohit doesn’t find Omkar threatening, and Rege extends to him a similar curiosity and comprehension. Second, its classic amplitude of form allows for the slow and steady examination not only of these illiberal voices but also, more interestingly, of a variety of quasi-liberal voices that emerge as troublingly adjacent to their more obviously intolerant “competition.” The Broadway or TV version of dialogism simply involves opposites clashing. It’s soluble Manichaeism. Carlos Fuentes’s privileged arena for language in conflict may in fact be merely a loftier, postmodern version of this kind of thing. Rege’s achievement, by contrast, is to redefine the dialogical as a kind of tight counterpoint, the novel asking us to discriminate between semitones rather than between wide octaves. She shows us that politics, properly understood, is more complex than competition.

Omkar, for instance, is subtler and more intelligent than some of his Hindu-nationalist allies. But for Gyaan, Rohit’s colleague, people like Omkar are just fanatics, and Rohit has become “a Nazi apologist.” “It’s nothing new,” Gyaan chides Rohit. “A young man goes in search of his roots and finds his politics. But you landed on the wrong side, and I’m wondering what happened to your famous bullshit meter!” So Gyaan is the ideological “competition” for Omkar. But what of Rohit and Naren? They belong to a wealthy, globalized class, and are insulated in ways that Gyaan, in love with the Muslim businesswoman, cannot be. Naren certainly looks down on Omkar, but also feels that he can comfortably accommodate him: though an atheist, Naren agrees that India has always been a Hindu nation. “It’s not because I worship cows,” he suavely puts it. “But I appreciate my culture has value in bringing people together.” Besides, capitalism will prove a salve: “Once we get rich, people won’t be so touchy.” Rohit, though, hears only what he wants to from Omkar and Omkar’s friends. So he isn’t terribly troubled when Omkar talks of an Indian “unity” that is to be achieved via one majority religion (even if it has four branches), or when Omkar offers up the preposterous idea that Islam is a “Western concept” alien to India.

Indeed, Omkar has a pitch for Rohit. He has made a short demo film of the festival Ganeshotsav, a ten-day celebration of the Hindu god Ganesha, and now he wants to shoot something longer about it. “Quarterlife” culminates in a remarkable set piece, an extended depiction of this festival, as it winds its way through Mumbai toward the sea, and of Omkar’s attempt to film it. Across thirty-seven pages, Rege puts us inside the seething crowd, roving among the viewpoints of many participants, named and unnamed, educated and humble. Rohit, Omkar, and Amanda are all present, down there on the street, each with his or her own distinct motive. For Amanda, it’s curiosity; for Rohit, the novelty of belonging; for Omkar, devotion. Naren is not present, nor are Rohit’s parents and old friends: they seem to look on in haughty consternation. The scene has an air of fatal inevitability. Something has been opened that cannot be closed—or that can be closed only after bloodletting and sacrifice. We end Rege’s novel still inside the bewildered, close-quartered exhaustion of its characters and their overlapping forms of attention, aware that some strange ideological fever has risen and crested, a fever whose enthusiasts and victims barely understood it, but whose pulses and spikes have been lucidly charted by the diagnostic acuity of this talented first novelist. ♦