A suitable choice

The 30th-anniversary edition of Vikram Seth's landmark novel A Suitable Boy is a timely reminder of India's nascent democratic aspirations

In 1951, the newly independent Indian state conducted its first general elections, described by historian Ram Guha in India After Gandhi (2007) as “a massive act of faith with few parallels in the history of mankind”. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government seemed to be in a tearing hurry to conduct elections as soon as the country gained freedom from British colonial rule in 1947. A new Constitution was made effective in January 1950; in March the same year, civil servant Sukumar Sen was appointed the country’s first election commissioner; and in April, Parliament passed the Representation of People’s Act, giving the right to vote to everyone who was 21 years of age or older and had lived within the post-Partition geographical limits of the country for the past 180 days or more.

Unlike Western democracies, where the right to vote was first given to landed men, India introduced universal adult franchise right away. But it also faced serious challenges: Of the 176 million Indians who could vote in 1951, 85 per cent could not read or write. Getting all of them to register, to print ballot paper and assign party symbols, to build election booths — it was an unimaginably mammoth task that Sen and his team accomplished. As India prepares for its 18th general elections next year, it is perhaps the ideal time to return to Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, the singular novel that captured the hopes, fears, aspirations, the zeitgeist of the first one. A handsome new 30th-anniversary edition, published by Speaking Tiger earlier this year, is the perfect excuse — if one is needed — to reread this ambitious book.

First published in 1993, A Suitable Boy is one of the longest novels written in English. In most editions, it runs to more than 1,300 pages. A short review by The Kirkus Review at the time of its first publication described it as “Fat… but fatuous.” Seth is not averse to taking jibes at the length of his novel — its epigraph has a quote from Voltaire: “The secret of being a bore is to say everything.” But the book was an instant success. As The New York Times reported, Seth received an advance of $1.1 million from publishers in the US, the UK and India, an unprecedented sum for an Indian writer then as it is now.  

The current edition divides the book into three volumes of 500 to 550 pages each, with beautiful golden covers. The box set is a collector’s edition that has been produced with great care. The font size is not too small, ensuring little strain on a reader’s eyes despite the long hours one has to commit to reading the whole novel. I remember setting myself the task of reading one part of the 13 parts — each as long as a novella — on 13 consecutive days during a summer vacation as an undergraduate student of English literature. That was before ubiquitous mobile phones and streaming services constantly eroded our attention span; this summer, it took me much longer to re-read it.

The narrative of the novel focuses less on India’s first election — though Nehru is mentioned more than 200 times — and more on the selection of a husband for Lata Mehra, the youngest daughter of the formidable Mrs Rupa Mehra. Seth gives her three choices, like Shakespeare gave Portia in The Merchant of Venice: Kabir Durrani, an amateur cricketer and Lata’s fellow student at the university; Amit, the brother of Lata’s sister-in-law Meenakshi and an England-educated poet; and Haresh Khanna, the pan-chewing shoe designer with great prospects in the Czech shoe-manufacturing company, Praha Shoes, a stand-in for Bata. The novel begins with the wedding of Lata’s elder sister Savita to Pran Kapoor, a university lecturer and son of Congress leader Mahesh Kapoor. Bookended by two weddings and large sections devoted to matchmaking, domestic life, and childbearing, it has prompted frequent comparisons with Pride and Prejudice. But like Jane Austen’s 1813 classic, marriage in Seth’s novel is a metaphor for politics, power, and money.

In 2020, filmmaker Mira Nair adapted the novel into a six-part series for the BBC. It sparked a controversy, with several Hindu groups describing a kiss between Lata and Kabir as an example of “love jihad”, a conspiracy theory that claims that Muslim men seduce Hindu women to force them to convert to Islam. Comparisons with Austen’s novel were also very common. British journalist Chitra Ramaswamy wrote in The Guardian: “It does not get more Pride and Prejudice than a girl being chivvied into marriage by her mum.” A reviewer for the Irish Times described it as “Pride and Prejudice in a sari”, while Nair herself described it as “The Crown in brown”, referencing the highly popular, multipart Netflix series on the British royal family under Elizabeth II.

Such comparisons, however, erode the true political potential of Seth’s narrative, where large sections are devoted to Nehru’s attempt to prevent India from turning into a Hindu state, represented through his constant conflict in the Congress’s right wing led by the party’s then president P D Tandon.

The question Seth seems to ask is what kind of a state do Indians want? Is it the Nehruvian secular and socialist state, or a feudal, casteist, exclusionary one? And what kind of freedoms can this state guarantee? Does Lata — based on Seth’s mother, Justice Leila Seth, the first woman to become the chief justice of an Indian high court — get to choose a life partner beyond considerations of her religion, caste and class? Does Maan Kapoor, Pran’s younger brother, get to explore his non-heteronormative sexuality? (Seth has been one of the strongest advocates of queer rights in India.)

The novel is an urgent plea for the preservation of the democratic dreams and aspirations of Lata’s generations — they remain poignant even now.   

The writer is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat