A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, 1993
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first, because seemingly it’s mandatory for every review of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy to mention its length. The paperback edition is over 1500 pages long, which makes it easily the longest single edition novel I have ever read (Clarissa was longer but came in 12 editions so isn’t a fair comparison). Apart from the fact that the book was slightly cumbersome to handle, for me this wasn’t really an issue. If you were reading it to a deadline for a review or coursework then I can appreciate the concern, but otherwise I am not sure why all reviews seem to obsess about the length. The impression I have is that Seth was determined to ignore the traditional ‘rules’ of novel writing, so if the novel ran to 1500 pages then so be it, not his problem (he displayed the same rule-breaking approach when he wrote his 1986 novel The Golden Gate entirely in verse).
A Suitable Boy is set in India in the early 1950’s, a few years after independence from the UK and the partition of the country into India and Pakistan. Partition was a traumatic and violent event for the people of the region, with tens of millions displaced and hundreds of thousands (on a low estimate) killed in communal violence. The immediate days and weeks of independence have been explored at length by writers such as Salman Rushdie (in Midnight’s Children), so the setting of A Suitable Boy in the early but not immediate post-colonial period provides a fresh perspective. The India described in A Suitable Boy is in the circumstances remarkably calm and law-abiding compared to that of a few years earlier. Partition has still left its mark – families are separated and communal violence remains a threat – but overall things are remarkably calm, even to the extent that a national election can take place. Hindu and Muslim families on the whole do not intermarry, but they mostly live alongside one another in relative peace.
To explore this world the novel follows the interwoven stories of four families: the Khans, Mehras, Chatterjis and Kapoors. Seth helpfully provides a detailed family tree at the opening of the book which I regularly referred to. If such a diffuse novel can be said to have a central narrative it is probably that of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s search for a ‘suitable boy’ for her daughter, Lata, an intelligent and independent 19-year-old undergraduate (to be honest, this storyline is usually deemed the central narrative simply because of its connection to the novel’s title rather than because it dominates the book or holds it together.) Rather than meekly accepting her mother’s decisions, Lata has her own views on whom she should marry. Her bullying brother, Arun, also tries to intervene and influence her choice. Three suitors emerge, all with various complications. Kabir Durrani is a cricket-playing student. He is charming and kind, and Lata quickly falls in love with him, but he is a Muslim so, according to her family, he is out of the question. Haresh Khanna is an ambitious young man employed by a local shoe-making company, but he has a former lover who remains in his heart, and he is dismissed by some members of Lata’s family as a ‘cobbler’. To complete the trio of suitors, Amit Chatterjee (Lata’s brother’s brother-in-law) is part of the extended Mehra family and therefore in many ways more suitable than the others. Amit is an acclaimed poet and author, clearly modelled on Seth himself. The novelist is brutally honest about Amit’s/his own failings and unsuitability as a potential husband.
This isn’t really a love story though. Lata’s romantic interests provide a narrative thread of sorts, but for long stretches the novel diverts into a wide variety of other topics and themes, from considerations of land reform, the Congress Party, elections, the Hindu/Muslim conflicts that continued throughout this period, as well as following the personal stories of a wide cast of peripheral characters. By ‘peripheral’ I mean that while they are not central to the core narrative, Seth doesn’t treat them as such, to the extent that the whole concept of a central narrative is flawed. All of these characters are brought to life and given time to develop their own stories. This seems part of Seth’s determination not to follow the traditional structures of the Western novel, but to write about what interests him. If it leads down a narrative rabbit hole then so be it; if the novel balloons to an incredible length, then it does.
Two of these ‘minor’ characters in particular stood out for me: Maan Kapoor, Lata’s brother-in-law (technically her sister’s brother-in-law) and Meenakshi Mehra nee Chatterji, wife to Arun and sister-in-law to Lata (and yes, in case you were wondering, I did just check the family trees to make sure I got this right). Maan is a playboy who becomes besotted with Saeeda Bai, a musical ‘courtesan’ – in other words a high-class prostitute. Through this storyline the reader is introduced to the complex sexual morality of India. While some women were kept virtually imprisoned in purdah, not allowed to show their faces to any man other than immediate family members, and forbidden from even going outside, other women such as Saeeda are allowed to sing at high-class social events without causing scandal, protected by the status of their customers. The double standards are shown, but Seth doesn’t moralise explicitly. Saeeda’s position is insecure – she knows that if she loses the patronage of some of her most senior ‘lovers’ she will be quickly ostracised by society. Later in the novel it is revealed that Maan had gay relationships while at boarding school and occasionally continues his long standing relationship with Firoz Khan, a school friend. He is in other words secretly bisexual. This secrecy is needed because being gay at the time in India in theory could lead to a life-long prison sentence, and would have been immensely damaging to his father’s political career. (His father is a minister in the Indian Government). Extraordinarily, homosexuality was only decriminalised in India in 2018 even though Hindu culture has a long tradition of recognising the complexity of human sexuality.
Meenakski is an interesting contrast to Saeeda and Maan. Although married she conducts a love-affair with one of her husband’s friends in which she is clearly the dominant party – she pressures him into liaisons and refuses to allow the relationship to lapse, apparently reckless or unafraid of the social stigma and other consequences that would ensue were they to be discovered. She is sexually liberated, and appears to enjoy her affair consequence-free – at one point she does fall accidentally pregnant, but loses the baby to a miscarriage and is secretly pleased at this outcome. The novel doesn’t pass judgment on Meenakski. As with Saeeda Bai her decisions are shown but not condemned.
Towards the end of the text Seth comes close to breaking the fourth wall when Amit, his avatar within the novel, is asked about the length of his own forthcoming novel. It is easy to imagine that this was a question Seth had to answer many times when his publishers released details of the page count of A Suitable Boy:
‘Do you believe in the virtue of compression?’ ‘Well, yes’, said Amit warily. The lady was rather fat.
‘Why then is it rumoured that your forthcoming novel – to be set, I understand, in Bengal, is to be so long? More than a thousand pages!’ she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.
‘Oh, I don’t know how it grew to be so long’ said Amit. ‘I’m very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse, If they’re bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch’. (Don’t we all?)
This is Seth’s response to the commentary about the novel’s lack of ‘compression’ – to mock his critics who are unable to bear the weight of the book or to read it without going into their own version of purdah.
Mostly the narrative is gently paced, following the lives of the characters wherever they end up. Periodically there are major events that in a traditional novel would be used to drive the narrative forward. I don’t think it is a coincidence that these dramatic incidents are used to end episodes of the television adaptation of the novel, providing cliff-hangers to ensure viewers return the following week. There is a tragedy at the annual pilgrimage to the Ganges (in the novel, the event is called “Pul Mela” instead of “Kumbh Mela”) which is based on a real event from 1954 in which hundreds of people were crushed to death. Although one of the novel’s minor characters is injured in the crush there are no long-term consequences – he recovers fully. Later another character is stabbed, but while at one point it is thought he might die, there are no long-term injuries and the attacker is cleared of any wrong-doing. Time and again events such as Meenakski’s pregnancy or Kabir’s declaration of love for Lata, which in other novels would be major turning points, turn out to be false starts, and things quickly return back to normal. I am not sure how to interpret this – it could be that Seth is making a broader point about Indian history and its future. Despite the many events that shook national life at the time the country quickly returns back to normality. It persists and survives.
Unsurprisingly, the novel contains a lot of detail about traditional Hindu festivals, traditions and ceremonies. Largely these are just shown to the reader – there’s no real attempt by the narrator to explain their purpose or background. This means the reader either heads off to the internet to do some background reading (making a long read even longer!) or goes with the flow and accepts the traditions as background colour which are important to some of the characters (others treat them with disdain) but not essential to an understanding of the plot.
Although the main story-lines are resolved by the end of the 1500 pages, much is left unsaid. This means the novel functions largely as a portrait of Indian life in the early 1950’s rather than a conventional story. When it was first published some reviews of A Suitable Boy compared it to epic nineteenth century novels such as War and Peace. I’m not sure such comparison are helpful. A Suitable Boy spans only around eighteen months, focuses on domestic rather than national events (national events without question feature in the novel, but they act more as a backdrop rather than as the focus of the narrative) and in some ways is closer to a soap-opera than a dynastic saga. I suspect it was this structure which made it an obvious choice for a television series rather than a film adaptation. Ultimately one has to admire the novelist’s determination to write the novel that he was interested in, rather than accepting the conventions of a genre which have developed over time (arguably in the interests of publishers rather than readers?). A Suitable Boy will reward the time you have to invest in it. It is an engrossing portrait of India which should not be rushed.
The Reading Bug 