Authors of The Other: Social Realism in Indian Fiction
Photo: Karan Madhok
When it comes to social realist fiction, there is a fine line between giving voice to the voiceless and speaking on their behalf. Areeb Ahmad analyses literature by Puja Changoiwala and Deepa Anappara to examine how the genre manifests itself in recent Indian novels in English.
In an article titled “12 Fundamentals Of Writing “The Other” (And The Self)”, Daniel José Older says, “When we create characters from backgrounds different than our own, we’re really telling the deeper story of our own perception.” More often than not, this perception is coloured by one’s privilege—the intersection of class, caste, sex, race, and religion—in such a manner so as to blur the distinctions between what is subconsciously reproduced and what is deliberately conveyed. Unexamined biases—conscious or unconscious—inevitably have a way of creeping into texts.
When it comes to social realist fiction, there is a fine line between giving voice to the voiceless and speaking on their behalf. The former makes space for them and the lives they have led; the latter attempts to box them into ready-made narratives where they are just soulless props for the writers to pat themselves on the back and feel good.
In the Introduction to his collection of essays titled Hummingbirds Between the Pages, Chris Arthur states: “Readers prefer… a book that consists of serial chapters… They want something that obeys the niceties of predictable progression, moving from beginning, to middle, to end, with everything neatly linked together, introduced, resolved, and concluded.” He is of course discussing the perceived lack of market appeal for essay collections but this can easily be the description of a conventional narrative in the novel form, a blueprint that is easily discernible in most novels available to us. The form privileges the fictional stories that remain limited to the pages and do not grossly spill outside of the physical object, something that does not impinge on our grounded reality beyond impressions and coincidences.
This perception is coloured by one’s privilege—the intersection of class, caste, sex, race, and religion—in such a manner so as to blur the distinctions between what is subconsciously reproduced and what is deliberately conveyed. Unexamined biases—conscious or unconscious—inevitably have a way of creeping into texts.
The purpose of a social realist ‘novel’, or at least what I perceive to be its purpose, is at odds with such a neat delineation. It is a narrative that is, or should be, uncomfortable in a novel’s skin, the clothes ill-fitting and protruding limbs. Its starting point is fact and it cannot dismiss that origin without becoming hollow. The narrative arc demands tension and twists, it wants foils and façades. To some, the social realist novel must meet these demands but when the objective shifts from ‘conveying the socio-economic condition of the working class’ to just ‘telling a good story’, there is something decidedly off. I do not claim that both these categories must remain separate, or indeed are separate; there are great novels which manage to do both. The concern arises when the latter overtakes the former in this genre.
Here, one must keep in mind that the rise of the Indian novel in English is inextricably linked to social realism in the context of India’s status as a British colony. Writers used the form to explore the contentions between colonial modernity and native traditions, clearly an instance of the Hegelian dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). From Mulk Raj Anand to Raja Rao, the unanimously-felt desire at that time was to articulate an authentic Indian experience, which can only be the subaltern Indian experience. Vernacular literatures, such as the Progressive Writers’ Movement, were particularly invested in portraying daily lives of the proletariat. In both instances, the writers themselves did not belong to the group they were writing about and were in fact far removed from them in terms of socio-cultural capital and material privilege. As a result, a general air of condescension was not uncommon.
This essay, however, is not really concerned with the history of this genre, its iterations, deficiencies, or its past practitioners. It is not just a consideration for space or a reluctance to venture into the realm of the scholarly but also a desire to limit the following discussion to two recent contemporary novels in order to explore how the genre manifests itself in current Indian writing in English. This of course automatically excludes all the books in translation which revolve around the same themes, such as The Sickle by Anita Agnihotri, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha.
The concerned novels are Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (2020) and Homebound by Puja Changoiwala (2021). Apart from being social realist novels, the books are the similar because their authors are journalists; this is largely their area of professional interest and the books are their fiction debuts.
Towards the end of Djinn Patrol, Shanti-chachi tells an intrusive reporter: “This is our life you’re talking about as if it’s just some story. Do you even understand that?” A moment of self-reflection or not, it does jolt the general reader from complacency.
Homebound is written the form of an epistolary novel, where the main protagonist Meher composes letters in her notebook addressed to a journalist named Farah. She never actually gets the chance to mail them and it is one of the many ways the narrative promise remains unfulfilled. While there is an ostensible addressee, the letters in effect are all written into the void. The readers are unaccounted voyeurs at best who have been willed into existence as witnesses to an act of affirmation. For Meher, writing letters is a documentation of her life. It is a way to make it real, to say that she was there and that she existed. The book ends with the notebook buried alongside her, and the attempt at an archive is thwarted.
An epistolary structure is also worth questioning for reasons of plausibility. The novel revolves around the migrant crisis in India post-COVID, where sudden announcement of pandemic measures and containment restrictions led to the vast migrant labour population setting off en masse on foot from their cities of employment to their towns and villages across the country. Meher’s family is one such case. Her father moved to Mumbai for better opportunities years ago and once he was settled, he called for his wife and kids. Now he has decided they must return to their village in Rajasthan to wait it out. So, would someone in Meher’s position have the wherewithal to write eleven letters over the course of just one week while embarking on a tortuous journey underlined by hardships? Could there have been enough time? Could she, as a fifteen-year-old girl born to working class parents, even have written these letters?
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara is a more traditional novel, albeit one that ingeniously plays with magical realism, flashbacks, and dramatic irony. Divided into three parts, the narrative follows a clear three-act structure. The protagonist is a precocious nine-year-old boy called Jai who lives in a basti in an unnamed city—most likely New Delhi—where a recent spate of kidnappings have recently taken place. Children as young as five and as old as 16 are being abducted, one after the other. Jai, a huge fan of detective and true crime shows, is on a mission to solve the case and find the missing children with the help of his friends, Faiz and Pari. Unlike Homebound, which is based on a singular event and uses a series of incidents which can be traced to real headlines, the background inspiration for Djinn Patrol is more diffuse and it is difficult to make clear connections like before.
Each part begins with a recounting of an urban legend, the stories of ghosts and djinns who act as the vengeful guardian deities of the dispossessed and the downtrodden. Whether it is Mental or Junction-ki-Rani who themselves receive the short end of the stick, or the good djinns who fulfil the prayers of their supplicants, these stories act as a bulwark against despair and shore up hope among the subaltern that there is something supernatural on their side in a world that seems out to get them. After each kidnapping, the narrator also presents flashback chapters from the children’s point of view which go over their last known actions to the point of their abduction, throwing up new questions rather than answering them by heightening the gruesome suspense. Both of them work as creative narrative devices that serve to elevate an otherwise “straightforward” story and speak to the craft aspects of the novel.
Beyond the structure, the narrative voice also bears examination especially in the case of the main protagonists. Both books have a single point of view first person narration which help the readers to access the interiority of these characters by making identification easier. In Homebound, Meher’s voice seems at odds with her class-caste position. A reader can perhaps once again wonder if someone like her would have that command over English and that level of knowledge; perceptions are coloured by preconceived ideas, state of government schools, and expectations of conduct. But why is it natural for us to expect underprivileged people to talk and behave only in a certain way, to stay in their lane? In the Author’s Note, Changoiwala remembers the young girls she met in Mumbai’s slums: “I wanted Meher to be that girl too, to have their dreams and their vocabularies, their idealism and their courage to seek.”
Jai is also similarly full of verve, bubbling with knowledge and information he gains from his atmosphere and the TV set. It is interesting, and indeed very humanising, in the way neither book makes their subaltern protagonists and characters perpetually wear a badge that signals their subalternity. They are not reduced to their daily struggles and are not constantly wallowing in misery to elicit cheap pity from privileged readers. These narratives have clear Blakesian shifts from innocence to experience, from light to darkness, and from ignorance to understanding. There are fleeting moments of joy aplenty, even if they get overshadowed by sadness. That being said, Anappara or Changoiwala do not pretend that their lives are easy or comparable to that of the nebulous middle class and the elite. There is no tawdry attempt to pretend they have the same resources and levels of access to solve their problems.
It is fascinating to look at the paratext, or the material that surrounds the main text, of these novels. The blurb for Djinn Patrol clearly mentions that it “draws on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India” while the one for Homebound asserts that “it brings to the page the stark realities of those who have remained too long without a voice.” In both these instances, one will quickly notice the use of the “real(ities)” and its, frankly loaded, connotations. These narratives aspire to a significant truth value, recounting incidents which may not be completely based in reality but are at least a very good approximation of it. There is a list of resources on Anappara’s website that she consulted; while Changoiwala does not have anything similar, her book has an impassioned Author’s Note which points all of the research that went into her book and inspired the events that take place.
As long as the characters are not reduced to their trauma—turned into objects of fascination where the commentary on their lives becomes more significant than their lives—the books will be worth reading, even necessary.
Ultimately the question arises, who are these books written for? Who is the intended readership? It is certainly not the subaltern proletariat who can ill-afford these novels without the appropriate free time, or even the required proficiency in English, to be able to read them. This is complicated by the language present in the book. The translation or transliteration of local terms, the presence or absence of Indianisms, and the abundance of pop culture cues. In Djinn Patrol, the idiom “daal mein kuchh kala hai” becomes “something black in the dal”, the song “Main Aisa Kyun Hun?” turns into “Why Am I Like This?”, and the epithet “bheegi billi” is “wet cat”. In Homebound, the substitutions are rare and literal translations are usually provided in parentheses immediately after the non-English text—whose inclusion is rare in both books— which can interrupt a reader’s immersion into the narrative.
It is obvious that for the educated middle class Indian reader—the category that makes up the primary readership of English novels—untranslated text will not be a stumbling block. I do not expect even diasporic Indian people or Desis anywhere in the world to have any comprehension issues as such, either. It is worth remembering that Djinn Patrol was simultaneously published in India, USA, UK, and Canada; Homebound is only available in the subcontinent for the time being. Hence, the implied reader is a non-Indian reader defined by a globalized modernity who does not have access to local turns of expression and hence must be catered to through the use of stilted translations and wonky substitutions. The purpose of the narrative is to elicit their empathy by soliciting their identification with the characters as the ideal goal of any social realist novel is to engender long-lasting societal transformation.
Towards the end of Djinn Patrol, Shanti-chachi tells an intrusive reporter: “This is our life you’re talking about as if it’s just some story. Do you even understand that?” A moment of self-reflection or not, it does jolt the general reader from complacency. If the purpose of a polished narrative is to lull an audience into passivity, even provide a cathartic outlet for the purging of unwelcome emotions, then both these novels decidedly diverge from that goal in a somewhat Brechtian manner.
Neither of the stories provide happy endings with neat resolutions. At the end of the Anappara, the children are still missing while the alleged perpetrators avoid justice and the main trio is broken up because Faiz and Pari move. In Homebound, Meher dies due to an asymptomatic case of COVID aggravated by an undetected lung condition and her father is still in jail for resisting police brutality, unaware of her death. The readers get no closure and the books end in the uncertainty that has often defined the characters’ lives.
The dedication to Changoiwala’s novel states: “For the dreamers, / the seekers, / the fighters, / the survivors, / whom we failed.” In the Author’s Note, she lays out the rule she set for herself while writing this book: “Stay true to the narrative and to the humans who inspired it. No imagined atrocities, no made-up brutalities, no fictional victories, just what happened, just what really happened.” It is an appreciable rule which now brings us back full circle. To what extent is ‘realism’ in social ‘realist’ fiction possible? There will always be some degree of artifice, stemming from the writer's distance from his subjects or the needs of a narrative that demands a coherent dramatic structure. After a certain point, it becomes an empty debate. As long as the characters are not reduced to their trauma—turned into objects of fascination where the commentary on their lives becomes more significant than their lives—the books will be worth reading, even necessary. Anappara and Changoiwala certainly qualify.
Priyanka Chakrabarty defines ‘trauma porn’ as “the depiction of trauma in this case is with the specific intent for the benefit of the privileged audience, and to evoke their sympathy by a one-dimensional portrayal of traumatic experiences.” In her essay “The Performance of Trauma in Fiction”, she delineates a linear narrative that most books of this kind follow, which is decidedly not the case here with either Anappara or Changoiwala. While the books might have shaky extensions, they do not cater to the privileged gaze solely for the purpose of vacuous catharsis from the comforts of their homes and instead challenges the readers to examine their own role in the unfolding acts. Neither are “neat and linear narratives of suffering” which end in unrealistic liberation but a reckoning with the ongoing troubles of this country highlighted by uncertain resolutions. It is not a closed circle but a bend into the road, revealing things that demand witness.
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Areeb Ahmad is an English MA candidate at the University of Hyderabad. He likes to write about the intersections of gender and sexuality, and enjoys exploring how the personal and the political as well as form and content interact in art. He is a Books Editor at Inklette Magazine. Most of the time, he can be found tinkling with his bookstagram: @bankrupt_bookworm. You can also find him on Twitter: @Broke_Bookworm.
