have always been impressed and awed by writers mainly because of the research and effort they put in to write the perfect tale and their imagination in bringing together characters and the details that govern each characters features.
. .
Vikram Seth has to be applauded for his effort which seems to be such a petty word when we talk about this Herculean book!
Extremely Mild Spoilers
The Basic plot is about Mrs.
Rupa Mehra wanting to find a Suitable Boy for her youngest daughter, Lata but the story dwells into a lot lot more, . . Politics, Religion, intolerance, Shoe Making, Farming, Teaching, . . its like he has described what India literally would have felt like through the eyes of Mothers, daughters, ministers, Royals Nawabs, Religious people, Actors, Musicians.
. . You name it and VS has given you at least a hint on their insights to India,
At its heart it really is about India, and how India deals with suddenly having to take care of itself instead of being told how to 'take care' of itself by the British.
The way minute details are dealt with is exemplary and the vocabulary used is very easy to comprehend although some words were totally new to me.
The way he understood Islamic laws for example prove the detailed manner in which he must have spoken to religious scholars, And how he describes the shoe making process starting from the sacrifice of the animal, . . to the finished product
The chapters are longpages approx and they swing between Brahmpur/Calcutta/Delhi/Kanpur,
The court scenes really bored me and more so because i reached the first one on a weekend where i excitedly woke up atto read.
I've never really appreciated poetry because of the cheesiness but i loved some of the poetry included in the book and VS being a poet couldn't refrain from including dozens , And i was glad!
Some of the characters you long for while reading and VS made sure you cant get enough of so many of them.
One Character i was so excited about was Zainab but she doesn't really show up later in the book,
My favorites were and you will know why when you read the book Maan, Zainab's Cameo, Dipankar, Saeeda Begum, Dr, Durrani, Rasheed.
But my absolute favorite hands down was Mrs Rupa Mehra, I have used so many tags to mark pages of hers, . . ! The way i could picture so many of my aunts acting like Rupa Mehra was hilarious, !
That is one fictional Character i could literally relate someone to :
I don't want to get into too much details and spoil a mammoth book for anyone of you who might be interested in giving away at least a month of your reading time.
. . But i really wish people would read such books to give them not just a great reading experience but a lifetime experience about how life has always been complicated, not just for us but our parents and theirs.
. . A Suitable Boy describes a year in the life of the fledgling Indian democracy, indirectly told through the experiences of four connected families and a litany of supporting characters, who, due to the diversity of their occupations and social positions, are able to explore various facets political, legal, social, cultural, religious, artistic of the India of this period, and the clash of its opposing cultural forces: traditional versus modern values, religion versus secularism, Hinduism versus Islam, Eastern versus Western culture, and democracy versus serfdom, to name a few.
The titular story concerning Mrs Mehras search for a husband for her daughter, Lata, though just one of many stories that the novel weaves together, stands out due to what it reveals about the norms and cultural prejudices of the time.
We see in Lata an intelligent young woman who has received a modern education, but is pressured by family and cultural expectations to take on a traditional female role While her plight is no means as bleak, I was reminded of Ishiguros Never Let Me Go, in terms of the dissociation between education and eventual societal role.
In Latas story there is a contemplation of what it means to seek happiness, an evaluation of the importance of love, of the fine balance between passion and security, of the necessary compromise of values that is thrust on an individual by their cultural context, where to either fight or relent to pressure requires in one way or another a sacrifice or self.
As an outsider, I was struck by the stratification of the society, where one must be utterly obsequious to ones superiors, and trample upon those below, in order to reinforce ones status.
The caste system locks people into the positions they are assigned at birth, preventing social mobility, In this culture status and position are everything, There is a casual, internalised racism, a sensitivity to the degree of darkness of ones skin, that manifests in all sorts of interactions, from choosing a mate, to business relationships, to deciding with whom to associate.
There is an enormous disparity in fortunes between the wealthy and powerful, who occupy great mansions and large estates, and who are all but unreachable by the law, and the majority of the lower castes, who are forced into subservient roles, living on a pittance in utterly squalid conditions, without any hope of improving their lot.
To the list of Hitchens Religions That Poison Everything, let us not omit the otherwise fairly innocuous Hinduism, whose dogma of karmic rebirth provides religious justification for this horrible system of oppression.
There is evidence in this book of a gradual abandonment of these attitudes, which I hope has been precipitated by the lastyears of democracy.
Striking also is the extent of social and political disunity, which Im sure is in no small part due to the “divide and conquer” policy of the British.
Its amazing the extent that the British were able to transform the country in their own image in such a short time, and the degree to which many of the characters would define themselves as, or aspire to be, English.
The closer one dresses, speaks and acts as an Englishman, the more refined he is, Conversely, the more “Indian” he appears by his accent or demeanour, the lower his standing and his desirability, Though there are surely lingering benefits of British colonialism, this kind of internalised oppression seems to me to be fairly odious, The India of this period is depicted as a heterogeneous multicultural society, where the religious, ethnic, linguistic, cultural and ideological differences constantly threaten to disrupt stability.
One gets a real sense of the fragility of the young Indian democracy, where there was a real possibility of failure and collapse, Partition was a tragedy that affects the world to this day, but overall the enduring survival of Indian democracy through these times of turmoil has been a wonderfully fortunate benefit to the world.
It is easy to imagine a world where things had turned out differently,
In terms of the prose, I did not enjoy Seths bland and relentless Realism, In nearly,pages, there is not a single sentence worth underlining, not a single interesting metaphor, and rarely anything resembling a profound authorial insight.
Instead, the story is told in a flat style of alternating description and dialogue, with the omniscient narrator jumping freely between the thoughts of the different characters.
This style has caused the book to be compared to some of the great works of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, of which it is reminiscent.
Many people seem to like this kind of writing, but its not my cup of tea,
Im rating this book more generously than its literary merits would seem to warrant, This is a very long novel, and though it is arguable whether many sections were essential to include, on the whole it paints a thoughtful, detailed and complex picture of postindependence India, with all the wonderful, as well as the disagreeable aspects
of its culture.
Indeed, the India of Seths novel is a land of contradictions, of inequality, of oppression, and yet of hope through the experiment of democracy.
If nothing else, I will miss his characters, who, though they are a little saccharine I dont disagree with sitelinkPaul Bryant's assessment, are delightful companions with whom to undertake such a long journey.
.stars: A Great Indian Novel in both scale and scope
Those familiar with the unique dramatic phenomenon that are Hindi television soaps would see why many tend to bring them up in comparison with A Suitable Boy: both are interminably long and contend, prima facie, with the quintessentially Indian concept of arranged marriage.
And yet, this is where the similarities largely end, for Vikram Seth's delightful literary behemoth extends its scope beyond the personal destinies of its characters and deals, too, with that of the fledgling democracy within which their lives come together.
At the center of this magnificent saga lies the young Lata Mehra, whose her mother's attempts to find her a suitable husband through love or through exacting maternal appraisal rope the reader into a story that intertwines four familiesThe Mehras, Chatterjees, Kapoors, and Khansacross a journey spanning vast tracts of Indian society, many of its vibrant cities, and the tumultuous year before the great elections inthat officially turned the country into the world's largest democracy.
The colourful cast of characters reflects people from various sections of society, from academic circles in Brahmpur to a class of anglicised professionals, poets, and foreign diplomats in Calcutta from enterprising middleclass shoe tradesmen in Kanpur to the casteoppressed leatherworkers and untouchable tenant farmers from the Muslim gentry in Baitar to lowercaste muslim peasants in Rudhia from courtesans and musicians living off of royal patronage to powerful politiciansthe story is knitted, plain and purl, to display the diverse, multifaceted, and often tragic social fabric of the country.
The author portrays delicacy and romance, humour and antagonism, rituals and riots, and the tragicomedy of their contingent coexistence through the immensity and realism of his pointed proseA Suitable Boy is dramatic, but no more than lived reality, informed as it was by the painful memory of a communal Partition and the realities of class, gender, and more prominently caste becoming known through the electoral experiment of universal adult franchise.
Seth manages to effortlessly weave into his narrative nuanced discussions on a rarely spoken about period in Indian history, including major events such as the passage and contingencies of the Zamindari Abolition Bill and the split in the Congress Party.
I was pleasantly surprised to find issues such as coloniality, the oftignored intersection of caste with communal divide, and the Sanskritisation of 'Indian' culture and languages being discussed in what is essentially a love story with both effectiveness and subtlety.
Unlike most tales in its genre, A Suitable Boy does not shy away from exploring how politics influences personal decisions, especially those concerning marriage.
Arranged marriage, in particular, is a form of maintaining the prevalent hierarchies drawn along the lines of caste, class, ethnicity and religion, and therefore a 'suitable' match for Lata would, according to convention, be a Hindu and a Khatri.
Whereas the author breaks prescription in some ways, he reaffirms them in othersis it perhaps too much to ask for a truly happy ending in a story set in thes Perhaps not, but it sure isn't realistic.
In any case, the tale manages ample comedy in another sense of the word: given the richness of contextual humour and subtle play of words, lighthearted cultural commentary, and other deliberate jokes, I found myself laughing out loud at several points during this book, whereas the simplicity of language and fullness of detail certainly made it a delight to read.
One of the most acclaimed books to come from the Indian subcontinent, A Suitable Boy does not disappoint: with its nuanced exploration of a host of serious themes and its serious physical bulk, it nevertheless remains light and wellroundedmuch like life itself.
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