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With his representation of India in the 1950s, Vikram Seths A Suitable Boy (1993) has
appropriated the nineteenth-century realist tradition in novel writing to his own ends. The
Nehruvian idea of India as a unity within diversity and a secular approach to religion
features prominently in this novel. Its vast descriptive horizon is contained within a
deceptively styleless language, naturalizing what is in fact a carefully constructed imagined
community.

By Neelam Srivastava

Suitable Boy provides a synchronic look at post-Independence Indian life of the 1950s, in many ways a
tranche de vie. It aspires to provide an
idea of India through a realistic
approach that has an almost photographic quality. Seths narrative technique has invited comparisons with
novelists such as R.K. Narayan, George
Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy, because his novel
displays a rare belief in the possibility
of representational authenticity, which
it seeks to achieve through an impressively detailed and documented reconstruction of Indian society around the
time of the first general elections.
Amidst the anti-realist tendencies of
postmodern fiction, Seths novel is
striking for its reappropriation of the
realist mode, which is characterized by
an omniscient narrator, linear chronology, and psychologically coherent characters, all immersed in a universe of
ordered significance.
My reading examines the novel as a
secular narrative of the Indian nation,
which draws much on Jawaharlal
Nehrus nationalist text, The Discovery
of India. In emphasizing Indias multiculturalism and traditions of tolerance
towards other religions, Nehru identified secularism as the only approach
which would guarantee the development of a truly integrated nation. This
did not mean absence of religion, but
putting religion on a different plane
from that of normal political and social
life. Any other approach in India would
mean the breaking up of India (Gopal
1980: 331)
The fifties were a very important
moment in the consolidation of modern Indian identity, when disobedience, resistance and revolt were carefully dismantled and oppositional
energies were consciously diffused as
the nationalist struggle was closed off
and the nation-state began to establish
its dominance (Tharu and Lalita 1993:
44). Many of the myths and conceptions of the nation that still survive
today were established and circulated
in Nehrus India. In A Suitable Boy a
cultural interpretation of 1950s nationhood, i.e. the idea of a strong India,
based in part on liberal progressivism,
is strongly endorsed.
This is even more so because Seths
secularism is articulated within the
boundaries of the nation-state. Compared to Salman Rushdies Midnights
Children (1981), which questions the
viability of the very concept of nation,
Seth is already working within an
accepted idea of the nation, and is concerned with more specific issues of
making it work, such as communal harmony and economic improvement. In
the 1950s, as a concomitant effect of the
Nehru administrations economic
development policies, the body of the
state absorbed the nation. The Indian

state assumed full responsibility for the

marginalized groups that had not been
prime beneficiaries of the transition
from colonialism to independence. Certain cultural products, such as Indian
nationalist novels, endorsed and
extended these transformations as they
set up a nation-space (Tharu and Lalita 1993: 60).
Seth has a similarly statist and secularist approach to the idea of nationhood. He writes about nation-building
from the point of view of Indias rising
middle class, informed by a secularizing Nehruvian ideology. Focusing on
four upper-class Indian families, three
Hindu, one Muslim, the author makes
no attempt to hide the essentially bourgeois viewpoint of the narrative, which
is contained in part within a progressive teleology of the nation. Many
events in the book can be seen as symbolic moments in the nation-forming
process, characterized by gradual,
rather than violent, social change. The
land reform acts implemented by the
Congress Party during the 1950s are
evoked in the novel by the fictional
Zamindari Abolition Act, which aims
to abolish feudal land-holdings in the
invented state of Purva Pradesh.It is
portrayed as the cause of one of the
most important social and economic
transformations of post-Independence
India. In the narrative it symbolizes the
passage from feudalism to the rise of
the middle class, traditionally seen as a
crucial moment of transition in the
development of a modern industrialized state.

A Suitable Boy as a national

narrative
The more leisurely stretches in realistic fiction also convey the immersion
of meaning in time. The well-trained
reader of novels knows when to look
and listen with special care; certain
meanings which inform the entire narrative are dramatized more starkly, or
expressed more explicitly in the privileged moments of traditional fiction
(Bersani 1978: 52). In A Suitable Boy,
this immersion of meaning in time
also results from, or contributes to, the
construction of the Indian nation as an
undisputed framework. This provides
a solid ideological and ethical basis for

the development of the novel: the main

narrative events, the dialogues, the
thoughts of the characters, and the
direct authorial interventions. There are
some privileged moments where Seths
construction of his discourse emerges
more explicitly, as in his direct comments on Nehrus political achievements.
Seths naturalized representation of
the nation goes hand in hand with his
endorsement of Nehruvian ideology. In
A Suitable Boy, the nation is an all-inclusive concept that moves from the individual, to the locality, to the regional
state, and arrives to embrace the entire
nation. Seth invents a state, Purva
Pradesh, whose regional, specifically
North Indian dimension is stretched to
make it representative of India in its
totality. At the beginning of the novel,
Lata Mehra, one of the central characters of the novel, is daydreaming during her sisters wedding, musing on the
small pyre in the middle of the ceremony:
this little fire was indeed the centre
of the universe. For here it burned, in
the middle of this fragrant garden, itself
in the heart of Pasand Bagh, the pleasantest locality of Brahmpur, which was
the capital of the state of Purva Pradesh,
which lay in the centre of the Gangetic
plains, which was itself the heartland
of India and so on through the galaxies to the outer limits of perception and
knowledge (Seth 1993: 16).
The author constructs an organic
idea of India through the microcosm of
Brahmpur, the capital of Purva
Pradesh, in the tradition of R.K.
Narayans invented South Indian town,
Malgudi. Seth claims to have based
Brahmpur on a mixture of Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Benares, Patna, and Ayodhya. The move to create typical, rather
than specific, North Indian localities
recalls the process of nation-forming
itself, where it is seen as an idealization
and selection of historical events and
religious and linguistic traditions,
made in order to construct an organic
ideology which can claim a national
representativeness.
A Suitable Boy appears to encompass
a staggering variety of experience: it

A Hindu priest about

to light the wedding
pyre

seems to be saying everything about

India, while in fact its vast descriptive
horizon is not infinite, and is shaped by
the discourse of the narrator. Realist
description is characterized by the
interweaving of the aesthetic and referential purposes. The aesthetic purpose has a containing function, in that
it directs the description towards the
production of a meaning. On the other
hand, the assumed reality of the referent prevents the description to turn into
fantasizing. This fact becomes very
apparent in the crowd scenes in A Suitable Boy. As in many Indian-English
novels, these scenes communicate a
sense of Indias multiple realities contained by a unifying national consciousness, which is represented by the
omniscient narrator and often filtered
through the consciousness of individual characters. As Maan Kapoor takes a
flneur-like stroll through the old part
of the city of Brahmpur, this is what he
sees:
Crows cawed, small boys in rags
rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a
cheap tin tray as he weaved through the
crowd), monkeys chattered in and
bounded about a great shivering-leafed
pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded
fruit stand, women shuffled along in
anonymous burqas or bright saris, with
or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging
around a chaat-stand shouted at each
other from a foot away either out of
habit or in order to be heard, mangy
dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal
cats mewed and were stoned, and flies
settled everywhere (Seth 1993: 97).

Both photos by Joy Wang

The Invention of India in

Vikram Seths A Suitable Boy

Guests and relatives at an Indian wedding

must be seen in context. Published in

1993, when the Hindu right wing
steadily appropriated Indian national
identity, A Suitable Boy can be read as a
response to the aggressive communalization of politics in the 1990s, by recuperating a Nehruvian vision of the relationship between religion and society.
The novel was immensely successful in
India, and its translations in Hindi and
Bengali met with great critical acclaim,
showing that it could be translated
back into the vernacular languages
which are represented in the novel. A
Suitable Boy thus remains an influential secular and realist narrative of
India, whose linguistic creativity and
intense engagement with recent history has effectively contributed to its
canonical status in the post-colonial literary context. <
References

The naturalness of Seths portrayal of

India in descriptions such as this one
is a great achievement. Its almost as if
the purpose of the walk were to familiarize the reader with the town, which
is the main setting of the plot. Such
familiarization is a recurrent authorial
strategy and is characterized by an
informative yet affective tone, calculated to make the reader feel at home in
every setting. The description of the
crowd carries an immediacy that makes
us enter the scene in some way, as if
we were present at it, thus imbuing it
with an impressionistic quality. This
technique resembles that of nineteenth-century realist fiction such as
Balzacs, where the stylistic unity of the
description is not established rationally but presented as a striking and
immediately apprehended state of
things, purely suggestively, without any
proof (Auerbach 1953: 471).
Nehru employs a similar naturalizing technique when describing the
diversity of the Indian crowds. There is
the sense, in both Seths and Nehrus
texts, that the nation is waiting to get
out, come into its own. India is
assumed to be an undivided subject
whose apparent diversity stops at the
surface. It is the narrator/protagonist
of the text who effects a discovery of
an undivided India through his description.
The novels Nehruvian perspective

- Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.

by Willard R. Trask, Princeton: Princeton
University Press (1953).
- Bersani, Leo, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, London:
Marion Boyars (1978).
- Gopal, Sarvepalli (ed.), Jawaharlal, Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology, Delhi: Oxford
University Press (1980).
- Seth, Vikram, A Suitable Boy, New York:
Harper Collins (reprint 1994; first edition
1993).
- Tharu, Susie, K. Lalita, Women Writing in
India: 600 B.C. to the Present, Volume II,
Delhi: Oxford University Press (1993).

Acknowledgements
This paper presents some aspects of my
PhD research dissertation, as explored
while at the Department of Political Science, South Asia Institute, University of
Heidelberg (Germany).
I would like to thank the South Asia Committee of the European Science Foundation for awarding a travel grant and all
members of the Political Science Department at the SAI for their wonderful hospitality during my stay.

Neelam Srivastava, MPhil is completing a

DPhil at the University of Oxford. Her thesis is on Secularism in Vikram Seths A
Suitable Boy and Salman Rushdies Midnights Children.
[email protected]

IIAS Newsletter | #32 | November 2003

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