@wedwardes on #Wine #Curry and more: Vikram Seth author of A Suitable Boy on the BBC

Saturday, 28 January 2012

Vikram Seth author of A Suitable Boy on the BBC

I was captivated by the tome of a novel "A Suitable Boy" by Vikram Seth. It brought back many real and imaginary memories for me of the India I grew up in.

After more than 40 years away I visited India twice in the last two years with a visit to Mumbai in October 2011 where I delivered a seminar on Product Innovation for Financial Institutions.

I was delighted to listen to an interview with Vikram Seth on the BBC today on Desert Island Disks.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the author Vikram Seth.

His novel A Suitable Boy was nearly a decade in the writing, but it was a huge and immediate hit and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

He is now working on a follow-up novel called A Suitable Girl. He's due to finish work on it in 2013 - 20 years after the original work was published. The pace of work, he admits, is slow:

"The sound of deadlines pushing past is one of the sounds that authors are most familiar with - it's very much in the gestational period."

Wikipedia on A Suitable Boy says:

A Suitable Boy is a novel by Vikram Seth, released in 1993. At 1349 pages (1488 pages softcover) and 591,552 words, the book is one of the longest novels ever published in a single volume in the English language.

A sequel, to be called A Suitable Girl, is due for publication in 2013.

Plot introduction

A Suitable Boy is set in post-independence, post-partition India. The novel follows the story of four families over a period of 18 months as a mother searches for a suitable boy to marry her daughter.

The 1349-page novel alternatively offers satirical and earnest examinations of national political issues in the period leading up to the first post-Independence national election of 1952, including inter-sectarian animosity, the status of lower caste peoples such as the jatav, land reform and the eclipse of the feudal princes and landlords, academic affairs, inter- and intra-family relations and a range of further issues of importance to the characters.

A suitable boy centres on Mrs. Rupa Mehra's efforts to arrange the marriage of her younger daughter, Lata, with a "suitable boy". At the heart of the novel it is a love story, set in a young, newly independent India. It begins in the fictional town of Brahmpur, located on the Ganges between Banares and Patna. Brahmpur, along with Calcutta, Delhi, Kanpur and other Indian cities, forms a colourful backdrop for the emerging stories.

Lata is a 19-year-old college girl, vulnerable, yet determined to have her own way and not be influenced by her strong mother and opinionated brother, Arun. Her story revolves around the choice she is forced to make between her suitors, Kabir, Haresh, and Amit.
The novel is not simply based on one story. This epic novel covers the various issues faced by post-independence India, including Hindu-Muslim strife, abolition of the Zamindari system, land reforms and empowerment of Muslim women.

The novel is divided into 19 parts, with each part focussing on a different story (and eventually coming back round again). For example part 1 is about Lata's story; part 2 is about a courtesan (the beginning of a major subplot featuring Maan Kapoor); part 3 is about Lata again; part 4 is about Haresh; part 5 is about the Brahmpur political scene etc. Each part is described by a rhyming couplet on the contents page.

Given the format of many smallish chapters I am surprised that A Suitable Boy has not been adapted to television.

I must re-read the book.

It is a cold day in London. I could do with a Massala Wine

Massala Wine - A Vinous Chai - 1

Massala Wine - A Vinous Chai - 2

And with a warming Chicken Tikka Massala for dinner a glass or two of my Wine for Spice