: ‘The Politician’: Finally, an English novel set in the heartland of Indian politics, Uttar Pradesh #IndiaNEWS The impulse to write the great Indian novel has been too tempting to resist for a number

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‘The Politician’: Finally, an English novel set in the heartland of Indian politics, Uttar Pradesh #IndiaNEWS
The impulse to write the great Indian novel has been too tempting to resist for a number of Indian English novelists. From Qurratulain Hyder through Shashi Tharoor to Vikram Seth, many have written their own great Indian novels, works of considerable merit, but not the great Indian novel. Such is the diversity of lands, people and cultures in India that most novels of this kind remain regional in focus, however ambitious they may be in scale. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata/Bengal, Kerala, and western India have usually provided settings and characters in Indian English novels. But Uttar Pradesh, an area which has wielded considerable political influence in independent India, has held out its appeal to a host of Hindi and Urdu writers and poets, but has only occasionally appeared in Indian English fiction. One can think of Lucknow in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, Lucknow and Benaras in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Benaras in Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics, and western UP, though cursorily, in Mirza Waheed’s Tell Her Everything. But Uttar Pradesh’s geography and its political significance has largely been absent in Indian English novels.Observing the quotidianThe Politician is unabashedly a north Indian novel, more specifically a novel about a specific region in central Uttar Pradesh. Written in a realistic mode, not trying...Read more

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