There have been some stellar portraits of modern India in 21st-century fiction. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (both of which won the Booker Prize), the commercial success of Vikas Swarup’s Q&A (the inspiration for the film Slumdog Millionaire), and more recently, Preti Taneja’s epic, Lear-esque We That Are Young, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2019. Each of these novels depicts different regions of India, reflecting the country’s vast size and multicultural society.
Santanu Bhattacharya’s debut novel One Small Voice offers readers another diverse, original take on contemporary India, a country of huge change and conflict. Spanning the last four decades, the book is a coming-of-age tale about a young northern Indian Hindu, Shubhankar Trivedi, whose name and religion are to the fore right from the book’s smart opening set piece, where three-year-old Shubhankar undergoes a gruelling interview for a place at a sought-after Catholic primary school. It contains in microcosm many of the themes that will unfold organically over the course of the novel: the upwardly mobile society of middle-class India, the pressures on younger generations to achieve academically and economically, the great chance of a particular surname and caste, the entrenched prejudice around religious belief, the fact that it seems to be getting worse, not better, in so-called modern times.
Bhattacharya, who lives in London, grew up in India and studied at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore.
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There is evidence that this is his debut novel, not least a busy, time-hopping structure that will initially frustrate readers looking to settle in with characters. A main narrative strain takes place in Lucknow, 1992, with a backdrop of violence and riots across the country. Ten-year-old Shubhankar witnesses a brutal act of mob violence against a Muslim servant at a family occasion. It results in a prolonged sense of stasis and shame that follows Shubhankar as he rebrands as Shabby at engineering college, and on into adult life working in Mumbai, until another act of extreme violence, known only as “the incident”.
The suspense around this is at times heavy-handed, compounded by a stylistic choice to start many of the short sections with a dream sequence, ostensibly to show the legacy of past trauma, but ultimately, like most dream sequences in novels, proving of much less interest than the material events of the book.
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These are minor points in an otherwise hugely engaging novel written with verve, intelligence and compassion for its central characters, irrespective of religion, caste or class. The family relationships feel intensely real, from Shabby’s rebel younger brother Chintoo; his strict, seemingly humourless grandmother; his hard-working, noble mother, who shows her love for her sons through actions not words: “At the airport, in classic Vasundhara Trivedi style, Ma picks up her suitcase and walks in, back straight, no hug, no parting words. Before going, she lists all the logistics she has already told him about twice now – food in the fridge, bills to pay, instructions for the maid, where she keeps the spare keys.” Friends in Mumbai are related with similar flair: free spirit Shruti – visceral on the misogyny of modern India – and Ganjeri, Shabby’s Muslim flatmate and best friend, who ultimately swaps partying for prayer: “[He] had all the answers, like an ascetic. The sun glowed like embers in his eyes.”
The area where the men live in Mumbai pulsates with life, much of it driven by religion: “There were the slums in front which could get noisy, the aarti every evening for some Hindu god or another. More slums on the other side of the tracks, the azaan from the mosque sounding five times a day on the loudspeaker.”
The violence and killing that takes place, over decades, in the name of religion and territory is related in a bleak, matter-of-fact style: “On 12th March 1993, 13 bombs had gone off [in Mumbai], almost at the same time.” Riots in Gujarat years later make for a ferocious list: “Months of violence against Muslims, slums burnt down, women raped, children slaughtered, families shoved into ovens and baked alive, heads cut off with swords, mosques vandalised.”
As is usually the case, the personal is political, the affairs of the state collide with the affairs of the heart. Shabby learns these lessons the hard way. “This whole country, this city, people screaming, horns honking, vendors hawking, passers-by shoving, dogs barking, coconuts breaking on the ground unannounced.” Contemporary India, a place of burgeoning freedom, money, opportunity, and above all, conflict.
