Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

You are mysteries to yourselves.' The period of 1984-91 in which it is set was the most fraught in modern Indian history.

He articulates the basic flaw in the Indian condition: 'This is the biggest problem with you Hindus. A professor explains how caste loyalty is used to get people elected while the masses never realise that politicians belong to their caste's highest subset, the ones who've 'always been millionaires'. Kittur is an Indian everycity in which businessmen contend with ubiquitous corruption and rustics arrive penniless at bus stands, seeking employment while sleeping on pavements rented from goons, and where the emotions of the poor are manipulated to keep a few in power. He makes Indians ordinary, allowing non-Indians a window onto them without the obfuscating lyricism that previously dominated Indian literature. Rich or poor, Muslim or Hindu, he doesn't romanticise Indians, portraying them as what they are: people living with the stress of India's poverty and their myriad neuroses - about their faith, social status and sex lives. His direct, low-key and accessible prose is his great strength, producing pithy stark images such as the frantic schoolteacher whose bloated torso is 'pregnant with a dozen heart attacks', or an impoverished coolie who is 'another of those lean, lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station'. Located in the fictional south Indian town of Kittur, it consists of a series of vignettes weaving together characters from a variety of castes, religions and backgrounds to give a textured and intimate sense of the exhausting complexity of Indian life and its stifling social attitudes - very much like R K Narayan did with his Malgudi novels but with a dark and smutty sense of humour.

Having excoriated the pretensions and injustices of modern India, he's now written an historical piece situated between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv, that ended the Nehru dynasty's 40year monopoly of Indian politics. Unlike his contemporaries, including Altaf Tyrewala and Jeet Thayil, he was just fortunate enough to get a UK publisher and a Western audience. In truth, he isn't the first or the best, belonging to a robust crop of writers who have shaken off India's colonial deference to the English language to write with raw honesty. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTįter winning the Booker Prize last year, Aravind Adiga was heralded as a bold and entirely new voice, writing about India's dystopic reality in unpretentious, democratic prose.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga