Deep into the second half of Prayaag Akbar’s excellent new novel, Mother India, there is an ironic scene featuring 34-year-old Vikram Kashyap, a far-right Hindutva YouTuber. One of the novel’s two central characters, 20-something Mayank Tyagi, works with Kashyap’s content team. Witnessing Kashyap melt down in real time due to a competitor’s latest triumph, Mayank remembers that “Kashyap had been inspired by the American shock masters, Limbaugh, Carlson, Bongino…”. This is the reverent air of an underling scrambling to assign intellectual heft to his boss, a man he clearly looks up to. The bit about being “inspired by the American masters” is delicious because this is typically the language used to describe a lineage of musicians or painters or, in the cinematic context, auteurs. That it is being used to describe the media personalities Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Dan Bongino—motormouth misinformation merchants all—hammers home the novel’s satirical foundations.
Mother India arrives, a blown-up smartphone staring at you from its front cover, in the trail of novels like Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (2020) and Aravind Jayan’s Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors (2022), where the stories’ propulsive event is a viral video, one with embarrassing and/or threatening consequences. But in both these earlier novels, the video happened because of the “wrong” person being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Mother India is doubly frightening because here the person featured in the video had nothing to do with it.
Mother India
Fourth Estate India
Pages: 184
Price: Rs.499
This is the novel’s other 20-something protagonist, Nisha Bisht, a salesgirl for a Japanese chocolate brand working in a posh Delhi mall. To make a “Bharat Mata” (literally, Mother India) propaganda video for Kashyap, Mayank pilfers Nisha’s face off Instagram using an AI-enhanced video-making software; she becomes the embodiment of “Bharat Ma” for no desire or fault of her own. The elements of timing and “choice” (however specious or simplistic) are thus rendered obsolete by data-scraping, world-eating generative-AI engines.
Between them, Mayank and Nisha tick off most of the issues that young people of middling education and boundless enthusiasm inevitably run into in contemporary India. They are both economic migrants to the big city; he is from Mahipalpur village near Gurgaon, she is from a small hill-town in Uttarakhand. Mayank is a less-than-impressed survivor of the gig economy, having worked back-breaking shifts as a delivery boy for “ScooterSerf” (a brilliantly named send-up of Indian delivery apps).
Also Read | ‘We must push back, otherwise we’ll live in a police state’: Siddhartha Deb
Nisha’s workplace delivers a dual dose of gendered realities: her male supervisor is not only sleeping with her covertly (they never acknowledge their relationship in public) but is also stealing credit for her ideas, thereby sidelining her from the chain of promotions.
Children of the Internet
Akbar’s handling of these perennially thorny issues is adroit, but even more impressive are all the quiet, unobtrusive ways in which he establishes one of the novel’s most crucial truths: that all these characters are “children of the Internet”, brought up on a visual-heavy diet. They process the world not through words but through images, for the most part. Mayank’s childhood recollections are full of Naruto and Call of Duty; his dog is named Sasuke after a character from the former. Nisha’s discovery of the primacy of images in today’s world is described by a long, breathless sentence unfurling across 150-plus words:
“…the understanding became clearer one summer while she was still in school when a handsome young Palestinian with a flag in one hand and a slingshot in the other had landed on the top of everyone’s feed and the front of newspapers across the world, it was like the whole world had started to briefly care for the cause because of the boy, and she’d been taken aback by the power of this appeal, by the history of it, because in the vast proliferation of memes that followed that photograph she had learned about Lady Liberty of the French Revolution and the Old Testament David, vanquisher of Goliath…”
The novel’s darkly funny treatment of modern-day Hindu nationalism is admirable. Kashyap’s glib homilies about duty and patriotism are balanced by Mayank’s increasingly sceptical responses, his slowly diminishing faith in the man. Mother India is the fictional counterpart to some great new non-fiction books about this world, like Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars and Siddhartha Deb’s Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of Democracy in India. Akbar has clearly paid close attention to the workings of this scary new ecosystem of right-wing content creators and influencers.
At just under 170 pages of text, Mother India is a quick, svelte read. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
For example, a hilarious minor character, “Captain Flight”, followed by Mayank and reviled by his boss Kashyap, makes a stunt video that features him flying a three-hour route over Florida, to “inscribe an assiduous map of India” over the clouds. This is reminiscent of a character from Roberto Bolaño’s savagely funny Nazi Literature in the Americas (translated into English by Chris Andrews in 2008)—a pilot-poet who writes fascist verses in trails of vapour and smoke across the sky. In a way, there is an oblique kinship between Mother India and Nazi Literature in the Americas because they share an important objective: to portray the depths of madness that jingoistic hyper-nationalism inevitably leads to.
The nationalism game
One can also identify the real-life fitness influencer Gaurav Taneja, aka “Flying Beast”, as one of the starting points for Captain Flight. There is a clear and well-documented connection between the practice of bodybuilding (or wrestling, boxing, et al.) and Hindutva-led ideologies in India, as indicated by the works of anthropologists like Joseph S. Alter and, more recently, Michiel Bass. Alter’s Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India (2011), in particular, is a revelatory document in this context. Mother India makes the same interconnected points these non-fiction books do—about power, religious propaganda, and the sociopolitical role played by young male bodybuilders. Akbar just does it with a “show, don’t tell” technique.
Also Read | The Modi model
Akbar also demonstrates the ever-shifting arithmetic of the nationalism game in a typically tragicomic scene, where Mayank has been arrested after a drunken, hare-brained attempt at terrorising “suspected Bangladeshi infiltrates” live on camera. At the police station, Mayank is relieved at first because the cop in charge used to be friends with his late father. However, recognition comes with its own problem: Mayank’s mother, too, was the subject of an embarrassing viral video years ago, the details of which are revealed in flashes across the novel.
“Mayank looked at Chauhan, whose expression had turned kindly, or some approximation of kindly. He knew he should find relief. A few minutes ago, when he was trapped alongside the presumed illegals, Mayank would have delighted in even the loosest connection to any of these uniformed powers, but now that the fear of confinement had passed, now that his nation and nationalism had been established, instead of relief he felt the onset of a familiar burning sensation in his neck and behind his ears.”
At just under 170 pages of text, Mother India is a quick, svelte read despite being quite idea dense in most parts. In Akbar’s last novel, Leila, a work of speculative fiction set in the future, the prospect of a Hindu Rashtra is a distant one yet. Mother India, however, offers no such comforting concessions. It brings us eye to eye with the tech-lubricated hyper-nationalism of today’s India—and dares us to blink.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer and journalist working on his first book of non-fiction.
