A Suitable Boy: 19th Century literuture?

I read A Suitable Boy again recently. On my old blog, I had lamented the fact that I had never written anything on a book I so loved and discussed with like minded friends in such excruciating detail. Back in my first year in college, when we attempted to start the ill-fated book club, we never assigned a session to this epic of a book as we thought it had been discussed to death. However, this novel, so broad and magnificent in its scope, always throws up new things every time I read it. While I could go on and on about the characters of this book, in this post, I shall concentrate on Seth’s style of writing.

Written towards the end of the twentieth century, about a period in the middle of century of the century, this novel is very much in the tradition of nineteenth century European realist writing. This is in stark contrast of trend of magic realism pioneered amongst Indian writers by Rushdie and later espoused by the likes of Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Chandra.

Seth offers a hybrid blend of the fictional yet typical with actual historical characters and events. The main characters are imagined, but the fictional politicians Mahesh Kapoor and S.S. Sharma read a letter from the eminently real Jawaharlal Nehru – which indeed, as Seth informs the reader in his prefatory notes, reproduces, word for word, parts of a letter actually sent by Nehru. Nehru later makes an interesting cameo appearance in the novel. There is a lot of Scott in Seth’s book in his style of creating fictional characters within a historical background alongside real life figures. The fictitious city of Brahmpur in the fictitious state of Purva Pradesh is also an interesting blend of fact and fiction. It is not an imaginary city in a nowhere land but clearly in the Hindi heartland in North India with touches of Agra, Benaras and Ayodhya. This is similar to an Eliot’s Middlemarch which incidentally has been referenced by Amit Chatterjee, the character Seth modeled on himself.