Life & Background
Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta in 1952; his father worked for Bata Shoes and his mother, Leila Seth, became the first woman Chief Justice of an Indian high court. He was educated at Doon School and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, went to Stanford for graduate work in economics, and spent two years at Nanjing University studying classical Chinese poetry — a period that produced his travel book From Heaven Lake, written on a hitchhiking journey from Xinjiang through Tibet to Nepal. He abandoned his economics doctorate. The Golden Gate, a novel in verse, appeared in 1986; A Suitable Boy, at some 1,350 pages, in 1993. He has campaigned publicly against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalised homosexuality until 2018, and has written openly about being bisexual. He divides his time between England and India.
A Suitable Boy
Set in the early 1950s in the fictional north Indian city of Brahmpur, the novel follows four extended families across the first years of independence. Mrs Rupa Mehra is determined to find a suitable boy for her younger daughter Lata, and Lata is choosing between Kabir, a Muslim student she is in love with, Amit, a poet, and Haresh, a practical shoe manufacturer. Around that plot run the Kapoors, the Khans, and the Chatterjis: the abolition of the zamindari system and its passage through the courts, the first general election, communal violence at a religious procession, the decline of a Muslim aristocratic household, and the working life of a tannery in Kanpur. Lata makes her own choice at the end, and it is not the romantic one.
Seth's deliberate choice is nineteenth-century realism: no magic, no unreliable narrator, no fragmentation, a wide social canvas and an omniscient narrator, which puts him closer to George Eliot and Tolstoy than to Rushdie, against whose influence the book reads as a quiet argument. The plainness of the prose is a policy rather than a limitation, and the ambition is documentary — the zamindari legislation, the mechanics of the tannery, the conduct of an election are all rendered with research showing. The Golden Gate makes the opposite kind of gesture, telling a story of San Francisco professionals in nearly six hundred sonnets in tetrameter, modelled on Charles Johnston's translation of Eugene Onegin, and it is the more formally audacious of the two books.
Why Seth Matters
A Suitable Boy is the major realist novel of Indian writing in English and the standard counterweight to Midnight's Children in any question about the direction the field took after 1981 — allegory and magic realism against social realism. The Golden Gate is the outstanding modern verse novel in English. Seth's range across fiction, verse, travel writing, translation, libretto, and the family memoir Two Lives is unusual enough to be a point in itself, and An Equal Music is a rare English novel that takes classical performance as its subject.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Mappings1980
- From Heaven Lake1983
- The Golden Gate1986
- All You Who Sleep Tonight1990
- A Suitable Boy1993
- An Equal Music1999
- Two Lives2005