A multitude of Indias crowd the pages of Aatish Taseer’s third novel, “The Way Things Were,” an ambitious family epic that charts the dazzling complexity of Indian politics and culture over the past 40 years and beyond. Against a vivid backdrop of hotels and rice paddies and ruined palaces, all bathed in searing heat or drenched in monsoons, Taseer’s characters fall in and out of love with language, India and each other. If “The Way Things Were” is occasionally less convincing as a novel of characters than a novel of ideas, that may be because the ideas happen to be particularly intriguing.
Born in London to an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, Taseer, a journalist himself, recently lamented the loss of India’s relationship to its own language in a New York Times op-ed, “How English Ruined Indian Literature.” Although Taseer writes in English, the novel’s concern with the role of an Indian language begins with the title, “The Way Things Were,” which is a direct translation of the Sanskrit word for history. Not just history, though; “Itihasa,” one of the characters explains, “covers everything: talk, legend, tradition, history,” suggesting that the past is knit together from many different forms of language.
Skanda, an American-educated graduate student, is working on a translation of one such itihasa, the Birth of Kumara, when he is called on to take the body of his estranged father to their native India for funeral rites. Once back in the Delhi of his childhood, Skanda finds himself retracing the steps of his parents’ courtship, marriage, divorce and eventual remarriages during years of political turmoil that begin with Indira Gandhi’s 1975 declaration of emergency and end with the destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu militants in 1992.
In the storyline that takes place in the past, Skanda’s father, Toby Ketu, a famous Sanskrit scholar and the last maharaja of a faded northern province, meets Skanda’s mother, Uma, an airline stewardess from a Sikh family in the throes of aristocratic decay. With his Western polish and erudition, Toby initially sweeps her off her feet, only to disappoint her with his scholarly passivity; eventually she remarries a scion of the new, post-socialist India, during what Taseer names the “Time of Things.” Meanwhile, in the present day, Skanda, who absorbed his father’s love of Sanskrit, wanders aimlessly through his parents’ old social set in Delhi, narrating this family history to his girlfriend Gauri, whose first husband was also a Sanskrit scholar.
The anxiety of influence is palpable, not just in the story of a son who grapples with his famous father’s legacy, but in the story of a colonized nation so long under the thumb of other cultures that it is permanently alienated from its own past. “All they ever taught us, in bloody Tara Hall, was Billy the Bard, the Bronte-Shrontes, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,'” complains one of the Delhi elites at a party in 1975. “They were so systematic, Les Angrez, in stamping out our culture.” Forty years later, Gauri echoes the sentiment, telling Skanda, “We, in India, prefer to take the long road back to India, don’t we? Via the West, preferably.”
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Toby’s — and Skanda’s — fascination with Sanskrit does not lie in the cliché that it is “the mother of all languages,” a nationalistic origin-story so wrongheaded that Toby disdains even to debunk it. Instead, Toby is obsessed with finding the cognates that link Sanskrit to Greek and Latin through a shared Indo-European ancestor, connecting India with Western Europe in a way that is extremely important for Toby, Skanda and, presumably, Taseer. In Taseer’s hands, Sanskrit is more than just a beautiful, ancient form of poetry; it represents an idealized version of Indian identity as cosmopolitan rather than insular, and the road to recovering Indian-ness as one that celebrates multiplicity and diversity.
This is all pretty fascinating, though it is occasionally tiresome to watch the female characters surrounding Toby and Skanda find it so. As a reader, you may occasionally feel reduced to murmuring, along with Uma and Gauri, “Do go on.” Headstrong, narcissistic Uma is a compelling character in her own right, but poor Gauri never evolves far beyond her role as captive audience, only interrupting Skanda to ask, “But, go on: why the meta-elements?” or “But Skanda … what has all this to do with a marriage?” and so on, until bedtime.
There is, however, ample beauty in “The Way Things Were.” If the reader isn’t as interested in listing the cognates for nakta (German nacht, English night) as the characters seem to be, there are always Taseer’s own ravishing descriptions of darkness: “The trees acquire that special density and their white flowers seem to prick the canvas, as though it were a canopy, with nothing but starlight behind.” These, more than the voices of characters that sometimes blend dispiritingly together, demonstrate the power of language to create a world.
Amy Gentry is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas.
“The Ways Things Were”
By Aatish Taseer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 567 pages, $30