2 States

"This is by Chetan Bhagat, who is one of the most commercially successful novelists in India at the moment. I find him a very entertaining and revealing writer. It’s a boy-meets-girl story, about Krish and Ananya, who meet when they’re studying at college. Krish comes from Punjab and Ananya comes from Tamil Nadu. So there is a huge cultural and social gap between the two families. On the back cover, and this is the premise of the book, it says: ‘Love marriages around the world are simple. Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. They get married. In India, there are a few more steps. Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. Girl’s family has to love boy. Boy’s family has to love girl. Girl’s family has to love boy’s family. Boy’s family has to love girl’s family. Girl and boy still love each other. They get married.’ There are some great set-piece encounters between the two families. It’s the kind of book that, if a different writer had written it, would have been a very heavy treatise on identity. What Bhagat is doing is writing about identity in a light and entertaining way. Here’s one bit. They’re at college, and they’re at a graduation ceremony. It’s the first meeting between Krish and Ananya’s parents, so they’re obviously both dreading it. Ananya’s parents arrive ten minutes late – the contrast here is between the brash, noisy Punjabi culture and their more restrained Tamilian culture. ‘Her father wore a crisp white shirt, like the one in detergent ads. Her mother walked behind in a glittery haze. Her magenta and gold kanjeevaram sari could be noticed from any corner of the lawn. She looked as if she had fallen into a drum of golden paint. Behind her walked a 14-year-old boy with spectacles, a miniature version of the MBA men who would get a degree in the evening.’ It’s funny and there’s subtlety to it as well. I admire books which look light, as if they’re very easy to write, while in fact they’re telling you a whole lot more. Also, as a reader, you can either skim through it as a light read or you can enjoy it for the levels of knowledge that lie behind it. In India you’ve got people who look different from each other, who eat different food, who dress differently and, crucially, who speak different languages. There’s no other country in the world that is as linguistically diverse. A North Indian language and a South Indian language will often have no overlap between them at all. You’ve got one-sixth of humanity crammed into one comparatively small land and, for all its problems, somehow it works. Perhaps, in a way, this is what all of these books are about: how that seeming disorder actually does work. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think 2 States will also be interesting to an outsider who is coming to India for the first time because it shows quite well the speed of social change. In one contemporary novel, you’ve got people who are quite happy having a love marriage – getting married to the girl or the boy they want to. Then you’ve got other people, of the same age, who have arranged marriages. You’ve also got people from the older generation who are very culturally conservative, and others who are much more relaxed. In India, at the moment, you have all of those things happening simultaneously. Maybe 20 years ago you could have said India was quite a traditional society. Today that doesn’t really apply. There are parts of India that are still traditional, but there are other parts which are modern."