Literary low marks, yes. But Two States scores with a Bollywood-folksy style of painting middle-class India.
There are two reasons why. Firstly, reading Bhagat’s novel—about the romance between a Punjabi boy and a Tam-Bram girl who not only have to woo each other but their respective families—I felt this was the first Indian novelist I had encountered who was writing with his roots in popular Hindi cinema. As the country’s most powerful form of popular culture, it’s surprising there has not been been more of this kind of writing.
Two States is a romantic comedy; think of it as a desi Father of the Bride or My Best Friend’s Wedding, of a kind more likely to be seen on film than in Indian fiction. The plot is simple, even trite—the clash between the Hindu-reading, early-to-bed Tamils and the price-tag-watching, whisky-drinking Punjabis; the determined young couple winning over all odds to reconcile their families. And there is a filmy melodrama to it (our heroine saving the day at a wedding gone wrong; the Tamil father-in-law making a tear-jerking speech in the climax). Like in popular Hindi films, the characters, are broad-brushed, lacking in nuance. But Bhagat is an amiable storyteller with a lively sense of plot, who wields his formulas with humour. Reading it is like watching a fun Hindi film.
Chetan Bhagat’s greatest strength, however, lies in the subjects he picks and his style. Two States portrays middle-class India with its everyday prejudices (the pressure on children to perform, the desire to be fair-skinned, the lavish expense on weddings), and it does so in ordinary, workmanlike language. Even the jokes and social observations feel like the ones your college friends would have made rather than a great wit. This is no writing with fireworks; Two States instead has the accessible charms of the girl next door. As a result, the novel seems to reflect how people really talk, what they truly feel. The French novelist Stendhal once said that the novel must be a mirror to society. Two States, in its own way, is such a mirror.
This brings me to my second reason. Last year Hartosh Bal, a journalist at Open, was criticised for writing that the current crop of Indian fiction in English did not merit being banned, as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses had been. It was a mischievous argument which cloaked Bal’s real point (also mischievous)—that contemporary Indian fiction wasn’t interesting enough. The core of Bal’s argument was valid. In the last few years, there has been remarkable fiction from other parts of the subcontinent—Tahmima Aman’s A Golden Age, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (the last two by my company, Random House)—and Indian literary fiction from the post Seth-Ghosh-Lahiri generation hasn’t matched these in critical acclaim.
Why this is so would in itself need an article. One reason could be that, although there are extremely talented young writers in the country today, their fiction rarely mirrors the world around us in a way that feels true. Bhagat’s novel, although it may be less sophisticated and not as well-written, stands in marked contrast to this. Two States is one of the few recent Indian novels to reflect the lives of the young middle-class; indeed this seems to be Bhagat’s raison d’etre as a writer. The novel has its flaws—the story being told in flashback from a psychiatrist’s couch is unnecessary, the narrator’s father needed more work—but these cease to matter in the face of its easy charm, good humour and above all, its need to be relevant and real. Perhaps in any other country, Bhagat would have been just another mass-market writer. In India today, he is also someone who is telling stories no one else is. This is what makes his work not just entertaining, but surprisingly important.
(Chiki Sarkar is the editor-in-chief of Random House India).