Indian literature has tended to mythologize Delhi as a majestic and contentious land, filled with the rebellious fervor of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and the soul of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi. Prayaag Akbar’s newest novel, Mother India, revitalizes the city by placing it at the centre of contemporary issues, namely the growing use of social media to polarize society.
In a cramped makeshift studio, Mayank works as an editor and designer for Vikram Kashyap, a niche internet celebrity known equally for his “waxy handlebar moustache” and “charmingly implosive turns of anger”. Kashyap hosts “a one-person discussion show on YouTube” on current events and uses Reddit and 4chan as sources of information. It’s a recognizable sight: a right-wing, aggressive, opinionated pundit that fires up the disaffected youth. Mayank doesn’t necessarily believe in Kashyap’s politics (which can be summarized as: India is great, Muslims are invaders, long live Modi), but he does feel a sense of national pride. In Mayank’s view, at least working for Kahsyap is a way of protecting the country while getting paid.
However, Mayank’s worldview suffers a blow when he has to create a video showing India under attack by “Jihadis. Khalistanis. Maoists and missionaries.” The event that spurred the video idea was a Jawaharlal Nehru University student refusing to repeat “Bharat Mata ki jai”, or “Long live Mother India”, a famous rallying call that has been used from freedom-fighting martyrs to orange-clad Hindutva vigilantes. The student’s justification was simple: Your Mother India doesn’t look the same as my Mother India. Kashyap’s goal is to portray this event on social media as an insult to India, arousing the kind of anger that sprouts comments and reshares. After a brief discussion, Kashyap decides that the best route is to show Mother India standing before a map of her country, bruised and bleeding, pelted with stones thrown by two boys wearing white prayer caps. The imagery is gory and blatantly Islamophobic, perfectly catered for Kashyap’s audience. Mayank dutifully animates the clip but makes one crucial adjustment: he changes the face of Mother India into that of Nisha, a stranger he followed on Instagram whose beauty he found striking.
Nisha is in the same city, completely unaware of who follows her on Instagram, instead focused on the luxury Japanese chocolate store she works in. She’s a sales assistant, and much of her job involves identifying the customers who have the means to shell out thousands of rupees for a couple of chocolates. Nisha and Mayank’s lives follow a simple and parallel routine, disarranged only by the minor interruptions of bumping into exes and disappointing the boss.
As views on Kashyap’s video begin to rise to the point of virality, the lives of Mayank, Nisha, and the jailed university student intertwine to tell a story of the chaos, jubilance, and extremism of contemporary Delhi. The cleverness that threads through Mother India doesn’t escape its title either. “Bharat Mata”, literally “Mother India”, is an image that has dramatically surged in popularity over the last decade, fuelled by the rising tides of nationalism in North India. It’s also the name of an iconic 1957 Indian film which was instrumental in crafting the image of “Bharatiya Nari”, the ideal Indian woman; a doting wife, a caring mother, and the stoic subject of hardship. It’s an image that Kashyap and Mayank impose on Nisha, one she publicly and privately rebels against.
Mother India sets the highest stakes—the future of Indian nationalism and growing online aggression that finds physical outlets—in the most mundane characters, and in doing so, asks whether mediocrity is the greatest evil of all, suggesting that perhaps mere complicity is crueller than intention. In Akbar’s world, no one is a mastermind or a cunning calculator; all are just average people who repeatedly make questionable choices that shape the country and the lives of those who live in it.