Our Madhopur Home is a multigenerational family saga narrated through an unusual and carefully balanced set of perspectives, most strikingly that of Laura, the family’s Labrador who observes: “this is not just my tale but also a narrative of bonds and relationships on a broad canvas,” and that the story of the Madhopur home is “not just the tale of a single house but a reflection of all of society.”
Set in rural Bihar, Tripurari Sharan’s debut novel traces the slow transformation of an ancestral house across nearly a century. It follows the lives that unfold within—and gradually move away from—the house at Madhopur, as colonial rule, feudal arrangements, famine, agrarian change, political movements and post-Independence upheavals reshape both family and village life. As children grow up and leave, distances—geographical, emotional, and moral—widen, and the idea of “home” itself becomes increasingly fragile. The fate of the family is inseparable from wider social histories—the rise and gradual unravelling of large landed estates under colonial rule, entrenched hierarchies, poverty, and the steady pressures of modern life.
Our Madhopur Home resists easy classification.
Originally written in Hindi and translated into English by Arunava Sinha with clarity and restraint, Our Madhopur Home resists easy classification. Though it draws deeply on lived experience, it does not present itself as autobiography or autofiction. Sharan—an IAS officer who has served as Chief Secretary of Bihar and Director of the Film and Television Institute of India—keeps his authorial presence firmly in the background. Instead of a single dominant voice, the novel shares narrative authority between two voices: Laura, whose attentive presence spans decades of domestic life, and Dadi, Baba’s wife and the family matriarch whose diary reconstructs the household’s earlier years. The formal choice allows the novel to engage with caste, patriarchy, loyalty, authority, and neglect without sounding defensive or judgemental.
Although the novel bears the name of Madhopur, it quietly refuses to function as a regional novel in the narrow sense. Madhopur operates less as a fixed geography than as a shared composite, standing in for many Indian villages shaped by similar historical transitions. What matters more than place is the idea of home itself: the labour of building it, the negotiations required to inhabit it, the pain of leaving it behind, and the quiet devastation of returning to it emptied. Across three generations, the novel traces a long historical arc—from feudal arrangements and colonial spectacle, memorably evoked through the image of a miles-long carpet laid out to welcome George V, through famine, agrarian change, nationalist politics, the Emergency, and into the early decades of the twenty-first century. These moments are never presented as textbook history. They are felt as pressures on everyday life: interruptions to routine, altered expectations, absences that accumulate over time. History here functions less as a sequence of events than as a constant presence shaping lives.
At the moral centre of this novel stands Sharma ji, or Baba, a figure who is becoming increasingly uncommon: educated, disciplined, quietly principled, a man who studied at Banaras Hindu University and chose to remain rooted in village life when many others left. He commands respect, but his authority is exercised less through speech than through restraint. Silence becomes his governing language. Farming, educating his sons, managing land and animals—all are treated as duties to be discharged with care and severity. Even love, the novel suggests, becomes something postponed, regulated, and earned.
The early contours of Baba’s life—his marriage to Dadi, moral formation, and domestic arrangements—are recovered largely through Dadi’s diary, written decades later at the behest of Tipu, one of Baba and Dadi’s children. Her recollections reach back to her adolescence in the early years following Independence, when she was raised under the authority of her uncle, Chhotka Babuji, who functioned as her guardian rather than her father. A feudal patriarch capable of severity yet prone to tears when Dadi leaves for her marital home, Chhotka Babuji embodies a world in which power and attachment coexist uneasily. Dadi’s account records a domestic order marked by strict controls over girls’ education and mobility; while she later observes that some freedoms have expanded—inter-caste marriages becoming possible, movement less restricted—the grammar of authority remains stubbornly intact. Patriarchy here is not exceptional; it is habitual, transmitted quietly across generations and reinforced within the everyday routines of.
The novel’s social world widens further through figures such as Zahoor Mian, the Muslim caretaker long associated with the household under the patronage of Doctor Sahib, Baba’s father. Zahoor’s life has been shaped by early migration, years of wage labour, and service rather than by ownership or inheritance. Having left his village as a teenager to work in Calcutta’s jute mills, he comes to embody a form of loyalty grounded in endurance rather than possession. Through Zahoor, the novel articulates one of its most powerful insights: life, as he comes to understand it, continues through repeated cycles of arrival and departure—children coming home for holidays, men leaving again for work, brief meetings followed by long absences. It is this rhythm, rather than any moment of celebration, that gives shape to what he understands as the “festival of life.”
Human-animal relationships quietly mirror human failure.
Laura remains as one of the novel’s most effective observing presences. She notices what humans rationalise or ignore. Through her, the novel draws sharp distinctions between care and neglect, attention and absence, attachment and responsibility. Human-animal relationships quietly mirror human failures: love deferred, responsibility passed on, affection unevenly shared. Laura senses, with unsettling clarity, that “there must have been something in his love”—a recognition that explains her pull toward Tipu, who listens rather than commands.
Tipu—whose name inevitably recalls the author’s first name Tripurari—moves through the narrative as a recognisable yet deliberately restrained presence. Like the author, he becomes an administrator shaped by institutional responsibility. His relationship with Baba provides one of the book’s most revealing scenes. Bound by a shared love for plants and animals, father and son nevertheless collide when Tipu encounters his ageing father punishing his body through relentless labour. “You always stick to your views,” Tipu says, almost pleading, “sometimes you should listen to us too.” It is the first time voices are raised between them. The exchange exposes a fault line the novel never resolves: decisions taken without consultation. Authority persists even within affection. Significantly, the pattern repeats itself when Tipu later brings a dog home without consulting his wife—suggesting how patriarchal habits quietly reproduce themselves .
Tragedy, when it arrives, is handled with notable restraint. Within three months of Tipu’s joining the IAS, Hemang—one of Baba and Dadi’s sons—dies young; another son Umang is imprisoned during the Emergency of 1975. None of these events are turned into narrative spectacle. They unfold quietly, altering the emotional climate of the house, and lingering long after. Grief accumulates rather than resolves. Later, memory itself begins to falter. Accusations surface, recognition flickers, and Baba’s inner life grows increasingly opaque. Dementia is presented not merely as illness, but as a disturbance in trust—what the mind chooses to preserve, often grievance rather than comfort.
The novel remains attentive to the slow rhythms of thought, feeling, and endurance.
The novel unfolds in scenes, almost cinematically—unsurprising given the author’s long association with film. Meals, departures, brief encounters, and extended silences are shaped with care. Humour appears sparingly; sorrow follows without slipping into melodrama. Rather than pushing the narrative forward through dramatic turns, the novel remains attentive to the slow rhythms of thought, feeling, and endurance.
The closing movement of Our Madhopur Home is resolutely unsentimental. Baba dies. Dadi leaves. Rooms are locked. Laura remains, watching, until one day she too is gone. What endures is the house itself—no longer a dwelling but an archive. Once vibrant, now emptied, it stands as silent testimony to lives that have passed through it.
Our Madhopur Home is not history in the academic sense, yet it quietly records a long social duration, spanning nearly a century. Through its episodic structure, restrained storytelling, and the steady gaze of a non-human observer, the novel makes social change visible without turning it into argument or thesis. For readers unfamiliar with Indian village life, the novel offers no guidebook or commentary—only carefully observed scenes through which a society slowly comes into view.