Review: Mother India by Prayaag Akbar

Prayaag Akbar’s highly anticipated second novel, Mother India, is about the country’s two largest forces and concerns: its youth and social media. The book attempts to address the ambitions of ordinary young people in present day India, and the dizzying anxieties around the reach and powers of the internet.

Twenty-something Mayank works at a propaganda kitchen, a dingy basement office of a YouTube influencer, where he uses AI to cook up dramatic videos targeting Muslims, liberals, leftists, all the people that his boss Vikram Kashyap deems as the enemies of Mother India – “PhD-waale. Jihadis. Khalistanis. Maoists and missionaries” — because “if they dared to disrespect our mother, they’re going to have to pay.” And so, when Mayank lands on the Instagram profile of a beautiful green-eyed girl from the hills, he decides to use her face, altered only slightly by AI, to represent Mother India in a video. On either side, he inserts drawings of two Muslim boys throwing rocks at her. This video goes viral, unbeknownst to the real-life woman whose face has been stolen for it. Nisha is a salesgirl at a luxury Japanese chocolate store in Delhi where she’s in a secret relationship with her obnoxious boss. Back home, Nisha’s brother-in-law is a local reporter investigating unusual forest fires in the mountains.

This is a tale of perpetrator and victim, of redemption and reclamation. The premise is interesting enough, the slim novel was able to retain my attention for about three quarters of the way, despite its flaws.

The biggest issue with the book is that the characters — a mix of right-wing Hindu nationalist, working-class, middle class, small town, young — never really emerge as real people. For the most part, they remain puppets in Akbar’s hands, and they follow the plot neatly as instructed. For over a decade now, Indian liberals, particular English-language journalists, have tried to decode Hindu nationalists. But writing a right-wing character is a hard thing to do. It’s evident, at the very onset, that the writer cannot stomach his main character. For the most part, he gives Mayank no agency to emerge as a real complicated person. Akbar simply throws is a few details to make his protagonist seem more digestible to liberals, to show an attempt to humanize. But this half-heartedness only makes clearer Akbar’s ideological biases against and social disconnection from the world he is writing about.

The novel opens with a kind of subtle mocking. Akbar tells us that “Mayank was not prone to falling in love... As he assured all who happened on his Twitter bio, appended most recently, with three tricolour and one temple emoji, it was his nation he loved first.” He’s that guy, we’re told with a nudge and a little wink, the type of moron who wells up at cricket matches. But also that he’s a self-aware one because Mayank knows that women “called boys like him a simp. Submissive.” Then we get a flashback to his childhood, which involved an MMS scandal, and are told that Mayank is not a blind bhakt but a questioning Hindu nationalist with a conscience. He does not like bullies, he tends lovingly to stray puppies. He feels bad.

Akbar’s Nisha seems promising at first, but then it’s almost as if she is, in real life, powered by artificial intelligence. Her life — personal, professional and publicly online — is upended but she smoothly carries on. She’s thinking about her boss-boyfriend when the video goes viral. She gets over it quite quickly, and although her stomach turns as she looks at herself in the video — “blood splattered across the frame, thick drops spurting with her frozen in place like some ghastly, ghoulish fountain” — she’s distracted by another personal event. Maybe she’s numbed by all of it happening all at once? Is she dissociating? If this was intentional that you’ll have to use your own imagination for how she’s really feeling on the inside. When she wakes up to an 11-year-old an 11-year-old boy trying to feel her up in a bus, all she thinks – perhaps with resignation or mild irritation, Akbar doesn’t say – is that it would be “impossible to sleep tonight.”

The brother-in-law plotline — a local reporter taking on big business — goes exactly like one would imagine. The book doesn’t really get into what drives local journalism, we don’t get any sense of what the work entails, the risks and the precautions taken, the apathy of editors in big cities, and if not the professional then the personal life of the bravest man in the book. This thread exists, it seems, only for Akbar to nicely tie them all up in the end. Or worse, to fit in another worrying headline into this book of bad news.

What Mother India should have been, or at least could have been, is a profile of masculinity — the awkwardness of ambition, shame, the father-son and mother-son quagmire.

When he was a young boy, his father had once said that Mayank would one day become the prime minister. His father died when he was nine, and growing up Mayank did not know how to fulfil that ambition. This explains the core of the sentimentality of Mayank’s politics and the work he does — “it seemed sometimes to him that this long engagement with Kashyap was to be found somewhere in the tapestry that had started threading out from this moment, as if the tiny trumpet and his grandstanding show could bring Mayank closer somehow to the center of power, the center of safety.”

The most powerful part of the book, the visceral thing on which the whole premise of the novel, the entire plotline, rests is the thing that’s the hardest to talk about: vulnerability. Mayank, Akbar writes, “sensed as well that this shame he carried did not lie that deep. It sat right beneath the surface of his skin, waiting like blood for the smallest opening to ooze out into the world, to show itself. Maybe this shame was in fact his most noticeable feature, the thing that people who knew him saw when they looked into his face, maybe this wound had defined him, had become the very thing that people thought of when they thought of him.”

This isn’t a bad novel. The writing is crisp, often breezy, and witty in bits —

“They heard him promise very loudly that he would turn an unknown party’s mother and sister into one entity.”

Akbar’s debut novel Leila (2017), a dystopian story about a mother searching for her daughter in an authoritarian, segregated, terrifying near-future India, received mostly excellent reviews. Writing openly about something so plausible, much of it clearly underway, was a brave thing to do.

Mother India, though, is nowhere near other books that have explored right-wing characters in recent times: Devika Rege’s Quarterlife or Kunal Purohit’s (nonfiction) H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars.

Ultimately, this novel doesn’t do justice to what it set out to do.

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.