A Novel of India’s Identity Crisis

Quarterlife by Devika Rege. Liveright, 416 pages. 2024.

In 2011, an anti-corruption activist began a hunger strike in Delhi, inspiring protests all over the country to pressure the central government into accountability. The following year, a twenty-three-year-old woman was raped and murdered by several men on a bus in Delhi; it wasn’t an isolated incident, but it received national and international media attention, and protests erupted again over women’s safety in public. A year later, the streets were filled with Pride marches when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a colonial-era law that criminalized gay sex. And a year after that, in 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), headed by Narendra Modi, won the general election in a landslide victory, ending a decade of dynastic, stagnant rule by the Indian National Congress.

These are just a few of the defining events of the twenty-first century in India, and likewise they are just a few of the instances that Devika Rege has named as inspirations for her debut novel Quarterlife, a sweeping document of the country’s transformation. “There is nothing like an ‘India’ book,” she insisted in an interview last year, yet this is as close to an “India book” as one can imagine: set a few months after the BJP’s victory, it is an attempt to capture the entire contemporary Indian political landscape, “something that felt—in one’s home, and yet in one’s city and the nation and the world at the same time,” as Rege put it.

When the emperor Meiji came to power in Kyoto after ending the Tokugawa shogunate, he introduced so many reforms over the next forty-five years that one expat supposedly claimed it felt like he had been alive for four centuries. The hyper-acceleration of change in India over the last several decades often makes me think of this remark. My grandparents—who grew up in small riverside villages in Andhra Pradesh and now live in its de facto capital city, home to some eleven million people as well as Google’s largest office outside of the United States and Amazon’s Indian headquarters—certainly feel the same way. Even my parents, raised in middle-class cities that no longer existed by the end of the twentieth century, probably sympathize. It sometimes feels like time itself works differently in India. The question of what constitutes our home and our identity is constantly being deferred in this shuffle of perpetual remaking.

Quarterlife is a story of a group of people—all carefully chosen representatives across a spectrum of religion, caste, class, and political leanings—engaged in this effort to keep up amid the shuffle, to get to grips with the present. If the country has an identity crisis, the characters function to bring the stakes of this identity crisis to life. The ensemble of people in the story embodies, as one review noted, the “many inequalities [that] can be glossed over in the name of common nationhood.”

The novel’s setting is 2014, and the BJP—barely fictionalized here as the Bharat Party—has just taken control of the country’s central government. Introducing the story is Naren Agashe, a disillusioned former Wall Street analyst who has returned to India embittered by his experience of racism and failed attempt to find a sense of belonging in the West, yet excited about India’s future and the energy of potential and ambition he senses there. His younger brother, Rohit, is a charming, restless young filmmaker running an indie studio in Bombay and eagerly trying to “get the scent of what’s next.”

Rohit’s social world makes up the majority of Quarterlife’s cast; the novel flits between their perspectives and others. There are Rohit’s childhood friends Cyrus, the queer Parsi, and Manasi, the ambitious young marketing executive with a Mahar father. Cyrus’s ancestors settled in Bombay from Iran sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries and enjoyed economic and social comforts, including religious tolerance, during the British Raj; they now live in leafy enclaves in the old city, making art and running some of the Bombay’s most iconic local establishments. Manasi’s ancestors are considered the original inhabitants of Maharashtra but long suffered discrimination as “untouchables”; B. R. Ambedkar, perhaps the most well-known Mahar, made caste abolition his life project, and now people like Manasi—middle-class, one of the first in her family to be educated—feel conflicted between embracing their background and transcending it. Then there is Rohit’s colleague Gyaan and Gyaan’s girlfriend Ifra, an inter-religious couple who lend each other Hannah Arendt books. Gyaan is a Hindi-speaking Delhiite always eager to speak for minorities, and Ifra comes from a wealthy intellectual family who settled in the Muslim areas of Bombay after Partition.

This collective embodies, as best as possible, Rege’s idea of being inside one’s home and also in “one’s city and the nation and the world” at the same time. They all have a stake in the new India; they all grew up in the nineties, when, as Rege has said, “politics was about the nine o’clock news” and no more; the rise of the BJP has forced them all to reckon with who they want to be, and how they want to engage with the new world. 

Into this scene arrives Naren’s former college housemate Amanda Harris, a dissatisfied young woman from a small New Hampshire town where her family has lived for nine generations. She decides that her begrudging love for her boyfriend and family, and the pull she feels toward her New England roots, are really “the outcome of an elaborate conspiracy” between her family and “her school, church, society, all of America.” She leaves them behind and arrives in Bombay with a fellowship to work for an NGO in Deonar, supposedly home to India’s largest dumping ground: “a century of trash” and about half a million people, all crowded into a fifth of a square mile.

At the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year, Rege described sensing, around the time of the BJP’s ascent, “fatigue with the existing liberal world order, this desire for change without knowing what exactly we’re asking for.” This sentiment reverberates most clearly through Rohit, who is utterly dissatisfied with his friends’ responses to the threat of nationalism (“To confess to anything other than dread around Gyaan or Ifra is to announce oneself as a moral reprobate”). At the same time, he is wary of his brother’s excessive enthusiasm about returning home, which is the result, he feels, of a failure not just to find a sense of home elsewhere but to understand what it means to belong somewhere at all. He’s equally embarrassed by Amanda’s brand of idealism and rebellion. “If the national election revealed how out of sync he is with his soil, Amanda and Naren have exposed the limits of belonging elsewhere,” he realizes.

And so Rohit sets off on a “search for a heritage” that might reveal some middle ground between his friends’ progressivism—their rejection of the new India—and his brother, who got “lost trying to claim a world that was never his to own.” He takes a trip along the Konkan coast, visiting his family and learning about their history in the upper-caste, administrative class of the Maratha Empire. Along the way, he soaks in the lush green landscape bound on the east by ghats and on the west by the Arabian sea, listening to stories of how Chatrapati Shivaji brought glory to the region in the seventeenth century by reviving Sanskrit and Marathi. Rohit’s relatives claim that their ancestors helped Shivaji resist the Mughals, who are widely mistaken in Maharashtra and the north of India as having been Islamic fundamentalists. 

On this roots tour, Rohit meets Omkar Khaire, a Marathi filmmaker working at a regional commercial film studio and a volunteer with a Bharat Party youth league. Rohit is drawn to Omkar’s humble background and his deep, simple love for his soil and for Shivaji. He introduces Rohit to his hometown of Wai, a village on the banks of the Krishna River famous for its Ganesha temple, where Rohit gets a sense of the internal tensions within Hindu nationalism. The BJP relies on its regional ally in Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena (fictionalized here as the Marathi Bana), but the relationship between the Shiv Sena and the BJP has been souring for years, as Marathi loyalists have little in common with Hindi-speaking migrants from the north, other than their self-identification as Hindus and their opposition to the Congress party.

Rohit sees, and is perhaps a little too fascinated by, what his friends refuse to acknowledge: the promise and power of small towns like Wai. In this other Maharashtra, which the Shiv Sena tried to cleanse of Rohit’s and Ifra’s English-speaking Bombay, people shoot big-budget films that attract the attention of Bollywood celebrities even as their social worlds revolve around religious traditions thousands of years old. Here, a place where bus drivers stream movies on their mobile phones at roadside dhabas drinking overboiled chai, and producers ask why “art” should mean importing French and Iranian films, is where the cultural capital of the new India lies. Rohit begins to feel like Omkar is the key to his search for home, a chance to find the future in the past. Poor Omkar, with his earnest devotion to the heartland and his equally earnest distaste for everyone from Bihari migrants to upper-caste Marathas, seems far too useful for the relationship to be a real friendship, but Rohit loves him in his way: “To know Omkar is to know this world.”

The book’s central conflict arises when Rohit brings Omkar to his studio and tries to enlist his friends’ support in producing Bappa, Omkar’s film about Ganesh Utsav and Ganesha devotees—a film that will collaborate with the youth league where Omkar volunteers. His friends are disgusted by his proposal, and when they fail to convince Rohit that it’s unethical to support the film, they plead with him that, professionally, it’s “suicide.” But Rohit is unconvinced. “It’s like he is allowed this one identity and it has to be cool, consistent and socially aware,” he thinks. But it’s not enough anymore.

The tension is brought to a boil during one very long conversation between the entire group that takes place at the Agashe family’s apartment. In what feels like a contemporary India 101 class, the characters face off, embodying all their class, caste, linguistic, religious, and political differences. They debate capitalism, socialism, Hinduism, colonialism, Gandhi and Ambedkar, Shivaji and the Mughals, the purpose of politics, and the importance of “at least . . . feel[ing] guilty.” The conversation can be excessively expository: there is little sense of the shared context you might expect to exist between people who grew up together in the same place. It’s as if this is the first time they’ve ever talked about, or even thought about, the world they live in, making them seem like slightly exaggerated types in service of the novel’s critique. Finally, heartbroken and distressed by Rohit’s defense of Omkar, Ifra—the character in Quarterlife who feels most alienated by growing nationalist fervor—leaves.

Shaken by this rift, Manasi frets to Naren, with whom she has begun a romantic relationship, in bed later that night. What is it all for? Should they “feel guilty,” as Amanda insists everyone should, about their privilege, about Manasi’s fancy job at Coca-Cola, or Naren’s family money from mining? Should she pay more attention to how their caste difference affects their relationship? “Why shouldn’t I be happy? Is that the same as asking why I shouldn’t be selfish?” But then later, she thinks, what about our dying planet, “all the loss and sickness and death”? 

The impossible, exhausting, and universal question of how to be good is, in Quarterlife, compounded by the problem of Hinduism, which carries the baggage not only of millennia-old caste oppression but also, increasingly, of the BJP’s most recent antidemocratic homogenization efforts—jailing political opponents, raiding newsrooms that publish criticism of Modi’s regime, and arbitrarily revoking visas and legal protections for minorities, among many other policies. It’s a project made all the more hysterical by Hinduism’s essential variability. Omkar presses all the usual right-wing talking points: Hinduism is not a religion but a five-thousand-year-old culture; nationalist doesn’t mean fundamentalist (“Please, we are not the Taliban”); unity is essential above all. Gyaan points out that the BJP’s Hinduism is more influenced by European fascism than real Hindu values or ideology. Naren, whose faith lies only in progress and money, praises the BJP for their “political masterstroke,” whatever their belief system. None of them, unfortunately, are really wrong—and no consensus is (or possibly could be) arrived at about what Hinduism is.

This slippery multifacetedness is emphasized by the various modes of Hinduism that Rege’s characters encounter—the “simple living and high thinking” touted by Brahmins holding forth on humility and “values” in Bharat Party headquarters; the political maneuvers of the Mahar party taking advantage of “the Bharat Party and the Maratha Bana calling off their alliance” in Deonar; the corporate gamesmanship of the swanky Bandra Kurla Complex office park, where humility is dead, and “Vedanta recognizes no sin, only error”; the liberal secularism of Bombay’s progressive galleries and studios. Characters fret over the middle-class Brahmin tendency to “work as if work itself was the reward,” debate the implications of their own consumerism, mourn the anchors of their parents’ generation (the “Gandhian clamp on their balls”), and yearn for a childhood “when being progressive and Hindu weren’t antithetical.”

To want to be a good Hindu without quite knowing what this means, to not be satisfied by the progressive’s willingness to denounce Hinduism wholesale, can be painful, constricting, suffocating. Rohit is uncertain, worried about being on the wrong side of history, yet itching to be what he views as authentic; as a result, he wins nothing. His friends abandon him and quit the film studio in protest of Omkar’s film, and even Omkar grows to hate him, accusing his interest in the cause as that of a “child’s fixation on a new toy.” Characters from nearly every single interest group, from Gyaan to Omkar, wrestle with the insecurity borne of longing to be the right kind of Indian, but the insecurity of the nationalist is especially tragic. They insist that this or that is the one thing we all have in common, because to admit the truth—that there is not one thing that all Indians have in common—is tantamount to admitting that there is no such thing as India. This is scary, and sad.

Spiritual homelessness abounds in Quarterlife, as it does in India everywhere. Perhaps the most interesting, and most moving, instance of this homelessness in the novel is the story of Bombay itself. Buried in Rege’s study of the transforming Indian is another of the fading Bombayite. Shivaji’s supporters in the Shiv Sena overrode Bombay around the time Rohit and his friends were born and officially changed the city’s name to Mumbai, but Bombay has always been a city for the outsider, the migrant, the minority. After Ifra walks out of the Agashes’ apartment—the last time she ever speaks to Rohit—she goes to meet her family at a gallery opening in South Bombay and stands on the terrace thinking about her grandparents, who were among the thirty-five million Muslims who chose to settle in India after Partition.

The only identity she has ever felt at home in is that of a Bombayite, a lover of printed tiles and creaking balustrades and monsteras by rattan chairs in which you spend an afternoon reading Manto. Does she have her grandparents’ courage? . . . Love was what held her grandparents here through Partition, but the city she loves—a Bombay starting at Flora Fountain in town and ending at Haji Ali’s white dome before coming up twice for air, once in Bandra and then in Juhu—is as translucent today as Meher’s hands, as wispy as Tariq’s hair, as wasted as Bobby. It has been almost two decades since the Marathi Bana changed the city’s name to Mumbai, and if Bombay doesn’t exist, the Bombayite is living on borrowed time. She sighs for the sepia city to which no passport can carry her. Twin tears fall past the ledge and turn to air before they reach the ground. She is already in exile.

For Ifra, Bombay represents an entirely different way of life; a cosmopolitan center as distinct from the rest of India as it is from London or New York. It is this Bombay that the Hindu nationalists’ obsession with “unity” threatens with obsolescence.

The climactic event of the book is the final day of the Ganesh Utsav festival, a whirlwind event in which massive Ganesh idols (or rajas, as Omkar angrily corrects Rohit) are carried in processions from all over the city and submerged into the sea. The scene is reminiscent of a Balzac novel, witnessed from the streets of Shivajinagar, from Chowpatty beach, from a mosque, from tailor shops and slums, from the Koli fishing village, from a helipad on Billionaires’ Row, from the former mayor of Bombay’s perch at the Orient Club. The collective—maybe in a sense national—voice conjured here departs from the rest of the book’s narration style, but thematically, it is of a piece with the bird’s-eye view that Rege maintains throughout. The characters introduced in this scene call to mind the migrant stone cutters and “surplus children” in Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness, who enter for a paragraph in order to further a critique of capitalism before disappearing from the story. On the night of Ganesh Utsav, dozens of people, “some in saffron headbands, others in fez caps,” take to the streets across the city to attack cops, fire into mosques, and throw acid and moonshine. 

In the book, as so often in real life, politics can make unlikeable and sometimes flat people of everyone. Naren, who survived a suicidal impulse and came to India looking for a place to belong, turns into a man who works for a corporation modeled on the corrupt, multibillion-dollar Ambani empire; likes to play mind games with his Indian employees; and leverages “that he is male, has a surname that spells pedigree, and speaks an Anglophone speech out of a fair face” to his advantage in the corporate world. Rohit, who feels his life “hovering in an endemic superficiality that goes by the labels of ‘hip’ and ‘cool’” and longs for self-discovery, turns into a man accused by Gyaan of being “one of those Bollywood nationalists peddling films in which all the Muslims are terrorists and the cops are Hindu.” Omkar initially insists, touchingly, that “when I am shooting, I have no thought that I am an Omkar, a Khaire, a class or caste Hindu. I am the camera!” But by the time Ganesh Utsav takes place, he has dismissed Rohit and his friends as “stains on the Hindu name” and leaves them to be attacked by mobs; the last we hear of him, he is making propaganda films for the Bharat Party. His evolution recalls Ben Lerner’s antagonist Darren in The Topeka School, who spends most of the novel as a tragic, socially awkward loser before his story abruptly ends with him wearing a MAGA hat at a protest.

In Rege’s defense, she writes in Quarterlife’s first-person epilogue that “to call this a novel or a book implies more closure than I wish to claim.” In interviews, she’s used the word ethnographic, a term that might better capture her ambitions, which are more sociological than narrative. Rege was drawn to the novelistic form, but her research process was inspired by James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book of immersive reportage about the lives of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression. She admires the way Agee “put aside what he knows as a young man from Harvard and Exeter” in order to give his characters “dignity.” Rohit and Amanda, too, are infatuated with their subjects’ dignity. If this seems fetishistic at times, it’s also perhaps the only way to reveal all the contradictions of India, of Hinduism, of politics and millennial angst, of the “many-headed snake” that is the nationalist party.

Sometimes it feels to me, too, like India is the entire world. Not just because it is the world I grew up in, intermittently, but also because it’s a place whose future affects everyone—because “the coffee here is as good as in Paris, the sushi in Tokyo, the bagels in New York,” and also because the creeping fascism of Modi’s BJP has only worsened in the years since Rohit met Omkar. In my feeling of being both an insider and outsider, I sympathize with the New Englander and with the Bombayite, with the impossibility of calling somewhere home when it’s the “city and the nation and the world” at once. Rege’s epilogue avoids prophesying about the fate of this expansive world, attempting to give it some ambiguity. This move does not so much counter as temper Quarterlife’s overwhelming feeling of despair: “The novel, much like the night at its climax, was merely the eye of a needle through which many threads come rushing, only to run on, opening ever outwards.”