‘Not ethical questions, but aesthetic ones': What's on Keshava Guha's mind while crafting a novel

Scroll.in

31-05-2025

Keshava Guha was born in Delhi and raised in Bangalore. His debut novel, Accidental Magic, was published in 2019 and his most recent novel, The Tiger's Share, was published in 2025 Besides novels, Keshava Guha has also written short stories and essays on politics, culture and sport. He is also a journalist and was previously a senior editor at Juggernaut Books.
The Tiger's Share revolves around two women protagonists. After having dedicated her life to achieving professional success in Delhi, Tara is everything her brother isn't: steadfast, independent, thriving. Meanwhile, Tara's friend, Lila, has it all: the great job, the lovely home, the beautiful family. But when her father dies, Lila's brother wastes no time in claiming what's his. Together, Tara and Lila are forced to confront the challenge that their ambition and success have posed to patriarchal Delhi society.
In a conversation with Scroll, Guha talked about why he wanted to write about the conflict between different notions of inheritance, why the novel is a love–hate letter to Delhi, and why as a novelist he is more concerned about aesthetics than ethics. Excerpts from the conversation:
The Tiger's Share is filled with characters who are intelligent, conflicted, and more often than not, a little out of step with their times or families. Could you share with us what drew you to exploring the inner lives of people who are both privileged and deeply uncertain about their place in the world?
Inner life is fiction's particular and exclusive realm; it's what novels and short stories can do, and journalism and cinema/television, on the whole, cannot. That's one reason why the claim, so popular a few years ago, that 'prestige TV is to the 21st century what novels were to the 19th' was a load of nonsense.
Indian fiction in English is, more or less by definition, an elite activity – and yet there can be a certain hesitancy about the non-satirical portrayal of English-speaking elites themselves. The notion that in a poor, unequal society literature ought to be 'progressive' – highlight injustice, advance noble causes –has meant that Indian writers, not only in English, have stayed well away from Henry James/Edith Wharton territory. I saw an opportunity, therefore, to write about a world that I knew and that hadn't been fully explored. The feeling of uncertainty you refer to has two sources: one, moral confusion brought on by the pace of social change, and two, a more specific anxiety about the place of the English-speaking elite in today's India.
Throughout the book, there is a quiet but powerful commentary on what it means to 'inherit' – not just tangible wealth like money, jewellery, property, land, etc, but also values, identities, even moral burdens. What do you think Indian families today are truly passing down to the next generation?
You are absolutely right that questions of 'inheritance' – not only in the material sense – are at the heart of the book. I wanted to write about the conflict between two notions of inheritance that seemed to me to define life in this part of Delhi. First, the idea that wealth belongs to a family, not to individuals, and that means that future, unborn generations too have a stake – this is often cited by rich Indians as a justification for not giving money away to those who actually need it (or, implicitly, as a justification for tax avoidance). 'It's not my money', they say, not mine to give away. One the one hand, this 'Patek Philippe' approach to inheritance – you're not an owner, just a custodian – on the other, an approach to nature which says that all that matters is to accumulate and consume as much as possible right now, and to hell with future generations and giving them a city or planet fit to live in.
So Delhi parents hope to pass on physical property, even if that property is in an ecological hellhole. But a question that animates my novel is, what nonmaterial values are they going to pass on? Brahm Saxena's ambition – to pass on, not only to his children but to anyone who will listen, an awareness of what humans have done to our environment and why we have done it – is a throwback to an earlier era, that of the freedom struggle, in which parents might bequeath idealism as well as apartments.
As someone from Calcutta who moved to Delhi for work, I often find myself caught in a love-hate relationship with this city. In that sense, one of my absolute favourite aspects of your book was its deeply vivid portrayal of Delhi. It wasn't just a backdrop – it felt like a living, breathing, even rotting organism, thick with unbearable heat, tangled politics, and lingering memories. How did your own experiences of the city shape the way you wrote it into the novel?
Like you, I did not grow up in Delhi, and moved there primarily for professional reasons. Very little in the book is directly autobiographical, and I chose to write from a perspective quite different from my own, in that Tara has lived in Delhi all her life and, except as a student or tourist, has known no other city.
The novel is, to appropriate your own phrase, a love-hate letter to the city. I hope that enough of the love is evident. I made lifelong friends in Delhi and found it a much more welcoming place than it is sometimes reputed to be. But the balance sheet of love and hate does not even out – it was ultimately too difficult for me to look past the reality of class segregation, patriarchy, materialism and ecological catastrophe. As Brahm Saxena implies right at the start of the novel, Delhi ought to have been the greatest city in the world.
You have also subtly been able to interrogate masculinity, especially modern Indian masculinity, through characters like Rohit, Kunal, and even Brahm Saxena to an extent. What were you trying to uncover about how men relate to legacy, failure, and self-worth?
Rohit and Kunal are not meant in any sense as representatives or exemplars. There are many kinds of Delhi or Indian masculinity – look at the evolution of someone like Virat Kohli, who used to be thought of as the archetypal macho West Delhi man, and ended up as perhaps India's most influential advocate of the importance of fatherhood. I wasn't trying to uncover anything about men, or Indian men, in general, through Rohit, Kunal or Brahm.
Kunal and Rohit are responding to what they see as threats – the threats posed by their sisters, and by the values of feminism, as well as (although this is explored less directly in the novel) the potential threat of men from less-privileged backgrounds who are more driven. India is more unequal than ever, but the English-speaking south Delhi elite is in some ways less protected than it was before 1991.
At some point in the book, Brahm Saxena's character and narrative arc made me wonder: Can someone be good without being useful? And in a deeply compromised world, is moral clarity enough? Were you also consciously grappling with these kinds of ethical questions while writing the novel, in how you shaped your characters, what they stood for, and the story you wanted to tell?
These questions are above the pay grade of not just this novelist, but of novelists in general. We dramatise ethical dilemmas, but the point is to show life is or might be lived, not to arrive at generalisable moral claims or precepts.
Interviews – and, increasingly, reviews – tend to focus on the moral and political content of novels, to mine them for lessons or controversy. That's appropriate to the form of the interview, which, after all, is meant to be of interest to someone who hasn't read, and may never read, the book in question. I don't mean to diminish the importance of these matters – but they tend not to be top of mind, at least not for me. What is top of mind are not ethical questions, but aesthetic ones – matters of form, above all, prose. Prose is of such primary importance to writers – but we find ourselves reviewed and interviewed with almost no reference to style or form. That is not a complaint; just a reflection on how different the experiences of writing a book and talking about it are.
Staying with Tara for a moment, I found her perspective to be particularly fitting for the story you've told. At the same time, I couldn't help but notice how she vocal she is on being self-righteous and yet her actions, such as distancing herself from 'feminist lawyers', activist causes, amongst others, often seem to fall short of the ideals she claims to uphold. What does this ambivalence say about the pressures on women who 'succeed' within the system but are also expected to critique or resist it?
I'm not sure that I agree that Tara is 'vocal on being self-righteous'. She certainly can be self-righteous, but at the same time, as her father's daughter, I suspect she would reject the label.
Her decision not to become a certain kind of lawyer is down to her awareness of trade-offs. Again, she would disclaim the label, but many people would say that Tara is in fact ambitious. I see her as someone who is morally serious – that is to say, she thinks seriously about moral questions – but not as any kind of earnest 'do-gooder' who, when confronted by a trade-off, always takes the high road even when that means giving up something of value.
To your final question – Tara, as I see her, is more committed to succeeding within the system – on her terms – than to critiquing it, except in private.
Many moments and instances in the novel seem to resist a resolution as characters choose uncertain paths, and readers are left sitting with open questions. Is this refusal to tie things up a conscious choice? Do you see ambiguity, much like our lives, as a more honest form of storytelling?
I don't know if it is more honest, but it is what I prefer, both as a writer and a reader. I love the fact that fiction is a collaboration between writer and reader – that every reader can make up their own mind about whether or not, at the end of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is really going to go back to Osmond.
In the case of The Tiger's Share, some of the lack of resolution has to do with the fact that lives are not lived, and ethical questions not resolved, in the abstract. Tara decides that she cannot choose based on moral principles alone, but has to also consider what her choice means for her relationship with her mother.
What conversations do you hope this novel sparks – in families, among readers, or in public discourse? If you had to sum up the message in one sentence, would would it be?
This is, as your previous question implies, not a didactic novel: it has no message. Of course, I'd be thrilled if it sparks conversations about inheritance, or how to recover idealism, or how to stop and begin to reverse the destruction of our ecology, but it is a novel, not a work of social and political commentary, and I hope it is read that way.