I entered a world of subversive games and dark sexual politics

The Herald Scotland

4 hours ago

The book seems ready to take you into a world of threatening violence akin to the movie Funny Games. In Michael Haneke's Austrian arthouse horror, two strange young men arrive at the holiday home of a perfect young family before all hell breaks loose.
The sense of dread mounts as these young heavies return the next day with a pair of older thugs linked to gangsters and politicians. The hoodlums want to know why Rekha is ignoring a local gangster's son who loves her, and believe her father should set her straight.
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To make matters worse, Rekha is visiting family in a rural village with no phone or internet connection. Her parents fear something terrible might happen to her, so are soon en-route to the countryside to bring her home to safety.
Don't get too caught up in this 'thriller', though. It's just an Hitchcockian MacGuffin - the plot device Shanbhag uses to lure you into his deconstruction of Indian society.
The scab which the author really wants to pick at is the tension between India's relentless drive towards modernity versus the rise of an intensely conservative and nationalist form of Hindhu populism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
If Harold Pinter was still alive and fancied anatomising this nation of contradictions, Sakina's Kiss is probably how he'd do it.
Harold Pinter (Image: PA)
Initially, Venkat and Viji seem perfectly matched. They have similar tastes, similar backgrounds.
The couple both seem equally modern, despite mocking fellow Indians so influenced by the west that they think 'we can only progress by destroying our own culture'.
Indeed, Viji may earn more than her husband, but we can't be sure as she won't tell him what her salary is, and Venkat is our rather unreliable narrator so we're trapped seeing the world from his perspective, and knowing only what he knows.
The couple's differences emerge after those strange, threatening Pinteresque men arrive, wounding Venkat's sense of masculinity. We soon discover that Venkat has a markedly conservative streak to his character. He's both submissive towards the women in his life - fearing to talk about issues like feminism - whilst secretly longing to dominate them.
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The tensions Shanbhag explores are playing out across the world today as men struggle to come to terms with the loss of power masculinity once conveyed.
This fragile male paranoia is found in everything from Trump's MAGA movement to the rise of online misogynist influencers.
Rekha, who can sense the patriarchy lurking inside her father, even physically overpowers Venkat at one point when he tries to restrain her. He's jealous of other men who have a better relationship with her, like teachers.
Venkat wants to present a liberal veneer to his family, friends and colleagues but inside he's truly and bitterly reactionary.
This isn't a reductive novel, though, where liberal women are good and conservative men are bad.
There are plenty of times when you pity Venkat. He tries to be decent but he's emotionally clumsy. At one point, his wife - disappointed in another of his clunky attempts at connection - pushes him away when he tries to hold her hand. You feel how much he burns with shame and embarrassment.
Any pity for him, however, quickly evaporates when the idea of 'forcing' his wife to hold his hand flashes through his mind. This book is a deft balancing act, at times making you empathise with characters you've no desire to offer empathy to, or prompting you to recoil from characters you've rooted for throughout.
Indian cricket match (Image: PA)
Venkat was raised in a deeply patriarchal family, where wives and mothers were treated as glorified servants at best. The cocktail of tradition and modernity which Venkat has imbibed has given him a spiritual hangover. He doesn't know who he is - thus all the self-help books he reads. Indeed, Venkat longs to be 'transformed'.
Other dominant facets of Modhi's India appear in cameo. Viji talks of the police 'thrashing people to death'. WhatsApp is used as a tool for radicalisation of the masses by both the left and right. The issue of how women dress constantly flows through the book. Patriotism and patriarchy are bedfellows.
Venkat is also that most cursed of creatures: torn between tradition and modernity, he attempts to strike a centrist position. Venkat is always both-siding any debate - even when one side is thoroughly repugnant. All sides just need a hearing, he says, blind to the fact that by indulging extremism he legitimises it.
Indeed, Venkat is the kind of man who has quietly acquiesced in India's slide towards authoritarianism. There would be no Modhi without the Venkats of India. He's not evil - he's just very self-centred and secretly longs for the power men of the past once wielded.
As the book finishes, we find ourselves in the midst of an election. The candidate is a vile sexist. Venkat has been told by his wife and daughter not to vote for him. Who will our anti-hero support? Let's just say, the book doesn't offer much hope of change in India.
The title of the novel is perfectly fitting. It's a reference to a line misread in a letter. Thanks to some terrible handwriting one phrase is misconstrued as 'Sakina's kiss'.
The book itself is one long play on the notion of misinterpretation: what we think is a thriller, is actually a deeply, political - and at least in India - subversive text. Modhi's culture warriors won't be pleased with Shandbhag's covert satire.
The book closes on a distinctly meta note, offering us not an ending but a choice of endings. Like a playful Paul Auster novel, we're encouraged to chose what we'd prefer to happen: not just to the characters, but to the soul of India - a nation in flux, changing every day.
Sakina's Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag is out now from Faber in hardback priced £12.99