Review: Worlds within Worlds by Ajay Navaria, translated by Nita Kumar

Hindustan Times

22-05-2025

While Dalit people as a whole are clearly subject to Savarna casteism, the castes within the fold too discriminate against each other with some communities considering themselves superior on the basis of ancestral occupation or present condition. Of course, caste is not limited to Hinduism in the subcontinent and is practised by followers of Islam and Christianity too. This plays out among the narrator's friends who, while being largely Dalit, come from different scheduled caste backgrounds. These differences result in endless spirited discussions and debates during social gatherings. They perfectly illustrate the absence of a single consolidated Dalit identity and underscore contesting voices.
The upwardly mobile narrator, Masterji, is a university lecturer. A liberal, he remains distant from these discussions, avoids confrontation, and interrupts to only advocate for harmony while refusing to take sides. A Khatik by caste, he married a Brahmin woman against his family's wishes. The turbulent relationship ended when Vandana died by suicide. Sangita, his second wife, who is Dalit but not Khatik, knew nothing about his first marriage. When she found out, she left him. The novel is set a month or so after her departure. Masterji is trying to reconcile with Sangita, explain his side of the story and persuade her to return.
In the midst of all this, he is introduced to Ayesha, an alluring sex worker, by a few friends who regularly avail her services. He becomes infatuated with her though he does not fully act on his desires. One of the three dominant caste characters in the novel, Ayesha has no social standing and her profession may be considered immoral but she maintains a grip on her caste superiority and makes incredibly casteist remarks quite casually. Her dynamic with Masterji is fascinating. She is either oblivious to his Dalitness or his social standing negates it in her eyes. She wants his regard and even ingratiates herself to his family during his younger brother's wedding, enthusiastically participating in it like a relative.
One of the novel's strong points is its focus on the socio-cultural aspects of Dalit life with the wedding playing an important part in the narrative. The reader glimpses the inner world of the Khatiks including the haldi rituals, gaari geet (abusive wedding songs) and the bhat ceremony, getting an almost firsthand experience of what holds the community together.
Nita Kumar's foreword highlights this aspect beautifully: 'You can fight back the oppressor in many different ways. Of all the different ways, Navaria chooses the following: quietly be yourself. But show that you are as complex and differentiated, as clever and unfathomable, as deep-rooted and interesting, as problematic and political — as anyone out there that you are being, or may be, compared with. There is not a trace of victimhood or pitifulness here.'
Worlds within Worlds is a novel dominated largely by men. The three central women characters — Vandana, Sangita and Ayesha — are all connected romantically to Masterji. Other women — his relatives — are at the periphery. Since this is a first-person narrative with Masterji's being the only point of view, his notions about women colour how they are portrayed. Enigmatic ciphers with barely any interiority, they are present so he can muse about their mysterious nature. To his credit, though, he is able to have an epiphany of sorts, at the end. He concludes that, when powerful women control slave-like men, their homes became 'pits of conflict.' He pauses and wonders if he is a male chauvinist: 'Was it not the inability of men to accept women's strength that had made pits of conflict out of the homes where women ruled?'
jay Navaria has produced a different kind of 'Dalit literature'; one which asks what next after education and emancipation, and explores how caste is enmeshed with class mobility. Nita Kumar asserts: 'Worlds within Worlds provides an approach to caste mired in globalism and universalism… where older hierarchies of caste are replaced by highly politicised sub-caste identities… within which new battles have emerged, including alliances and cross alliances, conflicts that seem stark and unresolvable, often using the language of religion and always of class divisions.' While the story and the prose in which it is told is simple, the novel works on the level of a discursive exercise. This emerges through the heated but frank conversations between the male characters who are friends, as well as through Masterji's internal trains of thought that frequently interrupt the narrative action. In the end, the novel acts as a lens, refracting multiple lived realities of people as worlds within worlds come together.
Areeb Ahmad is a Delhi-based freelance writer and literary critic. He is @Bankrupt_Bookworm on Instagram.