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3 days ago
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‘Not ethical questions, but aesthetic ones': What's on Keshava Guha's mind while crafting a novel
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.
Deccan Herald
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Deccan Herald
Siblings and strangers
Kudos to Keshava Guha, author of The Tiger's Share, for showing in minute detail the ruthlessness of siblings when they imagine their inheritance is at stake.
Scroll.in
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘The Tiger's Share': In Keshava Guha's second novel, a family man does the unthinkable
It is inheritance, not love, that is a tale as old as time. If Jane Austen is to be believed, marriage, now notorious as the 'culmination' of love, only began to bother with love in the late 18th century. Most of Austen's men, like the imperious Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, are comfortably off. If, God forbid, they are a little beggared, either through disinheritance, like Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, or because of sheer bad luck, like Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, born into nothing, they still end up with a living. Wentworth, in fact, wins a lush fortune through prize money and the navy. Anne Elliot marries him only after he is flush, of course. 'A man without a family, without evident roots, is no one's idea of a son-in-law, whatever his achievements,' says Tara Saxena, the protagonist of Keshava Guha's second novel, The Tiger's Share. Tara's maternal family, however, could hardly afford to be choosy. Her grandfather, having lost a case in which he tried to claim ancestral land he 'believed his brothers had diddled him out of', was left penniless, having spent what he had in a bid to acquire more. The situation was so dire that his legal fees exceeded the value of the 'putative share of the land'. Just as he resigned himself to 'housing a daughter who would grow more spinsterish with each year', a deus ex machina arrived: a man. The novel opens many years later. The man, Brahm Saxena, now a retired chartered accountant who managed to enter the ranks of elite society without a pedigree, convenes a 'family summit' to tell his children they will inherit nothing. Arguably the cruellest thing a wealthy man ever told his progeny: '…now that my duties are done, you can expect nothing from me,' he declares. In dispensing with his family's inheritance, Brahm sets in motion a chain of events that diagnose contemporary India as a selfish, often crass, and acutely unhappy society. Contemporary novelists in India have taken on the laborious task of writing these diagnostic novels, and many publishers' lists abound with books that are partly, if not entirely, about Caste, Climate, and the Cabinet, as if these three capital C's are the only imaginable way to meditate on the country. And imagine they must, for none of the Cs truly affect them; if they did, they'd hardly have time to write these 'theme' novels. As Walter Benjamin warned, '…the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.' Posterity, by any good measure, is inconceivable for theme novels, for they are catered to contemporaneity. There is perhaps an exception in Guha's The Tiger's Share. The haves and their have-nots In a country as poor as India, love comes second to inheritance, even for the idealist. 'All his life, my mother's brother worried about the prospect of other people's claims on his money,' tattles Tara, an accomplished lawyer who sanctifies work as if it were therapy, adding, 'That might be why he has never made any.' Tara's brother, Rohit, and her friend Lila's adopted brother, Kunal, don't earn much either. This, despite everything that has changed in the country over the generations, despite all that has suddenly become possible. Like millennial men of their generation, they're frazzled by the self-evident apocrypha of their victimisation. One hides behind so-called art and apathy, reading only to impress women or imitate white auteurs. The other, a contrarian in khadi, founds a media company named 'Adhimukta Bharat', dons a 'Modi jacket', and invokes monarchist wisdom without irony. What surprises them less than their own inadequacy is that their sisters, who couldn't afford to bemoan the lengths they had, went off and became the very people they had aspired to be. If they weren't so moneyed, we might pity these men. Even after all that supremacy, they're men in stagnant infancy. After her businessman father, who 'spent most of his time at the Delhi Golf Club', dies of a heart attack, Lila texts Tara, telling her she needs her 'as both friend and lawyer'. By now, we understand the theme. Inheritance. Like many 'theme' novels where characters and their concerns stand in for modern India, a gig worker here, a liberal, progressive woman befriending an activist there, Guha needed something recognisably national in scope. He chose the so-called last citadel of the elite. Capital. Most of it, of course, is untaxed. Lila doesn't need the money that could come to her on the conveyor belt of time. 'Nor do I feel entitled to it,' she adds. 'But, my concern is with justice… I don't begrudge him his share. But he's not going to bully him out of mine.' It wouldn't be entirely inaccurate to say that Lila perceives herself as self-made, even while residing in a family house in Golf Links and flitting between America, the UAE, and India at will, making motherhood appear effortless with her entourage of aides. So feckless a character by any moral measure, she makes Tara appear sinless. These characters are instantly recognisable if you've ever had the misfortune of knowing someone who owns a house in Lutyens' Delhi. To trust the ballots is to trust that its residents, who have only ever rented abroad, are citizens this country seems resolute in loathing. Perhaps because they wield all the power, even as they remain convinced of their pyrrhic fate. In a novel of unbeaten sisters and unbuilt fortunes, where sons season protein shakes with their father's ashes and interns moonlight as spies, Brahm Saxena seems positively sane. Tame, if not puerile, in his wish to 'serve other duties' now that he's ticked every box of a family man's life, except leaving behind a will anyone actually wants. The mirrors we live in Although Tara is second-closest to Brahm after his brother Vikram, she knows little about her father, having acquired his history 'piecemeal', turning the novel into an odyssey of learning about her parent anew, one who philosophises like a character from an indie film. He takes Tara to the kachra ka pahar, literally a mountain of trash, a dumping ground in Ghazipur next to a government hospital, and muses on human arrogance; he keeps a framed photograph of Bhagat Singh and another of a brother and sister, two children, the girl he calls his 'leader'; he proffers his sophomoric philosophy, adding that she shouldn't hate anyone. Kunal accuses Brahm of being 'clinically insane'; Rohit alarmedly tells him, 'Daddy, you've gone full Greta'; and Tara's friend is almost grateful that he sees at least one of the two 'principal' projects/targets of India's 'collective sadism': the environment and Muslims. Even if Tara takes him seriously, Guha does not insist that the reader must. Brahm's clinical, sometimes grandiose declarations never quite dispel the charge of senility, and his corporatised deportment with his ménage can seem loveless. After all, to think of care as duty is a precarious endeavour. The cynical reader will dismiss Brahm's ecological concern as a geriatric reflex, a riposte to the ever-nearing collision with fatality. Much of what he proclaims carries the affected, maudlin diction of a countryman newly learning to care, disclosing the charade of naïve incrementalist politics that feigns trouble is far away. For a risible character, Guha still manages to build Brahm as an enigma. He is the only character who startles us, just as we are surprised to have cared about him at all. No one in The Tiger's Share is easy to like. Even Tara, who often insists on her affability, flails as a moral character with her righteousness. When she rejects a client accused of rape, it is not only because she knows he is guilty, but because she refuses to be a 'woman lawyer', having worked hard to avoid the kismet of one: 'For eighteen years I had fought to avoid becoming one of them, and I was closer than ever to winning.' The respectable don't come off well in Guha's world, but neither do the indifferent. Everyone gets what's coming to them, even if it's just a mirror. He has spared no one, not even us, his readers. Until now, the gaze of the so-called theme novelist has been directed elsewhere. At someone who warns us of our complicity, our indifference, the casual ease with which we trade material reconstruction for identitarian politics. The Tiger's Share does not risk taking anyone lightly. Perhaps the enemy of our enemy is not our friend, especially if they still have capital to spare.
The Hindu
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Author Keshava Guha on his new novel, The Tiger's Share
Keshava Guha's debut novel Accidental Magic (2019) created a fictional world of Harry Potter fans from different parts of the world and varied cultural backgrounds. His second and recent novel, The Tiger's Share (Hachette India) revolves around the lives of two families in Delhi, the inheritance wrangle between successful sisters and entitled brothers, environment degradation and social realism. A writer of fiction and literary and political journalism, Delhi-based Guha says reading fiction is his single, favourite activity. 'I have no illusions about fiction changing the world, it's a private path, a private artistic pursuit that is like fulfilling a deep impulse,' says the author who was raised in Bengaluru and studied history and politics at Harvard. Excerpts from an interview: Q: What inspired you to write this story? A: The book started with the ending in terms of the idea. I just had this idea of an individual taking a drastic step because he was so appalled by what humans had done to the environment. Then I tried playing around with that and everything else took shape around that idea. It is a bit of a mystery where ideas come from for fiction. I don't sit down and plot it in a thorough way or anything like that. Q: There's a Victorian feel to this novel — the storyline, the connection to some characters. A: Absolutely, in a few ways. In Victorian England, the novel was kind of at the heart of at least middle-class culture and one of the roles which the novel played was helping people understand social change as it was happening. A big influence on this book in particular is Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South (1855), a really graphic account of workplace industrial pollution and the effect it was having on the world. Also, a lot of these Victorian novels do have prominent heroines whether they are written by men or women. But those heroines are living lives that are much more circumscribed. So, you are kind of using the form of the Victorian novel in many ways, although it's much shorter in a very different context. I do think that it is a very adaptable form, the novel. Q: In a statement about the book, you said that you've tried to do something 'old-fashioned but of enduring value'. Please elaborate? A: To me, this is what is unique about novels as a form. If you think about other forms like painting or classical music or even poetry, the form becomes outmoded very quickly. So, if you listen to Mozart, Schubert or even Beethoven who was very modern for his time, you couldn't try to compose like that today. On the other hand, Victorian fiction, or say, writers such as Flaubert or Tolstoy — it is in the nature of the form that it can constantly be renewed with new material because it is so suited to understanding whatever is happening right now. In the age of the Internet, people thought ebooks would replace printed books; they never did. So, it really does have that enduring appeal and that ability and capacity to absorb new material and things. Q: Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth. So much in this novel seems real. A: The people in it, the families in it are entirely made up. I also wanted to write about issues and problems and situations that exist. To come back to what you said about the great lie that tells the truth, the lie angle is also important in that you can do things in a novel which you can't do in a documentary or journalism. One of those is to write about people who are really not typical, to show how things could be different. If you think about things like the patriarchal aspect of the inheritance disputes, that is very much provoked, not by my own family but by families that I saw in Delhi over and over again. My view of Delhi is that it is completely driven by material ambition, the values are entirely material and they are to do with having fancier cars and more expensive apartments. Delhi is a city that is all about exclusion. It is kind of explicit in the book. I was also struck by the contrast between those values and the kind of non-material idealism of the pre-Independence generation. Q: What are you working on currently? A: India has had this crazy sort of brain drain over the last 10 years or so; it's been a little different from earlier waves of migration and now you have so many Indians who are influential, in so many positions of power around the world. I've become interested in this new phenomenon: to be global, the idea of a global Indian elite. It'll be more of a global book. Q: Has your writing been influenced by any authors? A: In terms of conscious influence — all the Victorian novelists, in particular George Eliot. Among more recent writers, Australian Shirley Hazzard has been a big influence at the level of prose; the other is Penelope Fitzgerald, Booker Prize winner, who wrote incredibly short books and who had an amazing amount of daring, writing about anything. The interviewer is a Bengaluru-based independent journalist.
The Guardian
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Tiger's Share by Keshava Guha review – hopeless sons vs brilliant daughters
In Delhi the seasons are 'human-fucked', explains Tara Saxena, the narrator-protagonist of The Tiger's Share. Autumn is the 'season of smogs and mellow murderousness'; once the smoke arrives in October, 'we could no longer see the sky'. Over summer the Loo, a dry 'caramelising' wind, slurs through the city, while inside their flats people 'lived as cheese and chocolate do in India, refrigerated'. Now and then comes the brief respite of rain. In its aftermath, people head out into the parks to enjoy the momentary cool, the only time when the air is 'useably fresh, like a banana that is only one-third rotten'. Food-related imagery abounds in Keshava Guha's second novel; you are never allowed to forget that all things – produce, people, every species – are perishable, that from the moment of our birth the decay is inbuilt, and that such a truth is all the more exaggerated in a city where trash mountains leaking toxic gases rise up next to hospitals where babies take their first breaths. The Tiger's Share opens with a family summit organised by Tara's father, Brahm Saxena, her Baba, during which he announces to Tara and her younger brother, Rohit, that he has decided to relinquish all obligations to them. 'I will not be a burden on you,' he says. 'But now my duties are done, you can expect nothing from me.' In the remaining years of his life he feels compelled to find and then act upon his deeper, more essential purpose – what he owes not to his family but to the world itself, in particular his own beloved and polluted country, which sees 'every tree, every bird suffering, as if it has been told it must live but is stuck in a place no longer fit for living'. 'Daddy, you've gone full Greta,' is Rohit's alarmed response. The resulting narrative unspools over the year that follows their father's ecological awakening, with all the ways it alters the course of things for Tara and Rohit. She is a very successful lawyer; as an adult, he has mostly failed and flailed about, existing in his sister's shadow – or, at least, this is how Tara sees it. Brahm Saxena is the stable moral centre of Tara's universe. If their family have a true religion, such belief 'is rooted in him'. In The Tiger's Share, Guha offers a wide, chaotic and morally ambiguous portrait of contemporary Delhi society (stratified across caste and class, but mostly skewed towards those in more privileged, affluent circumstances). Its breadth and ambition – with even the most minor characters fleshed out, each bookshop or park or neighbourhood visited an opportunity for Guha to thicken the text with some historical, political context – has echoes of Zadie Smith's early maximalist style. Only Brahm Saxena remains untainted and morally pure. On his desk he keeps a photograph of Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary hero of the Indian independence movement who was executed in 1931 for killing a police officer (his intended victim was a police chief responsible for the death of an Indian writer, but he got the wrong man). It is Singh whom Brahm Saxena looks to for inspiration. 'You could say he achieved nothing,' he admits to Tara. 'But what he did was make people think, My Country is worth giving my life for.' Two questions propel the narrative onwards. The first: what is it that Brahm Saxena will do? The second: why is this moral spirit so lacking in the sons of men like Brahm Saxena? 'What was it with this generation of Indian men?' Tara asks rhetorically. 'Why couldn't fathers raise sons?' This theme of apparently hopeless or even corrupted sons versus brilliant daughters is reinforced through a parallel pair of siblings who know the Saxenas. Kunal and Lila's very rich father has just died and a battle for inheritance is playing out, with Kunal convinced he deserves the lion's share. One problem with Indian men today, Lila tells Tara, is that they think they are lions, social creatures who are loved and looked after by their lionesses, only to discover in adulthood that they are really tigers, solitary animals who exist in a 'zero-sum game' of scarcity, with their sisters out to get them as much as anyone else. Over time, Rohit becomes a kind of anti- or inverted Baba, taking to YouTube – a male trope we now recognise all too easily – to proclaim that man should not be content with survival but must instead strive for 'thrival', his own coinage, focusing on our own species' prosperity rather than, say, animal conservation. Meanwhile Kunal's company tries to create its own desh-bhakti curriculum to roll out in government schools. Desh-bhakti translates as patriotism (and these curricula really exist), but, as Tara notes, 'everything depends on what that means'. Was Bhagat Singh's revolutionary action patriotism? Could we argue that every environmental or ecological protest – something that becomes an increasingly important theme in the book – is a form of broad patriotism? It is testament to Guha's adroit, understated authorial touch that we are never given conclusive answers to such complex questions about patriotism, nationalism and how India's identity is changing, only a range of responses acted out through his characters. And while we are chained to Tara's perspective, through the subtlest of hints we start to wonder whether she, too, is failing to live up to her heroic father's ideals – such as when she chooses to distance herself from those female lawyers who defend women in rape trials, since 'no one took them seriously'. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion After the heavy summer rain, many trees fall down across the Delhi avenues designed by architect Edwin Lutyens – 'Planted while the roads were being laid out a century ago, they had grown tall enough to cover from end to end, in death, the roads they had been designed to ennoble.' The great trees fall and out of the wreckage it is up to the next generations to decide how they want to begin again. The Tiger's Share by Keshava Guha is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
