Navigating the India maze with Prayaag Akbar’s ‘Mother India’

Manisha Gangahar

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Compellingly provocative, strikingly incisive, sharp witted and ironical, ‘Mother India’ does a daunting task — it critiques. The novel, through a gripping account of two young people’s lives in urban Delhi, delves into the world of constructing reality and manufacturing consent under the wraps of ordinary and the not-so-ordinary. Like in his critically acclaimed debut novel ‘Leila’, Prayaag Akbar fuses the art of storytelling and the craft of commenting in his second.

Although the age-old metaphor as the novel’s title might become a hinder, yet the cover is fairly suggestive of what Akbar might be offering in the 168-page book — an unusual fictional story, but quite real in today’s India. The recurring trope of Mother India has not merely punctuated but has been revered in India’s multi-layered and convoluted nationalist discourse, and Akbar attempts to frame the shifting sites and sets of nationalism in ‘Mother India’. The symbolism has inspired iconic depictions, but Akbar draws out an alternative exposition and how it could impact our existence.

The novel explores how Mayank and Nisha, struggling to make a decent living, navigate the complexities of today’s times, when Nature, technology, faith, even humanity, all are abused by those who can, and will. Mayank works for a right-wing content creator’s grimy basement studio and is assigned to design a video clip portraying a threat to “Mother India” from “PhD-waale. Jihadis. Khalistanis. Maoists and missionaries”. Nisha is a salesgirl at an exclusive chocolate store and has “worked on herself” to fit the job profile, but she must still note the advice: “A pretty girl like you, I know you must be on social media all the time… Don’t let it distract you.” Their lives intersect on social media, in the most bizarre way, with each having to deal with the altered denotation of Mother India and face the consequences.

At its core, ‘Mother India’ is interrogating the play of (mis)representations, appropriations and (mis)interpretations. As Mayank’s boss puts it: “It doesn’t matter what he is saying… It matters how we interpret it… What matters is how we relay it to our followers.” The novel, while reiterating the incursive and exploitative traits of technology, underscores the larger concerns of the country in the background — migrants, camps, student union leaders and employment. As the narrative interweaves the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, it is Akbar’s journalistic acumen and perspicuity that becomes much perceptible. His prose remains taut and relentless, never letting the focus drift too far from the twin poles, Mayank and Nisha.

Even while engaging with the hegemonic structures of present-day India, Akbar accomplishes to evade the ideological particularities and idiosyncrasies that could prove stifling. Rather, he brilliantly manages to keep the focus of his prose on the way institutional mechanisms and abstract politics can drive human emotions, even as rudimentary as love. The characters in ‘Mother India’ are real and relatable, and so remains the sentiment behind the trope, though often misplaced and distorted: “But whatever she gives is not enough. We keep drawing. We never rest, for we fear there is a sibling who receives more.”

‘Mother India’ is hard to put down but, as Henry David Thoreau said, “must soon lay it down…”