In her debut novel Quarterlife, Devika Rege offers a gripping and layered portrait of a nation in transition. Set against the backdrop of rising Hindu nationalism, the novel follows Naren, a Wall Street consultant drawn back to Mumbai after a divisive election that brings the Bharat Party to power.
We caught up with Devika Rege via email to chat about Quarterlife and get some behind-the-scenes information about how the story came to life.
What is Quarterlife about from your perspective? Why did you initially choose to write this story?
Quarterlife is a novel about young people arriving at their politics in a time of rising Hindu nationalism. It is set in a year reminiscent of 2014, when Narendra Modi first came to power and the right-wing in India gained an unprecedented majority. That election was also significant in the way it polarized not only communities, but relationships within families and groups of friends. Whom you voted for suddenly seemed to betray something essential about your character. Whether or not that is true, we saw dialogue breaking down over dinner tables and chat groups in a way that it still hasn’t recovered. This novel is my attempt to make sense of that time, and to look past the rhetoric at the messiness and moral ambiguity of our everyday lives as citizens.
You feature a wide array of well-rounded characters. Did any come first? Who was the easiest to write? Who was the hardest?
The Agashe brothers and Amanda came together at the outset. The Agashes’ new money and the resulting mix of confidence and insecurity about their social position suited a novel about the desire for economic and cultural supremacy. Amanda’s naivete is not that of an outsider alone, but that of many middle-class Indians about the world beyond their gated societies. These characters came quite instinctively. Gradually though, I started to ask myself what it meant to be writing a novel about democracy from such a limited number of perspectives. That’s how the cast came to widen, and the story morphed in tow. The hardest character to write was Omkar. He’s a filmmaker in the youth cadre of a Hindu nationalist outfit. I shadowed many young men in his position to write him. At times, the challenge was to look past my instinctive recoil. But at other times, it was to look past my sympathy, by which I don’t mean pity so much as the points at which I could relate to or understand them, and the resulting self-loathing and feelings of complicity.
The novel opens with a character turning to India after living in America. The theme of place and belonging always interests me. You were born in India and studied in America. How do you think about place when writing? Has your idea of belonging changed in the years you studied at Iowa?
Iowa was my first experience of living abroad and it made me curious about what India looked like to an outsider. But campus life is a strange microcosm, so I did two artist residencies to understand Amanda’s world better. One enabled me to work on a hay farm in Jaffrey. The couple I stayed with came to feel like my grandparents and I care more for the memory of their farm than many places in India. I suppose the idea of belonging interests me more than any specific geography. In Quarterlife, Mumbai or Wai were not my muses so much as my case studies. It also felt important to address multiple registers of place – say the local, the regional, the national, and so on — given the different and often conflicting ways in which each shapes our sense of identity and belonging.
The politics of India play a vital role in the book. Did the book change throughout the years you wrote it while the global political landscape shifted?
That’s an interesting question. The book did keep morphing as my understanding of global climate evolved. Like when Trump came to power, what my American friends were saying felt like a déjà vu of how my Indian friends and family had reacted to Modi in 2014. To equate Modi with Trump is gauche, but the echoes in those reactions helped me understand what was particular to our experience in India and what was generalizable to a wider political landscape. It enabled me to see the moment as a frame for writing into something more universal, say, the ways in which people justify their beliefs and what happens when those run up against their conscience. Aesthetically, this meant that the idea of empirical veracity no longer felt divorced from a poetics of consciousness, and that it was possible to pursue both in Quarterlife.
The book came out in 2023 in India and I was curious what the reaction has been like for those who live there and are close to the politics and themes in the book. How have people reacted?
It is impossible for a writer to be objective about how their work has been received. What I can say is that the responses that moved me most were not from Delhi but from unexpected quarters, like writers from smaller places saying that the novel helped them through creative block, or posts about the book by readers whose first language clearly wasn’t English. I couldn’t believe that they had persisted through four hundred pages. I suspect one reason is that we have had very little fiction here that takes on the Modi years in India in a comprehensive way, so there is a hunger to process that moment through fiction.
What are books that helped guide you in writing this book?
There were many but I’ll limit myself to three here. Indian philosopher Akeel Bilgrami’s Secularism, Identity and Enchantment was an education in what he calls the ‘moral psychology of politics’. Bernard Williams’s Morality was especially instructive to me in understanding how an amoralist might justify his choices. More than a guide, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri was something of a muse. It is a slim book of poetry that tells hauntingly of faith and doubt in a small pilgrimage town.
For those who read and love your book, can you recommend others that are similar or in conversation with the themes and topics you have explored?
Majoritarian State by Angana Chatterji and Christophe Jaffrelot offers some excellent meditations on the rise of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. If we’re taking a wider view, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities would be worth revisiting in these times. I’d also recommend Gauri Gill’s photo books Acts of Appearance and Fields of Sight. They are set in rural Maharashtra. Besides being a visual treat, her gentle collaborative process with local communities is inspiring.