How Modi’s Rise Divided India’s Young People

In the opening pages of Devika Rege’s debut novel Quarterlife, one of the protagonists, Naren Agashe, goes to the Lincoln Zoo in Nebraska to buy a coffee. After an older man threatens him at his usual café, Naren doesn’t want to take any chances: He’d rather sip the insipid beverage sold at the zoo’s gift shop, the only place nearby that sells coffee, than risk another round of abuse from the racist loon, who he fears may pull a gun on him if provoked.

As he walks around the zoo, Naren is arrested by the sight of an odd creature. It is a “jaguon,” according to the placard before its enclosure, a “hybrid born of the accidental mating of a black jaguar and a lioness.” Watching the animal pacing “a cage barely the size of his kitchen,” Naren feels its restlessness. Even if it were to leap out of its prison and escape, its “animal brain,” he thinks, would be “bewildered by a sudden cellular longing for a non-existent habitat.”

As he walks around the zoo, Naren is arrested by the sight of an odd creature. It is a “jaguon,” according to the placard before its enclosure, a “hybrid born of the accidental mating of a black jaguar and a lioness.” Watching the animal pacing “a cage barely the size of his kitchen,” Naren feels its restlessness. Even if it were to leap out of its prison and escape, its “animal brain,” he thinks, would be “bewildered by a sudden cellular longing for a non-existent habitat.”

In the jaguon, Naren seems to recognize something of his own predicament as a green-card-holding white-collar professional in the United States in the 2010s. The 31-year-old Wharton graduate from India has clung to a consultant job even after the financial crash. Yet he is unable to rise in corporate America, a fate made worse by a bad breakup. An object of pity to his colleagues, deracinated from his homeland, Naren longs for his own non-existent habitat—until a landmark election in India opens the door to unexpected economic opportunity back home.

Back in New Delhi, the right-wing Bharat Party has come to power with a sweeping popular mandate after campaigning on a promise to end corruption and usher in a new India. Soon, brain drain begins to reverse as prodigal Indians like Naren return home, seduced by the promise of a trillion-dollar economy and a newly anointed prime minister. Liberal Indians accuse the leader of having innocent blood on his hands for fueling sectarian violence, but his loyal army of militant Hindus ignores his past as a blip on the path to progress.

The parallels with India’s 2014 national elections and the rise of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party are conspicuous. But Rege doesn’t focus on the political aftermath of those elections, such as the mob violence against minorities that erupted in the years that followed or the country’s deepening youth unemployment crisis. Instead, Quarterlife dives into the psyche of the generation born on the cusp of India’s economic liberalization in 1991: young people awakening into political consciousness in the 21st century, confused by the baggage of their colonial inheritance and globalization bringing in non-Indian ways of thinking and living.

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In Quarterlife, Rege is interested in what takes place inside the drawing rooms of Mumbai’s nouveaux riches—Exhibit A being Naren’s family and its social circle. They are part of an upwardly mobile class who live in a fictional complex called Imperial Heights (“a ludicrous name,” Naren thinks, “just the kind to appeal to upstarts come into money by accident”).

The Agashe family, whose scions are spread across Mumbai, Pune, and Brisbane, has recently become wealthy through the sale of ancestral land to a mining shark, whose operations are wreaking havoc on the environment. Only Naren’s uncle, a small business owner, has remained steadfast in refusing to sell his portion. Like millions of Indians, he is a bundle of contradictions. He considers himself a “leftist” who cares for the environment and his workers, but he also supports the ruling government in spite of its environmentally unfriendly and right-wing policies, as he has lost faith in the previous system that was nominally socialist.

Naren and his younger brother Rohit are clearer about their political allegiances, swayed by the new government’s promise of turning India into a global superpower. But they soon realize that they are deeply divided from their peers in their experience of the world.

Between the Agashe brothers—who are Chitpavan Brahmins, a sub-caste within the highest rung of the Hindu caste hierarchy—and their assorted friends, Rege packs in a wide range of characters across India’s social strata. They include a lower-caste filmmaker from rural Maharashtra; a woman who, despite her class privilege, is marginalized as a Muslim; a young liberal, shaped by the secular values of India’s Constitution (the kind of person routinely mocked by India’s right wing as “sickular”); and a member of India’s Zoroastrian Parsi community who thinks his insignificance in the religious hierarchy protects him from anti-Hindu hate—until the police upbraid his Hindu boyfriend not so much for being gay, but for dating someone from a minority community.

The plot of Quarterlife is organized around two main events: Naren’s move to India from the United States and his American friend Amanda’s decision to tag along with him to work with an NGO. As Naren negotiates the dynamics of big business, Amanda steps into a Mumbai slum to document the lives of its women and children. Overwhelmed by this other India that borders the pockets of luxury inhabited by Naren and his friends, she spirals into a personal crisis, complicated by an unexpectedly intense love affair with Rohit. 

On the face of it, Rohit and Amanda come from utterly disparate backgrounds—one having grown up in suburban Mumbai, the other in small town New Hampshire. But in the age of free trade and movement, they are both homogenized as “global citizens.” Amanda feels at home with Rohit’s English-speaking, cocktail-sipping, Adidas-wearing friends. As time passes, however, these commonalities begin to crumble.

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As the moon-eyed, white American do-gooder, Amanda serves as a foil to her peers. She may not know what a Dalit is, but she sees hunger and poverty where her Indian counterparts ignore it. “Honestly, people fighting for two meals a day don’t care about half this stuff we’re debating,” she says in a fit of rage, disrupting an intellectual tirade at the Agashes’ residence. Her moral edge doesn’t land well, especially with Rohit. He is stung by her self-righteousness toward people like him, who have been lifted out of semi-poverty through luck or labor to reach India’s 1 percent.

Two other characters allow Rege to explore deeper questions of belonging. First, there’s Kedar, Naren’s cousin, who is mocked as a “vernie”—a pejorative for those who speak vernacular as opposed to English—by his city-bred cousins. He is a reporter with Hindi and Marathi newspapers, exposing land encroachment by greedy industrialists. Kedar’s idealism is bracing, just like Amanda’s, but in his case, it comes at a devastating price.

In contrast, Omkar, Rohit’s newfound friend, is raring to forge his way ahead in the new India. A young man from a small town in the state of Maharashtra, he deplores the upper-caste Marathas, who rejected him for his lowly social standing (“backward caste, class, everything”). His ambition is to make a documentary on the Ganesha festival, but liberal arthouse film producers won’t support him because of his dedication to the Bharat Party as a foot soldier of the party’s youth wing.

Omkar is elated by the soaring wave of Hindutva. He sees the party’s ascension as a triumph of anti-elitism rather than a successful strategy of targeted violence against minority communities. “Only the Bharat Party cares for all Hindus,” he boasts. In Omkar’s view, the time has come for people like him, who are the voice of “Bharat”—a Sanskrit and Hindi name for India—to speak as one, overcoming their historical neglect by the Anglicized classes representing “India.” (Modi, incidentally, identified his nation as “Bharat” while chairing the G-20 summit in New Delhi last year.)

Rohit’s friendship with Omkar becomes the trigger that blows up close-knit allegiances. Rohit is charmed by Omkar’s “son of the soil” pitch; he sees Omkar’s steadfast faith in the Bharat Party’s doctrine as a sign of hope, especially when compared with the political cynicism of others in his milieu. But his friends attack Omkar’s earnest championing of Hindu nationalism. They gang up against Omkar, calling him a fraud and trickster, and accuse him of manipulating the sympathies of the urban elite for personal gain. The two faces of India and Bharat ultimately fight out a bitter blame game, each pointing fingers at the other for bringing the country to a state of crisis. 

In an Indian Express article this year, Rege wrote that Quarterlife is an “attempt to understand how, around 2014, our political identities became all-encompassing in a way that they had not been before, and what this meant for the spread of Hindu nationalism.” The outcome of her quest isn’t flawless, but it captures a fundamental truth about the 21st century, not just in India but all over the globalized world: that life is riddled with conflict and asymmetry among people close to and far from one another.