Whoever was asked to write the blurb for Preti Taneja’s novel We That Are Young must have faced something of a quandary: when, or how (perhaps, even, whether) to reveal that it is a retelling of King Lear.
You can understand the problem. How best to acknowledge the ingenuity of this novel without making it sound like a niche literary interest? Or, to put it another way, if you alert the reader that the saga of modern India in their hands is actually a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shakespeare, will they be tempted to put it straight back on the shelf? You might forgive them, at least, for wondering whether this was merely a staging, or something new.
It is, in fact, both. Taneja, a British writer with Indian parents, is a human-rights reporter, a film-maker, a Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and the author of some journalism and a novella. This is her debut novel. And while it might sound like a literary experiment, it turns out to be one of the most original and exquisite novels of the year.
“Lear’s ‘blasted heath’ becomes a Delhi slum
First, though, it is an excellent King Lear. It is set in contemporary New Delhi and Kashmir, but its plot is a direct transposition of the play’s text and is strikingly true to the original. Devraj Bapuji is Lear, the billionaire head of a family business, owner of lands across India in the form of hotel resorts and factories, and with tens of thousands of employees. He plans to divest the company into the charge of his three daughters, Gargi, Radha and his youngest, Sita, and to marry off Sita at the same time — until she, and then her sisters, refuse to comply.
There is much fun to be had for Shakespeare fans in identifying the parallels in the texts. Even those elements that you’d think couldn’t possibly work in a modern realist novel are dexterously preserved. Lear’s entourage of 100 knights? They have become “The Hundred”, a sort of management programme for young future leaders whom Devraj hosts every fortnight. The Fool? That’s Devraj’s decrepit mother, whose strange poetical pronouncements are an amalgam of ancient songs, wisdom and dementia.
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The prose is full of linguistic echoes of Lear, and Taneja seems determined to show that there is nothing of Shakespeare’s that she can’t make relevant and alive. In this sense, the shift to India is revelatory. There is something unique about modern India, and the way it occupies a space at once exotic and familiar, that has the extraordinary effect, by adding distance, of bringing Shakespeare closer, of making Lear more real.
In its Indian setting it no longer feels strange or historical for a man to be arranging his daughter’s marriage. It is no stretch to imagine that she would be expected to be obedient, or that the granting of a dowry would depend on it. It makes sense that its characters worship various gods, that a storm might last for days and bring with it great floods.
Lear’s “blasted heath” (always an oddly indeterminate place) is more patent and vital in its incarnation as the basti, a Delhi slum: the tattered clothes and flimsy shelters of its destitute inhabitants bring Shakespeare’s “loop’d and window’d raggedness” to tragic life. Even the language of Indian English, which can be formal and flowery (“cloying like Diwali sweets ... full of twists and turns”, as one character puts it), makes a fitting match for the Shakespearean register. As a Lear, it’s close to perfect.
But while the poetry and tautness of Shakespeare are unimprovable, Taneja’s novel creates room for something else: motive. In her world these characters’ actions, however unsympathetic, are understandable, compelled by the forces of pride and shame. This is particularly true of the women, who are shown here, for all their sometimes grievous faults, to be the victims of constant wounds of indignity at the hands of the men who surround them. They are ignored for their considerable talents, infantilised for their beauty, humiliated sexually and abused. Sita’s attempt merely not to respond to her father’s game of flattery triggers the downfall of the family — because, as she understands, a woman’s ability “to say ‘no’, and be heard! ...is a freedom some will only dream of”.
Taneja’s prose, whose free indirect style alights in turn on each character, ingeniously betrays their self-possession and shame, and her immersive present tense takes a story we know and makes it urgent and irresistible. This is a new voice, vivid, full of imagery and pace, and with a richness to match the vibrancy of its world.
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King Lear poses an underlying question: what debt do we owe to our fathers? When is it right to stand up to the previous generation, to insist on saying something different? We That Are Young is a kind of answer. Much like Cordelia, it strikes an immaculate balance: at once perfectly faithful to its literary father, yet with language, spirit and direction of its own.
Galley Beggar £9.99 pp503