The Imbalance of Islam: Muslims and Unhappiness in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy

To begin with the obvious: Vikram Seth’s thirteen-hundred-page novel, published in India barely a year after the horrors of Ayodhya, is a wellcrafted, carefully written, balanced piece of fiction. Within its many pages of byzantine sub-plots, up to five at a time working together in a parallel display of Tolstoyan complexity, Seth presents a fairly equal number of Hindu and Muslim sympathetic characters, along with an equal number of authorial remonstrations for the fanatical excesses of both faiths. There is a Raja of Marh for every zealous imam, a frenetic Hindu puja for every Shi’a procession, not to mention (following what seems to be the standard formula for every Bollywood film that deals with religious differences) the archetypal Good Muslim and Bad Muslim, an Azad for every Jinnah, an Akhbar for every Aurangzeb. A Suitable Boy, in other words, constitutes an Indian novel largely mirroring the open-mindedness, secularism and sophisticated tolerance of its author. The remainder of this brief essay aims to supply a restrained qualification to the above. Not because Seth’s work is a secret document of Hindu prejudice, masquerading as tolerant, unbiased fiction, but rather because of an unsettlingly elusive quality which seems to characterize each manifestation of Islam in the novel. Regardless of whether they are introverted mathematicians and their mad wives, gloomy Nawabs, victims of unrequited love, mentally unbalanced