Devika Rege’s debut novel, Quarterlife, begins in November 2014, in Nebraska, where a management consultant named Naren Agashe scrolls through his social media feeds with a strange sense of exhilaration: “Back home, campaigns for the national election have taken off, and everyone is raving about the Bharat Party candidate, a Hindu nationalist on a mission to bring India into the twenty-first century.” Four months later, the Hindu nationalist is elected prime minister of India, and Naren boards a plane to Mumbai, along with his college friend Amanda, who has received a fellowship to work in the Deonar slum. They descend upon a crowded and anxious scene of twentysomethings: Rohit, Naren’s brother, a film producer who feels shallow and adrift in a rapidly globalizing Mumbai; their cousin, Kedar, an investigative journalist determined to expose a mining cartel; Omkar, a poor filmmaker whom Rohit hires to make a documentary about Ganeshotsav, the Hindu festival that celebrates the birth of Ganesha; and another dozen or so young people—American and Indian, lower and upper caste, Hindu and Muslim, on the political left and the right—trying to navigate a new and confusing era in Indian history.

Quarterlife is a deeply intelligent social novel, its characters legible to us as both singularly interesting individuals and vectors of cultural and political forces beyond their grasp. It is also more formally inventive than just about any debut novel I have read recently—“by a distance the best debut of the year,” Sam Sacks wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Reviewers in India have praised Quarterlife as the first novel of the Modi era, or the first Indian millennial novel, although Rege politely shrugs off such loose categories. She and I first met last January at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where we spoke on a panel called “On First Novels.” In September, I joined her onstage at P&T Knitwear, in New York, to celebrate the US publication of Quarterlife, which, by then, had won two Indian literary prizes—the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year and the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman—and was a finalist for the prestigious Crossword Book Award. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Merve Emre (ME): The first section of Quarterlife’s five sections is called “Anxiety.” Why did 2014 emerge as a year of heightened anxiety for your characters?

Devika Rege (DR): The run-up to the 2014 general election in India, which had parallels to the 2016 election in the States, was ironically a period of great progressive foment. We had anticorruption protests sweeping our cities. We had protests for gender rights and women’s safety. For people like me, growing up in the middle class, politics had meant the nine o’clock news and what you did on voting day. Now we found ourselves on the streets, raising placards without knowing that some of those protests were funded by the Hindu right to bring down the incumbent liberal government. There was all this restlessness for change without knowing precisely what that change should look like, which for me is the definition of anxiety.

What that change finally did look like was Modi coming to power and Hindu nationalism taking center stage. Some people were delighted, others were appalled, and the polarization reached the level of friends and family. In Quarterlife, for a Muslim character like Ifra, this is the period through which anxiety becomes fear. For Naren and Rohit, it’s still about finding success and authenticity in a time of upheaval. Amanda, a visitor to the country, is anxious more in a Kierkegaardian sense, where the prospect of freedom is dizzying and she worries about her capacity for sin.

ME: Quarterlife begins in Nebraska, where we meet Naren, whose anxiety about his economic and social status prompts him to return to his family home in Mumbai. It struck me that this setup inverts the upper-middle-class migration novel, which opens with a hopeful journey from east to west. Why did you want to begin in the US?

DR: I get that question a lot back home. Why does the book start in America, and why is there an American character in it if it’s a book about India?

ME: I know the tone in which that question is asked back home, and I promise that I’m not asking it in an accusatory way. I’m interested in the fact that Naren is going back home because he’s anxious about what he hasn’t been able to accomplish in the US. He has a fantasy of making it, and that fantasy was deflated when it came into contact with xenophobia against “brain-drain” immigrants. What is the promise that going back offers to a young Indian man disappointed by his failure to navigate American neoliberalism?

DR: I’d have to share a little of India’s history to answer that question. In 1991, our markets were opened up to the global economy after decades of socialism. Naren would have been a child when there was all this euphoria about India going from “the beggar of the world” to one of the fastest-growing economies. But there was still a sense that you would make a greater fortune in the West if you were among the brightest of your generation. That is why he comes to the States. But things in the States aren’t looking pretty. The dot-com bubble has burst, 9/11 has happened, and now, the financial markets crash. Tribalism sets in and he feels on the receiving end. Meanwhile, in India, growth has reached an all-time high. Then there is a slump, and Modi gets marketed as this outsider, this working-class hero who will storm the establishment and make the elites clean up their act—as if that’s the only thing keeping India from becoming the superpower that liberalization promised. So, this is the vision that is bringing Naren back. And I was interested in how his wounds in the States fuel his desire for an imagined community and a homeland where he is going to reign.

ME: This is what I find immensely appealing about Quarterlife. It offers us a fine-grained and often quite sympathetic account of how people become attracted to right-wing views—how easy it is for aggrieved men, who believe they’re finally getting what is due to them, to become co-opted into injustice or fascism. How did you think about scaling up from the story of an individual to a broader historical arc?

DR: It was a period of tremendous flux, so to write even a fiction out of only my experience or imagination felt presumptuous. I spent years shadowing young people across the political spectrum, including many young men in right-wing nationalist outfits. Few would say “I’m just being an opportunist.” Many felt that they were owed this, that this was their time, or that there may be a price to pay but it’s for some greater national good. Making sense of this relationship between the self and the nation, especially at a time of rising nationalism, was at the heart of the project. And as my material grew, the novel got wider and more intricate.

But yes, beyond the individual characters, I also wanted to examine the innumerable widgets that bring about such societal transformations. I was on the lookout for these sleeplessly, and this preoccupation is reflected more in how cause and effect—which is far from direct or even explicable—is examined across the novel’s web of stories.

ME: Naren and his brother Rohit are each attracted to Hindu nationalism for almost opposite reasons: Naren, because it goes hand in hand with global neoliberalism; Rohit, because it allows him to shape an identity and an artistic practice based on his ancestral roots. Their relationship is strained in part by the presence of Amanda, who begins a relationship with Rohit. Can you reflect on the question that you thought I was asking you before: Why have a white American girl as one of your main characters?

DR: Back home, the question comes with a certain tone—“What’s she doing in the book?” But why should a book about India, if that’s what it’s about, not include Amanda? It’s also a book about a place, a book about a city. Mumbai has got people from all over the world living in it. There’s a lot of global financial capital and American aid running through the city. Besides, our national identity has been defined by our conversation with the West, and since the ’90s, that conversation is more with the States than the UK. When I was growing up, the urban middle class was obsessed with cultural exports like Nike, McDonald’s, and the Backstreet Boys. Indians who went abroad for one summer would come back with an American accent. Nobody wants to admit that now. We are embarrassed by it …

ME: It is embarrassing to come back with a Backstreet Boy. Mortifying.

DR: … and that mortification was one of the things I wanted to explore. The reaction that Amanda draws out of the Indian characters is a desperate desire to free themselves from the Western gaze. But there’s a person on the other side of the gaze. Does it liberate us when that person is dehumanized? Having said that, Amanda is not just an instrument for the Indians to get to know themselves better. She’s a full presence in the work, playing out her own moral dilemmas as she explores the dark side of India’s growth story. Her naivety about caste, which leads to tragedy in the slum where she is volunteering, is also that of many Indians about their own country.

ME: The title, Quarterlife, is a description of where these characters are in their lives—their mid-20s, an inflection point—but it also maps onto the country’s life cycle, its quarter life crisis 23 years into economic liberalization. You talked earlier about mapping the characters and their personal relationships onto political positions. But of course, one never wants to write a character that’s reducible to a political position. How did you aerate these characters in the second section, “Transformation,” so that they were legible types—the striving banker, the guilty liberal, the nostalgic nationalist—and fully rounded individuals?

DR: When you spend time with people, you realize that you have an idea of a certain type and discover all these ways in which the individual complicates the type. And this is a question I have for you as well. What is the place of the type not only in literature but also in our lives? There’s this Cartesian, liberal ideal of an autonomous, individuated person. Then there’s a more Marxist, materialist idea that our sense of self may well have an external rather than an internal locus. It is not simply, “I think, therefore I am.” It is also, “You think, therefore I am.” The constant mediation between the two is something we experience all the time. There are spaces in which I can’t escape showing up as a woman, an Indian, a person of color. Sometimes I’ll play to the type and sometimes I’ll reject it, but it’s hard to escape entirely. There is my inner assertion of who I am that is consistently knocking up against another person’s conception of me and of what institutions are making of us both, and I wanted my characters to embody that tension.

ME: It’s curious how many diasporic novels are written in a close third person and rotate like clockwork among three characters’ points of view. There is a wonderful moment, in the third section of Quarterlife, “Stalemate,” when the narrative becomes more populous and dispersed. All of a sudden, it starts to latch onto minor characters—friends, girlfriends, parents—and adopts their point of view for whole chapters. The novel becomes shaggier, less controlled. Had you planned to add points of view at exactly this point? Or did that come to you as you were writing?

DR: It came to me as I was writing. You’re right about the messiness, but then, democracy is messy. I always knew it couldn’t be just one character telling the story, so I started with three. And yes, there is a precedent to this form. The modernists foregrounded it as a literary device, although it’s present across Anglophone literature today. That’s where I began, quite instinctively, and I thought that I had picked characters that gave me good vantage points; I had an insider in Rohit, an outsider in Amanda, and a kind of insider-outsider in Naren. Then, as my material grew, I could feel other voices jostling to be on the page. And it seemed pretty undemocratic that a novel about democracy should be told entirely from the points of view of two upper-caste, upper-class Hindu men and one white woman.

I asked myself how it would change the story if I let more characters in. I liked the idea of changing the form to give more characters a voice, and that giving them a voice would change the form in turn. That’s why the novel moves from three to nine to almost 40 voices. There was a point midway when I thought, should I just start over with a larger opening cast? But no cast, however wide, can embody a nation. Ultimately, the design also became a way to explore how those who might appear to be protagonists are merely on the penumbra of other lives. In an ideal democracy, I’d imagine there would be no protagonists, and the ideal novel that captures it would be, in Bakhtin’s conception, a space for a community of equals. Quarterlife is not such a novel, alas, but by pulling the mat from under certain voices, at least it points to such a hope.

I do believe that all the great works of literature have an ethical core.

ME: You said earlier, “If this novel is about India …” and I heard in that “if” your discomfort with the idea of writing a novel of or about India. But I also sense your desire to write a novel that exceeds the idea of individual subjectivity as embodied in a single or strongly defined bourgeois protagonist. What’s the difference between writing a novel of the nation and writing a novel of the collective?

DR: I wanted to address the collective but at the same time undermine the idea that any particular collective represents the nation. There is no such thing as a great Indian or great American novel. They are simply novels in conversation with other novels. Perspectives in conversation with other perspectives. Theoretically, Quarterlife’s design could extend endlessly, right? It could go on for another thousand pages. All that the novel does, I suppose, is establish the premise. I wanted to gesture to the promise of that unlimitedness as well as the limits and erasures in both democracy and the novel form as it actually plays out. So this novel is about a collective, but that collective is not the nation. It can only allude to the nation without becoming it.

ME: The final section of the novel is composed of a single chapter whose title is a question mark: “?” Up to that point, each chapter has been marked by the name of the character whose point of view the narrator attaches to, but “?” suddenly introduces us to a first-person narrator who speaks about writing the novel that we have read, and plunges us back into an “I,” a self, a separate and bounded individual. Why leave us with the voice of the individual instead of the voice of the collective?

DR: I was worried that chapter didn’t make sense aesthetically in that the novel should end where the story ends. But a novel is more than a story, and the move made ethical sense, and ultimately, there is no distinction between the two. As Benjamin says, the literary tendency is not separate from the political tendency of a work. And especially given the novel’s themes, I did not want it to appear written from an omniscient point of view. This is the account of one woman of a specific background trying to stretch her imagination as far as it will go. That is why the last chapter has a narrator who is something of me in my quarterlife. Her story isn’t exactly mine, but she reveals the position from which the rest of the work is written.

I also don’t see all the prior chapters as collapsing into this final act staged by the individual. To return to Bakhtin, I am thinking now about his use of the term meanwhile. In the world of the text, Naren and Rohit are still going about Mumbai while the narrator broods in Varanasi. In the act of reading too, the last chapter and everything before it is consumed in totality. I didn’t want to write an entire novel filtered through the consciousness of a solitary person walking about a city. All the same, I didn’t want polyphony with no sense of an anchor, even if the voices are not subordinate to that anchor. You have the individual and the collective and I tried to do something that gave credence to both within the text.

ME: I like the idea of simultaneity between the “I” and the polyphonic chorus. It makes me think of the novel as an autobiography of the collective or, more specifically, an autobiography of a generation.

DR: I have the same response to the concept of a novel about a generation as to a novel about a nation. But your juxtaposition of “autobiography” and “generation” is interesting. Also, to say that there are no grand narratives is in itself a grand narrative, so yes, there are traits and experiences that you might categorize as generational as compared to utterly idiosyncratic. I know some people have called it a millennial novel. That’s for readers to decide.

My interest was more in exploring multiple registers of belonging. We identify as somebody who belongs to a certain family, but also to a city, a state, a country. Sometimes, those identities are in conflict. For a character like Omkar, his regional identity as a Marathi son of the soil runs up against the Hindu nationalist one, and these differences are crucial in a democracy. Before I started writing the novel, I thought of Hindu nationalism as a monolith, a kind of thinking that gives its agenda power. So to be able to see the macro but also see the fissures and fault lines within it feels important as a writer and a citizen.

ME: You hesitated when you said “feels important.”

DR: I don’t think that any artist likes to see their work in utilitarian terms. And this novel has too many perspectives in it to be polemical. But one of the questions that came up for me as I was writing it was this: If you give everybody a sympathetic point of view, how do you keep it from becoming a project in moral relativism? There is no absolute answer here, but I do believe that all the great works of literature have an ethical core. It’s like those writers managed to capture all those voices and make this grand pirouette and somehow land on their feet. And to strive for that felt important.

ME: 2024 is 10 years after the events in the novel take place. I’m interested in novels that look back from a medium historical distance—a decade, say—onto a month, or a year, that feels like it indelibly shaped the present. How do you look back at 2014 from 2024? Another way of asking this question might be: Where are your characters now? What has happened to your vision of the collective?

DR: I think the novel would have been different depending on which election year I’d taken for my study. In 2014, Modi was wearing suits and talking business. People like Naren voted for his government, not because it was a fundamentalist Hindutva one, but because they believed it was pro-business. By 2019, the mask was off. Modi had grown a beard and was wearing kurtas. Muslim persecution was at its height. The press and public institutions were in tatters. There was no doubt by then what this government was about, yet people kept voting for it with a new brazenness. Now, in 2024, Modi has come back with a chastised majority. I think it will be interesting to see how it all goes down. Are we going to see reform or an implosion from within? Will there be a night of the long knives? He has no teeth left to pass the bills he wants, but that insecurity might lead to other forms of virulence on the ground.

I hesitate to say where my characters would be now. I have my suspicions, of course, but I’d have to write that other novel to find out.

ME: Is there any difference between how you talk about this book in India versus in the US? Do you feel freer to speak about the political context of the book in the States?

DR: Ronny Sen, the photographer whose images are on the book cover, was attacked with a sickle for speaking up in 2019. I’ve had friends lose their jobs at universities, and others work in fear that their FCRA licenses will be revoked. Through the years I wrote Quarterlife, things were worse than they are now, and my mother told me constantly to be careful. I would then think what Kedar thinks in the novel: dekhenge. “Let’s see what happens.” As for talking about the book, this conversation will go online, and I will soon be back in India, where I live, so our location doesn’t matter much. But publishing abroad has given me confidence that the book will remain in print even if it runs into trouble at home, which is liberating.

That said, someone like Kedar, a journalist and activist writing in Marathi, is a lot more incendiary and vulnerable than me. The degree of repression changes depending on your language, your medium, your publics, your impact. As a debut novelist in English, you’re more likely to get sued than shot. We had a Marathi publisher try to get translators for Quarterlife and no one would touch it because it’s politically sensitive. Norton in New York can take the risk, HarperCollins in Delhi can take the risk, but a little outfit in Pune can’t. The novel is coming out in Italian and German now, but not a single Indian regional language. Still, you know, to the extent there is a space, let’s use it. I’m not here as a journalist or an activist tonight, but that doesn’t mean I won’t speak my truth. 

Featured image courtesy of Devika Rege.