On a smoggy afternoon in January this year, seven thousand dignitaries descended on the Indian city of Ayodhya to witness the consecration of a new temple—while many more thousands of pilgrims awaited the public opening the next day. This was no ordinary edifice; it was a $250 million structure built on the former grounds of a sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, which Hindu nationalist mobs razed in 1992. The desecration sparked mass violence nationwide, resulting in thousands of deaths. Thirty-two years later, Narendra Modi, India’s conservative prime minister, a man infamous for overseeing the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, inaugurated the temple—the latest and perhaps most theatrical move in his longtime effort to recast India as a Hindu, rather than secular, state. 

The scene in front of the temple was chillingly quiet as Modi and his cronies addressed the crowd in formal shudh Hindi, which a majority of Indians cannot understand. As I watched clips of the event from the U.S., I kept thinking, naively: this isn’t what life in India sounds like. In India, noises jostle in merry, pluralistic cacophony. In most temples, as you listen to Sanskrit chants, you can also hear vendors hawking their wares and auto-rickshaws honking, not to mention the sounds of other faiths—the tinny noise of the azaan (the Muslim call to prayer) emanating from the speakers of a nearby mosque, or a brass band processing in a Catholic funeral. But of course, the artificiality of Modi’s Ayodhya scene and soundscape was by design. The prime minister, who is likely to be reelected for a third term this June, wants Indians—and the world—to hear nothing but his own resonant oration, his reductive story of the nation. 

India’s hard right turn has been a long time coming, but its emotional underpinnings may not be obvious, especially to outsiders. One novel that helps explain why and how we got here is Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, first published in 1998 and reissued by New York Review Books this May. Freedom Song is set in 1993, in the midst of the fraught political aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, but it may strike some readers as an unconventional political novel. It features no scenes of protests, riots, or physical clashes between Hindus and Muslims. Instead, it largely chronicles the domestic microdramas of a sheltered, upper-middle class Hindu family in Calcutta. The first character we meet is Khuku, a homemaker playing host to her friend Mini, who is coping with arthritis. Meanwhile, Khuku’s husband, Shib, toils in a failing candy factory, and her twenty-eight-year-old nephew, Bhaskar, desultorily takes meetings with potential brides. There is minimal plot. Chaudhuri’s characters discuss “the troubles far away in Ayodhya” only occasionally. 

This is precisely the brilliance of the novel, which is less about electoral politics than it is about the slow accretion of antipathies—the banality of hate—among many privileged Hindus. In an introduction to the new edition, the philologist Wendy Doniger, whose scholarship on Hindu history inspired Hindu nationalist uproar in 2014, offers a similar hypothesis, asserting that “I’ve read nothing that so well explains how Modi is able to capitalize on a deep, abiding resentment that is there in the hearts of many Hindus in India.” Looking closely at Chaudhuri’s meandering, eavesdropping style of prose and narrative can indeed shed new light on these sociopolitical resentments. Reading the novel today also offers a reminder of the many different ways to represent communal strife in fiction. Most Modi voters, after all, are not burning Muslim neighborhoods or rioting in the streets; like any populist, the prime minister capitalizes on subtler forces—a sense among some Hindus that Muslims pose an existential threat to their community. In electoral systems, tacit acceptance of these ideas is as important as the violence a mob can wreak. And the art about these publics cleaved by bigotry might benefit from beginning in the personal, the domestic, the shapelessness of daily life—which can be formed, in the hands of authoritarians, into a brand new nation.

Chaudhuri may be the great Indian novelist you haven’t heard of. A year younger than Arundhati Roy but less famous, he has earned critical acclaim if not commercial success for decades; his debut, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and his first three novels, then sold as a single volume in the U.S., won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction in 1999. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award—India’s most prestigious literary prize—for A New World (2001). The critic James Wood raved in the New Yorker about Odysseus Abroad (2014). 

It is a fascinating time for NYRB to reintroduce Chaudhuri’s early work (in addition to Freedom Song, the publisher has reissued A Strange and Sublime Address and his second novel, Afternoon Raag). Chaudhuri’s attention to the earlier rumblings of Hindu nationalism feels especially prescient now, in a tense election year for India, but Freedom Song also resonates today because Chaudhuri’s aesthetic approach—his ability to write a political novel that does not obviously present itself as such—has gone out of fashion. His work is less explicitly about politics than recent (excellent) novels about Hindu nationalism, such as Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (2020), which follows a Muslim woman unjustly incarcerated on charges of terrorism, or Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World (2023), which imagines a near-future dystopian India. Chaudhuri’s work also contrasts with several epic Great Indian Novels, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), about India’s founding, or Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), about Indira Gandhi’s reign of terror in the 1970s, which are more unambiguous in their investigations of national identity. Compared to these books, Chaudhuri’s work might seem devoid of politics. 

But Chaudhuri descends from another kind of political tradition, that of twentieth-century modernists such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and the poet Arun Kolatkar (whom Chaudhuri has called an Indian modernist). Like the modernists, he is almost maniacally obsessed with the mundane, and finds his way from the quotidian to the radical by way of defamiliarization, which the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky defined as the artistic technique of making the familiar seem strange. Defamiliarization—“ostranenie” in Russian—is both an artistic and a political practice: describing something we see every day in new language is not only aesthetically satisfying but also consciousness-raising. If we perceive our environs anew, we can imagine that norms can be broken, that the present is not inevitable. As Chaudhuri writes in his essay “The East as Career,” discerning the world this way—the same way one of his Bengali artist forefathers, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, did—“becomes a secular act full of spiritual urgency.” And, I’d add, moral and political urgency; this discernment opens an aperture to social change. 

Chaudhuri begins defamiliarizing the commonplace from the very beginning of Freedom Song, which opens with the sound of a muezzin proclaiming the azaan. Chaudhuri, an accomplished classical vocalist and composer as well as a writer, draws our attention to the artistry of the azaan (“the unearthly lift of the melody”), as though these sounds, which emanate from mosques five times a day, have never been described before. His character Khuku, by contrast, is unwilling to hear the world the way Chaudhuri invites us to. She is only concerned with the fact that her Muslim neighbors have interrupted her sleep. She shares her gripe with Mini, who replies haughtily, “They are going too far! And . . . it isn’t really Indian, it sounds like Bedouins.” Here, Khuku’s petty complaint sweeps into Mini’s wild statement on national identity; later, Mini will declare, “It was no bad thing that they toppled that mosque,” and Khuku will agree. By patiently dilating a small, forgettable moment in a character’s average morning, Chaudhuri reveals how a simmering concern can gradually boil over; hate is insidious, and, in contemporary parlance, comprises thousands of tiny microaggressions. So alongside the azaan and daily life in Calcutta, Chaudhuri manages to defamiliarize even such elusive subjects as the process of radicalization.

Chaudhuri is also attuned to the almost automated actions and rituals that comprise religiosity—and attendant political identity—in India. With his estranging gaze, he lingers in physical gesture: when Bhaskar, Khuku’s nephew, accidentally kicks a book, “he immediately and swiftly touched his forehead and chest with his index finger in quick, absent-minded repentance.” (I instinctively make this gesture, too, when my foot brushes paper, never mind that I am not a religious Hindu.) This representation of religion as involuntary duty—as opposed to the active pursuit of, say, spiritual epiphany or salvation—lends insight into how Hindu majoritarians can so readily stir the sympathies of their constituents, for whom religious identity may be ingrained, and who might act on their affinities without complete thought, whether performing a harmless gesture like Bhaskar’s or joining a destructive mob like in Ayodhya.  

Indeed, Chaudhuri wryly critiques the farce of trying to name or entrench any identity, however harmless it seems on its face. He writes a flashback to Bhaskar at seven years old, reading a book called We Are Bengalis, which brags about his culture’s great men, including the religious leader Swami Vivekananda and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The stories move Bhaskar and his younger brother Manik: “Once he [Bhaskar] understood what a wonderful thing it was to be a Bengali, and that he was Bengali himself, he went around the house chanting, ‘We are Bengalis! We are Bengalis!’ and this echo, predictably, was taken up by Manik, who had no inkling of what it meant.” This is a good joke: nationalism in miniature. A story, sold and circulated, stirs someone’s sense of self, and is then reverberated ad infinitum by people who do not know the full meaning behind what they chant. Later, Chaudhuri calls back to the way oratory circulates: “Speeches were expended on the ‘idea’ of the country and what the meaning of that idea was,” he writes of the aftermath of the Ayodhya troubles. “The word ‘fundamentalism,’ travelling everywhere and belonging nowhere: people tried to understand what it meant.” Here, it’s no longer a joke: India itself is an idea that travels everywhere and belongs nowhere. We don’t know what it means anymore.

Alongside this attention to politics at the level of the individual and the family, Chaudhuri also attends to larger collectives in the form of media. Take Chaudhuri’s tender sketch of Bhaskar distributing the Communist newspaper Ganashakti in the mornings, in which the author describes the thwap of papers falling against porches and flowerpots: “There was a special purpose in these throws … an inexplicable bond was formed between the distributor, whose every aim with the bundle seemed to be a salute, and the silent house.” As the sociologist Benedict Anderson wrote, nations are “imagined communities,” and publics are formed as people read the same pamphlets or newspapers. But how many of us have refused a pamphlet offered by someone on a street corner without considering the “salute” that might pass between us, if we accepted, if we entered their imagined community? In contemporary India, the new texts might be WhatsApp-circulated misinformation and pro-Modi memes more than the independent press, which is dying out under his authoritarianism. But in Freedom Song, many imagined Indias—what Rushdie has called Indias of the mind—are still alive. Bhaskar’s father tunes into radio programs to catch “desperate snatches of the Oriya and Assamese news, the spiritual monotonous faraway sound of a raag being sung, then being swallowed up by a whistling, humming vacuum, strains of Greek music, the nasal lisping of Arab voices.” Here is a polyphonic India, more complex than a politico could draw up: “India seemed to come alive on the air-waves in ghostly manifestations, and beyond it, the world.” 

I am, myself, working on a novel that deals in part with diasporic incarnations of Hindu nationalism. I write nothing like Chaudhuri; my style and taste usually tend toward the Rushdie-esque maximalists or writers with essayistic tendencies, who engage more head-on with the idea of nationhood. But there is no need to cleave a neat binary here; great political novelists can delve into the personal, and apparently quiet novels obsessed with subjectivity have much to say about the wider world. Perhaps that’s why reading Freedom Song felt so enlivening. It reminds me, as it might remind other contemporary readers, of how quiet and private the making of a nation, and of a public, can be, and of how the domestic is a route into the collective—how the vaster “we” to which we belong and the conventions we take for granted begin in small places. Our job, as readers and writers alike, is to look more closely, to rupture the familiar, to notice.