Prayaag Akbar’s new novel, Mother India, plunges into pressing, contemporary matters Premium

Prayaag Akbar remembers reading about an actress whose photograph was photoshopped and used, without her knowledge, on an online platform. “She was completely clueless about it until the media started reporting it,” says the Goa-based writer, who was in Bengaluru to launch his latest novel, Mother India.

Prayaag Akbar remembers reading about an actress whose photograph was photoshopped and used, without her knowledge, on an online platform. “She was completely clueless about it until the media started reporting it,” says the Goa-based writer, who was in Bengaluru to launch his latest novel, Mother India.

“For me, that was kind of shocking, but also just a fact. People can take your images and do whatever they want with them,” says Akbar in a conversation with poet and novelist Jeet Thayil held at Champaca Bookstore.  

Something similar happens to one of Akbar’s protagonists, Nisha, in Mother India. Mayank, the other protagonist, steals her image from her public Instagram profile, feeds it into AI software and uses it to create a GIF of Mother India. This novel,which unfurls in alternating narratives, diving in and out of the worlds of Mayank, a right-wing content creator and Nisha, a sales assistant, is Akbar’s second. His award-winning debut novel, Leila, set in a scourged, dystopian landscape of the future, was published in 2017. “Seven years?” asks Thayil. “Did it have something to do with the fact that you were a journalist… a teacher… a hands-on dad?”

Akbar admits that while many things were happening in his life, he took as long as he did because he struggled with writing Mayank. “I kept writing this character without seeing him in his full humanity,” he says, pointing out that he constantly saw Mayank through the lens of the right-wing troll with objectionable politics. “I couldn’t reach who he was beyond that, and I’ve tried to get there in the novel. That also took me a bit of time,” he says.

Mother India is realistic— often frighteningly so — and the reader will find obvious parallels in today’s newspapers or, more likely, the internet. The slender novel packs quite a punch, plunging into several pressing contemporary matters such as the perniciousness of social media, the exponential rise of national populism and cultural conservatism in India, income iniquity and job scarcity, urban loneliness, and even the street dog-human conflict.

It also challenges the tired trope of the sacrificial Indian mother, so prevalent in popular culture, by exploring various forms of motherhood, including a refreshingly hands-off canine mother. At its core, however, it is the story of two regular young people trying to forge their path in a city struggling with a complex past and uncertain future, doing their best to negotiate the multiple realities, malleable truth and impending climate crisis of our times.

“The books (Leila and Mother India) are very different in some ways,” says Thayil. “But I thought that there are similar kinds of engines that work.” For instance, both novels grapple with the idea of an India that is in peril, he says. “And both describe caste and class divisions from the inside, especially class in this book.”