Using fiction to bring to fore realities of gangland politics

Age of Vice author Deepti Kapoor sat down with host Milan Vaishnav to discuss the origins of the book and what it says about the current state of Indian politics

Age of Vice is the blockbuster new novel by the author Deepti Kapoor. It’s a love story, wrapped inside a tale of capitalism run amok, wrapped inside a violent story of gangland politics. Last week on Grand Tamasha, a podcast co-produced by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and HT, Kapoor sat down with host Milan Vaishnav to discuss the origins of the book and what it says about the current state of Indian politics.

Critics have celebrated the book and a television series for the US cable network FX is already in the works. (HT)

To call this book a sensation would be the understatement of the year. Critics have celebrated the book and a television series for the US cable network FX is already in the works. Kapoor, who grew up in north India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi, is the author of a previous novel, A Bad Character, published in 2015.

At the heart of the novel sits the Wadia dynasty—a shadowy business conglomerate run by Bunty Wadia, who is in cahoots with the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ram Singh. One of the key protagonists of the book is Bunty’s son, Sunny, who is struggling to find his place in this vast business empire. During a pivotal scene, businessman Sunny tells the chief minister’s son that—when push comes to shove—everyone in India can be bought. Author Kapoor admits this is a cynical view while noting Indian politics has the capacity to surprise. “I’ve heard conversations between people I’ve known who are in politics or families who have always been in politics who say: ‘You know, we can win this election because our businessman friend will provide alcohol for…villages in the constituency….All the male members will get a bottle of liquor and the female members will get saris and that’s it, that’s all it takes.’ But then, of course, the people can take the liquor and the saris and vote for someone else.”

In many ways, Kapoor’s work of fiction echoes themes covered by recent non-fiction entries on the underbelly of Indian politics and society—from Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers to Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds and Sonia Faleiro’s The Good Girls. But Kapoor remains committed to the world of fiction storytelling, she tells Vaishnav. “I don’t actually think I can write non-fiction in the same vein” as these other writers who are covering the darker side to Indian democracy, Kapoor explained. “It is easier for me to write fiction because I can stay close to the truth but I can play with it too. You can exaggerate.” Kapoor notes she did a couple of non-fiction essays for the literary journal Granta, including one on life in Greater Noida, but she doesn’t think she’s very good at it and decided she will “stick to her lane.”

In nearly 600 pages, Age of Vice transports readers from the badlands of eastern Uttar Pradesh to the five-star hotels and fabulous bungalows of New Delhi. “I used settings that I spent time in,” explained Kapoor, noting she could never write a novel set in South India, a region she does not know intimately. Instead, she drew on her own disparate collection of lived experiences—her childhood in Moradabad, time at a boarding school in Dehradrun, life as a Delhi-based reporter where she gained access to an elite social circuit in Delhi, and experience as a yoga instructor in Goa and travel writer reviewing Himalayan retreats.

Meanwhile, Kapoor is at work on two follow-on books in a planned trilogy that will follow the characters from Age of Vice from the early 2000s to the start of the Modi era.