Books: Love in the Time of Struggle
A former senior editor for the Penguin Group, Beena Kamlani taught book editing at New York University for nearly two decades. The English Problem, her debut novel set in India and England in the years before Indian independence, tells an absorbing story that will please both fiction lovers and history buffs.
The English Problem (Crown), a debut novel by Beena Kamlani, is a sweeping historical fiction set against the backdrop of pre-independence India and England, two countries and people in the throes of cataclysmic change. The novel starts with Shiv Advani, a precocious young man from a prominent Karachi family, as a law student knocking on the doors of his guardians in London on a cold and wet January day in 1931.
Shiv is identified as a future leader of the Indian independence movement and is sent off to England to pursue higher education in law, but not before reminders from Mahatma Gandhi himself that the pursuit of greatness requires hard work and the abandonment of desire. Shiv leaves India for England as a married man, leaving behind his 16-year-old pregnant wife.
Shiv’s barrister-in-training English friends take him to parties and soirees, where, as fate would have it, Shiv falls for a high-ranking member of English aristocracy. A torrid love affair begins, and Shiv’s lover instructs him on the ways of English high society, such as bowing in public:
“You bow when you’re introduced. And if that relationship has stayed static, no movement at all, then you continue to bow to each other for the rest of your lives. If you’ve been for a drink with the man at your local pub, then, of course, the bowing stops.”
[Right] Beena Kamlani with the author Amitava Kumar
On the English head nod, Shiv is told: “Nods are reserved for public places. At the opera, you spy someone you know in their box. You angle your opera glasses... and when you’ve confirmed that it is the same person, and when his eye catches yours, you nod, acknowledging him.”
Pre-war London comes alive in The English Problem, and Kamlani is a master of detail. Students of Indian and colonial history will revel in the glorious descriptions of Mr. Polak’s efforts to make an Englishman of Shiv—he is taken to the finest haberdashers, tailors, and suit makers in London to suit him out as a barrister-in-making.
Shiv’s journey oscillates between ambition and duty, desire and sacrifice. While he feels immense gratitude towards his hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Polak, Gandhi’s followers, he also cannot ignore the covert and overt racism from his seniors at the Inns of Court, where Shiv trains as barrister.
The story weaves through Shiv’s struggles to balance honor, relationships, desire, and sense of duty for home and country. Upon Gandhi’s request, Shiv starts a new cultural magazine in London to galvanize public and intellectual interest for the independence cause.
The story, quite like the Queen of Scotland that Shiv boards in Glasgow, gently rocks back and forth between Shiv’s past in the U.K., leading up to an assassination attempt in Glasgow while delivering a speech, and his present, aboard the ship, as a convalescing patient, returning home to India.
The English Problem is a masterful effort in historical fiction, ambitious in its scope and precise in its rendering of a slice of world history that redefined an empire and defined a nascent nation.
Girija Sankar, a freelance writer based in the Atlanta metro area, works in global health.
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