Category Books

The author of When I Hit You returns with a pithy, savagely funny tale of online shaming and the Indian manosphere

We can all agree that the internet today, especially two particular platforms owned by the world’s greatest megalomaniacs, is a hellscape. But if you think X and Facebook are purgatories of friendless trolls endlessly posting hate and bullying women, each other and minorities under the guise of free speech, wait till you experience the Indian version of that netherworld, as captured by novelist and poet Meena Kandasamy. Take the worst algorithms in the world, add a billion-and-a-half people, mix in a far-right government with advanced internet skills and bring on the “burning ghats of Indian politics” that include caste and misogyny as well as roiling ethnic and religious antagonisms, and the western version of X begins to look like a children’s playground.

This is the world that Amy Chaturvedi, a posh student activist-communist living in London, wakes up to one day when the internet is set ablaze by a deepfake sex tape. It’s her face, but it’s not her. Don’t get her wrong, Amy is sexually unapologetic and proudly experimental; she has done plenty of transgressive things, she just didn’t do that one video. But try telling that to the Indian manosphere or, in fact, Amy’s mother. “The main aggressors are a disparate bunch of Nazi-loving, Islamophobic vegetarian dicks with profile pictures that are either the Joker or V for Vendetta,” Kandasamy writes. “If these trolls are to be believed, I am a leading member of the tukde-tukde gang of academics who want to balkanise India. I am on Pakistani payroll. I am funded by George Soros.” She nails the weaselly character of the Indian internet troll, exposing all their shameful secrets – their failures with women, their desire to be followed by Prime Minister Modi (it’s a real thing, look it up), their fear of Muslims, and their rage. Kandasamy’s sharp humour provides much-needed relief from the anger of the internet and I found myself laughing many times at her wicked, tart observations.

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The Booker winner’s epic tale of gay love and loneliness in the Hebrides charts an uneasy homecoming against a backdrop of repression

There’s a common greeting in the Outer Hebrides: the lineage-establishing “Who do you belong to?” By the time this question is posed to 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, in Douglas Stuart’s new novel, there is a sense that Cal is his father John’s beyond the ordinary claims of blood – the latter’s sway containing undercurrents of domineering ownership.

The book opens with the two conducting a strange ritual over the phone, performed regularly ever since Cal moved to Edinburgh to study textiles: John, a precentor, reads to Cal in Gaelic from the New Testament and has him sing back “with the full power of his belief”. The verse John recites – which prefigures the novel’s themes of repression and self-denial – urges the faithful to guide the errant and to stay vigilant against temptation. After receiving Cal’s assent, John orders him to return home, ostensibly because Cal’s maternal grandmother, Ella, is sick. Though John lives with Ella in her croft house, she is his ex-wife’s mother and thus not his responsibility.

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