Brothers

About the book

Brothers is a novel by Manju Kapur, published by Penguin Random House India in October 2016. It is her sixth novel, and the first to leave Delhi, the city where her earlier books were set. The story moves between Lalbanga, a village near Ajmer, the town of Ajmer itself and the city of Jaipur, and it follows one family, the Gainas, across some seventy years, from the freedom struggle through caste politics to the Emergency. At its centre is a question Kapur asks in all her novels: what does family cost the women and the younger sons who live inside it?

The novel is built on a striking piece of structure. It opens with its own ending, and then works backwards to explain how that ending came about. Reviewers noted the device at once: with the outcome already known, Kapur has to work doubly hard to keep the reader engaged in the working out of the plot, and she manages it. The result is a family saga that is also a portrait of Rajasthan changing across the twentieth century, from a world of villages and landlords to one of elections, ministries and television news.

What happens in Brothers?

The book begins with the assassination of Himmat Singh Gaina, chief minister of Rajasthan, shot by his younger brother Mangal. Tapti, Mangal's wife and Himmat's on-off lover, is left facing an uncertain future, bereft of a husband, now jailed indefinitely, and of the only source of happiness and affection she had ever known. From that ending, the story steps back two generations to show how the family arrived there.

In the ancestral village of Lalbanga, the brothers' uncle Virpal flees rural life for Ajmer, bent on joining Gandhi in protesting against British rule. His brother Dhanpal is left behind and, in stark contrast, is corralled into joining the British army to fight the Germans in Africa. Both brothers escape the fatal consequences such twists of life could produce: Dhanpal returns from the war scarred but alive, while a childless Brahmin happens upon Virpal sleeping rough and takes him in. That chain of chance sets the tone for what follows, as Virpal's nephew Himmat takes up his uncle's political ambitions and rises to the top.

Himmat's family believes his rise is built on fate and connections rather than on charisma and sheer hard work, and his brother Mangal expects, and is granted, similar sponsorship. But Mangal does not have the drive or the talent to put it to good use. When his projects fail, he is resentful and lays the blame squarely on his brother. The jealousy and bitterness build, year by year, into the foundation for the eventual killing.

Tapti at the centre

For all its title, Brothers is as much Tapti's novel as it is the men's. She is the wife of one brother and the lover of the other, an intelligent and ambitious woman caught between two men who both want to own her future. The story follows her through the same seventy years, and the women of the family change with the times around her: the first generation's wives, Gulabi and Mithari, live lives shaped by the village and by duty, while the second generation's women, Sonal and Tapti, are educated, restless and unwilling to accept the roles handed to them.

Tapti's position is the novel's moral knot. Himmat is a reformer, especially on women's rights and the caste system, yet he turns the modern way to his own advantage, divorcing his first wife and justifying an affair with his sister-in-law. Mangal, who becomes a murderer, remains closer to the village and the family than his brother does. Neither man is simply good or bad, and Kapur refuses to judge either of them for the reader. What she shows, instead, is how a woman with ambition and intelligence is left with almost no room to move in a family where the men hold the power and the land.

Two generations, one rope

Tying the two plots together, quite literally as it is a recurring metaphor, is the rope of the village where every brother is born. All four are unable to escape completely the umbilical cord that binds them to Lalbanga: its old laws and superstitions, its caste wars, and the grinding poverty of a rural community eking out a living from an unforgiving climate. Worse, being both farmers and born into the lowly Jat caste, they are at a disadvantage when it comes to climbing the greasy pole of a city career.

This tension between country and town, and ultimately between new and old, runs through the whole book. Himmat is afraid of being sucked back into the earth from which he had emerged, yet when Mangal is disrespectful of the land that supports them, Himmat reproves him. Kapur's point, as one reviewer put it, is that it is possible to take the boy out of the village but not the village out of the boy. She offers no solution to that conundrum, which is one India itself is facing in its transition to a developed economy, but by depicting both sides of the argument she leads the reader towards a resolution.

The author

Manju Kapur was born in Amritsar in 1948, a year after Partition divided her province, and taught English literature at Miranda House, University of Delhi, for almost thirty years. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters (1998), won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and became a bestseller in India. A Married Woman (2002), Home (2006), The Immigrant (2008) and Custody (2011) followed, each a close study of middle-class family life, and each of them has its own entry in this Kosh. Brothers was her sixth novel, and her seventh, The Gallery, appeared in 2023. She lives in New Delhi.

Reception and legacy

Brothers was widely reviewed on publication, and critics praised the confidence with which Kapur handled her difficult structure, opening with the murder and still holding the reader through seventy years of backstory. The Asian Review of Books called the prose brusque yet evocative, and noted how the novel refuses to offer easy answers about village and city, tradition and change. Scholars have since studied the book for its portrayal of two generations of women, and for the way it treats egalitarianism as a promise that traditional society keeps breaking.

In Kapur's work, Brothers stands apart as her Rajasthan novel, the one book that left her familiar Delhi behind for the villages and small towns of the state next door. It is also the book in which her long-standing subjects, marriage, caste, ambition and the price women pay for men's choices, are given their largest canvas, across two generations of one family.