OUT Caste in the campus novel OF SYLLABUS

THE CAMPUS NOVEL HAS CAUGHT UP and discovered caste, now a box to be dutifully ticked.

- DIYA ISHA

To sate the current appetite for representation, contemporary novelists feel compelled to invoke it, and the publishing industry has obliged with a flurry of books. In April 2024, Simon & Schuster released Habitations, Sheila Sundar's debut novel, following Vega Gopalan, a young academic struggling with her self-image as an immigrant in the United States. In August, the spoken-word poet Megha Rao's Our Bones in Your Throat was published, a campus novel about two friends accosting the elitism that saturates their private college. October saw the release of Nayantara Violet Alva's Liberal Hearts, a campus romance set in another private university, where a first-year undergraduate falls in love with the “golden boy” from the neighbouring village, their affair accentuating the friction between the minted lives of privileged students and the abutting local community. Alva's protagonist, prompted by her romantic interest and the syllabus she is studying, realises she “can't stop feeling guilty” about her privilege. Similar sentiments abound in the other two novels. Together, they seem to make the same appeal to their readers, as if whispering a challenge: if you are anti-caste, you must like these books.

The Mandal commission, private universities, and the New Education Policy, 2020 stirred up India's collegiate order. Even novels written in English, a language that has long been a birthright for Savarnas and a privilege for everyone else, could not look away, marking a clear departure from earlier campus fiction that skirted around social realities. The best-selling campus novel of the 2000s, when the patter of college-attending, Friends-watching millennials was studded with Americanisms, was Chetan Bhagat’s debut,