How the wheels of oppression keep turning

Kavery Nambisan's new novel, telling a story of religion, caste and gender, shows her at the top of her game

- Aditya Mani Jha

Over the last three decades, Kavery Nambisan has quietly built an impressive body of work in contemporary Indian English writing. Her seven previous novels (which include The Scent of Pepper and The Hills of Angheri) contain realistic, thoughtful, multi-dimensional portraits of life in villages and towns. Her last, A Town Like Ours (2014), set in the fictional village of Pingakshpura, was about a place recognised for its "eight varieties of paddy, four of mangoes and ten types of banana" that becomes a "high-decibel, boom-boom town".

With her latest novel Rising Sons, Nambisan expands on the village-meets-modernity framework and elevates it to a wholly different level, crafting a compelling familial saga while at it. The fictional setting this time is Kesarugattu, a few hours away from Mysoor, and the era is the 1920s-40s. The patriarch is the uber-Brahminical Devaraya, living amidst a large number of lower-caste people, including the Ai tribes indigenous to the region. He works as a peon at a bank in Mysoor and uses his experience to open a "money house" in his village. Devaraya's wife Gowru and their children—Nanju the conscientious elder son, his sickly younger brother Anna, and sisters Chinni and Bhavani—are the other key players.