More than a romp on campus

Three decades on, Anuradha Marwah's debut novel holds a witty and wise mirror to young women's struggles in India

- Somak Ghoshal

As far as opening lines of novels are concerned, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta by writer and scholar Anuradha Marwah makes a lasting first impression. "It was morning. I didn't have to go to college till 10.30 am," the chatty, eponymous narrator informs the reader. "There was nothing to do except cry, make a phone call or masturbate."

It takes considerable chutzpah for a debut novelist to live up to this tone of droll, understated ennui—but Marwah, who currently teaches English at Delhi's Zakir Husain College, delivers on this promise abundantly.

First published in 1993, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta is one of India's earliest "campus novels", as the blurb from its publisher claims. Recently reissued in an all-new avatar, the book harks back to the golden age of Indian writing in English, when the market wasn't overflowing with a zillion authors and the readers were, most likely, less distracted by the internet.

In the early 1990s, Marwah was a young mother of two, teaching at Miranda House college in Delhi. "I was overwhelmed, not in touch with myself," she tells me on a video call from the US, where she is currently on an academic assignment. "I felt I needed to do something that would involve me completely, for a long time."

So she joined a writing group of (mostly) Indian and American women in Delhi, who enjoyed listening to snippets of the "plotless novel" she had begun to work on. Somewhat to her surprise, eventually Geetika Mehendiratta got written and was published to, mostly, critical acclaim. "A few readers found the language a bit too informal, let's say," Marwah adds. In the years to come, the novel would attract serious scholarly attention, while its author would go on to write several other plays and novels, her most recent being The Aunties of Vasant Kunj (2024).