Why The Complex Is Being Compared to Russian Classics #shortsfeed #trending #viral

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Surprisingly, reviewers keep reaching for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Yeah, good for me.

[00:00:06]>> [laughter] >> Like somebody called it Dostoevskian.

[00:00:10]Somebody said there's a constant sense of danger lurking beneath the story.

[00:00:15]Uh and your course that you teach is called Innovations in Indian Literature, isn't it? I mean But the architecture of this complex feels very 19th-century European in some way, you know? I mean How do you reconcile those traditions and what do you think the Indian family novel can do uh what it can do that the Russian family novel couldn't?

[00:00:37]>> Ah, that's a very deep and difficult question to answer quickly.

[00:00:42]The thing that I like about the setting of Indian family novels is just that India itself, the backdrop, is such a confusing place, right?

[00:00:55]Especially like the 1940s to the '80s.

[00:00:58]I'm not writing about the post-liberalization period, you know?

[00:01:01]Because you have this tremendous force of English and the West bearing down on a certain class of society. People are Anglicized.

[00:01:12]And then you have a wide swathe of people who obviously are living in great poverty.

[00:01:17]And so the characters have to carry a huge number of contradictions in their heads as they're walking around. And they're not always aware of how privileged they are.

[00:01:26]They are talking to each other in multiple languages. So I have to find a way to represent that in English, right?

[00:01:32]The tones of Punjabi, [clears throat] of Hindi. Um and also they have a very distinct relationship with the West because on the one hand we have a post-colonial complex at that time, which is that we like things from the West, but on the other hand, understandably, we have a great deal of resentment.

[00:01:48]Those things, that configuration feels more specifically Indian or South Asian to me than the Russian novel would have that is from Tolstoy's era or Dostoevsky's era. What I like about Dostoevsky specifically is that his characters feel Indian because like us Indians, they're a little bit irrational, they talk a lot, they shout a lot. [laughter] And so I, you know, I like that.

[00:02:10]94.3 Radio 1