Santanu Bhattacharya turned heads with his 2023 debut novel One Small Voice, which intertwines the personal fallout after a boy watches a mob burn a Muslim man with a panoramic survey of how modern Indian society is changing – buckling, almost – with the rise of Hindu nationalism as its dominant ideology. It marked him out as a novelist able to tell the biggest of stories with the most precise and haunting of details.
His follow-up, Deviants, is even more ambitious. It tracks how India’s attitudes to homosexuality have shifted over the past 50 years, by following the lives of three gay men in the same family: Vivaan, a 17-year-old who can pass for 21 on dating apps; his uncle, nicknamed Mambro, growing up in the mid-1990s; and Sukumar, his great-uncle (or grand-mamu, and Mambro’s uncle), whom we meet in 1977, fitfully studying commerce in Kolkata.
Vivaan’s story is written as if dictated via voicenote: apt, as he lives and studies in the “Silicon Plateau” of Bengaluru, India’s hi-tech centre. Rather than feeling gimmicky, this gives his voice an attractive and vivacious quality, as he revels in the freedom he has online to hook up, to exist on the wild frontiers of contemporary sexuality, where one can be “heteroflexible, homoflexible, objectumsexual, omnisexual, skoliosexual, bi-curious”.
He has been prompted to record his thoughts by Mambro, who recognises himself in his nephew, and wants to help him navigate life as an out gay man. It’s the kind of support that was not readily available to Mambro from Sukumar 30 years earlier, not least because Sukumar had “an inability to fit into the world, he always seems just outside the framework within which everyone lives”.
Sukumar’s story, told in the third person, is the most affecting. Unable fully to express either his love or his calling as a sculptor, he lives his life on a low wattage, even as he discovers some sexual release in passing encounters: “when he’d meet all those others, he’d learn that this was the story of every man like him, a long legacy littered with broken hearts, quashed dreams, duplicitous lives. Men like them, it was best they didn’t wish for anything at all.”
Sukumar and Mambro’s longer-term lovers are acknowledged only as X and Y respectively – frustrating for the reader, as they don’t quite come to life. But then this is Bhattacharya’s point: that lives and relationships under the notorious section 377 of the penal code, a baleful British colonial inheritance, were shadowy, not painted fully. And India’s legal framework is still not one of true equality. Watching the livestream of the supreme court judgment on legalising same-sex marriage, Vivaan observes acidly: “the judges said big cuddly things about gay people, oh give them respect, show them love, but in the end, refused to grant equal rights”.
But the country has changed sufficiently for Vivaan to be able to go to the school dance with his boyfriend. The reluctant headteacher is ultimately persuaded, “unfurling a Pride flag and waving it around like she’d come to watch an India-Pakistan cricket match and it was the last over and India was sure to win”.
Bhattacharya’s style is unshowy yet lyrical, a difficult combination to pull off. Writing about Y, Mambro observes: “Maybe that is what love is; we feel it, in moments, for short spans of time, that indomitable potency to imagine beauty with inexplicably intense ferocity, like when the little bird gathers up all the oxygen it can muster and sings a tune.”
More notable is how Bhattacharya uses language itself as a motif to signify social and personal change. When Sukumar is challenged by his mother about his relationship with X, “All the words he couldn’t tell her, all those feelings they didn’t have vocabulary for, all the things they didn’t have the courage to speak out loud, were circulating through his veins, making it difficult to breathe.”
For Mambro, the discovery of the journal he kept of his relationship with Y triggers ostracism by his university friends, and makes him wary and distant in relationships. It is only towards the end of his story, when a younger Vivaan starts ripping pages from the journal to make into paper boats, that he finds a degree of resolution. These words don’t belong to him any more; he is ready to write again. Meanwhile the teenage Vivaan can benefit from a fuller sense of expression: “If you’ve been on those apps and know how people talk, you know that someone bothering to type out full sentences without grammatical errors is enough to make you fall in love with them.”
There’s one false note in the novel, when Vivaan responds to the breakdown of his relationship by turning to an AI bot; effectively a digital mirror built by harvesting data and translating that into a simulacra of desire. It felt untrue to Vivaan that he could be satisfied by this avatar; for all that he lives his life online, his yearning for palpable human connection is stronger than that.
This is a minor complaint. In Deviants, Bhattacharya has written a compelling, concise epic, where politics, love and freedom are balanced and blended into a novel that is unflinching about the cruelties of the past, optimistic about what comes next, but wise enough to know that progress comes with costs, too.
• Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
