Violation Is the Connective Tissue in This Family Portrait

The drama of The Complex, Karan Mahajan’s new novel, is set off by a sexual assault. Gita, who has recently married into the esteemed Chopra family, travels back to Delhi from the United States to visit family and attend a wedding of one of her husband’s relatives. There, she runs into her husband’s uncle, Laxman, still young himself, who corners her during the wedding reception and rapes her. From this violent act, Mahajan unfurls decades of the Chopra family’s story. As Mahajan teases in the novel’s framing device, this rape sets off a chain of events that will finally lead to Laxman’s murder.

Part of the strength of The Complex is Mahajan’s willingness to enter the minds of all his characters, from Gita to Laxman himself. This isn’t the first time he’s tackled complex material: His previous book, The Association of Small Bombs, which was shortlisted for the National Book Award, was told partly from the point of view of terrorists. But as Mahajan explained, though writing these characters can be challenging, they also aren’t as abnormal as we’d necessarily like to believe: “One thing I could draw on as a human being is compartmentalization. People do a bad thing and then they’re just living their lives.” While Laxman—who becomes an important political figure in India and embodies the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in the 1980s—is the novel’s crux, The Complex is engrossing because it is a portrait of a family, not just of one bad actor. In addition to Gita and her husband Sachin, who move between India and the United States, there is Karishma, another niece of Laxman’s by marriage with whom he embarks on an affair, and her son Mohit, who gets swept up in real political protests against affirmative action in the novel’s final section, a real-life episode that was inspired by Mahajan’s childhood memories. 

This range of perspectives allows Mahajan to show nuances and contradictions that drive so many of the characters: Karishma, for example, being drawn to the unappealing Laxman in order to escape the dreary confines of her life, as well as her friendship with Laxman’s wife. As Mahajan says, “Laxman has committed sexual assault, but we know from the real world that many men like this exist and they have people who live with them and marry them and even love them, right? Our president is a man like that.”

In our conversation, conducted via Zoom, Mahajan and I discussed how to write rape from a female perspective, his ambivalence about the term “family saga,” using historical fiction to explore the present, and more.

Morgan Leigh Davies: How did the book begin, and where did the inspiration for it come from? 

Karan Mahajan: It changed as I was writing. The initial impetus was that I was interested in the way the psychology of immigration works—the way immigrants often lie to themselves and say they’re going to go home, the way that they can become suspended between worlds. The character of Gita Chopra came first. She is someone who has moved to the US following her husband. She hasn’t made a conscious or a professional decision to immigrate herself. She longs to move back to Delhi, but feels cast out of home as well because she’s dealing with infertility and there’s a social shame and stigma attached to that. 

That’s where the book started. I knew she would have this antagonist when she moved back to India, Laxman Chopra, but the novel really clicked and opened up when it became clear that they would be linked to each other through an act of sexual violence, and that it would bind these characters in a way that was negative and inextricable. It played up the idea that many people are connected to home not just by love, but by a wound. 

MLD: Your previous novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was pretty dominated by men. But the way you handled Gita’s experience of rape really affected me. It is unusual to read a book by a man where this subject is handled so sensitively. What was the process of writing Gita’s perspective?

KM: I’ve certainly written male dominated novels. There’s always a risk one takes when stepping outside one’s own experience. But here, I felt I was dealing with a woman who is from my social class, a similar background in Delhi. Obviously, she is older than me, but I had been around women like her my entire childhood. I had a way in, and it would also, to be honest, be a learning experience to me. I’m of that school of people who are like, Don’t write what you know, write what you want to learn about. 

Some of the research was very straightforward. I thought to myself, I’m a cis brown man. I don’t really understand how women relate to their own bodies. I know about it from having interacted with women, but not in any kind of lived way. I read Annie Ernaux’s book Happening, which is about her abortion. There’s a great book, Adopted Miracles, by Anamika Mukherjee about infertility and adoption. Those books are not quite about the experience I was describing, but they gave me some way of thinking about the difference between how a cis man and a cis woman might interact with their bodies.

In terms of the sexual assault, that was very difficult to write. I always start novels avoiding things that are risky. This was true of The Association of Small Bombs. There was no part of me that wanted to write from the perspective of a terrorist. I was going to just write about the victim. I remember at some point thinking, I can’t actually write this because I don’t understand why someone does this . . . so, I forced myself to write from that perspective. In this case, it was true of both the perpetrator and the victim. I was like, Okay, I don’t really know how a woman in the 1970s in India would deal with sexual violence. I had to be very careful not to inflect it with the way women would talk about it now. I didn’t want it to be a #MeToo narrative because that’s not the recourse they had back then. So I thought to myself, Okay, what can she do? I interviewed therapists who deal with Indian women. I read lots of different accounts of sexual violence. That’s one thing about the present day—there’s a lot of stuff online. There were podcasts that were really helpful. I don’t think I used anything directly, but they gave me some confidence.

I also drew on my own experiences of shame, where there are things, even minor things, that I constantly think about and am not able to talk about with even the person I’m closest to. I think that was a part of it. 

MLD: There are a couple of instances in the novel where the characters talk or think about the idea of double consciousness, which felt so present throughout the book in these characters either living with the experience of sexual violence, or just being a woman. Male characters experience this as well. I’m curious about setting up this family situation where everyone has to have that double consciousness to continue promoting the family ideal.

KM: I think double consciousness is the thing I’m most interested in writing, because the experience of being in a big Indian family, or even an Indian social setting, is one of feeling surveilled and knowing one has many eyes on oneself and that life is partly a performance. Of course, this is true everywhere, not just in India. There’s a private self and a public self, and somehow society is set up in a way that the two can’t meet. The characters have to constantly fluctuate between the two extremes. That’s when I know a novel is really working, when I feel that happening, because that feels like lived experience to me.

MLD: From a structural perspective, how did you make the decision to write this as a family saga that also deals with a lot of political ideas? The politics is mostly held to the end of the book, so the family problems wind up taking up most of the novel. 

KM: One of the funny things about having written this book is I have a personal allergy to it being called a family saga. It’s not because it’s not a family saga, but because I don’t often pick up those books anymore. I was very conscious of the form. I knew it was a family story, but I was trying to renovate it in this way where the characters are linked to each other through violation rather than by patrimony or inheritance. The classic family saga is the story of the grandfather, then the father, then the son, or the grandmother, mother, and the narrator. I didn’t want to do that. 

I wanted to take on this very technical challenge of writing with equal depth about the US and India and really recreating the feeling of going back and forth, which is something that immigrant novels don’t get into. Immigration is not a linear process—I’m talking about educated immigrants, obviously, not someone coming as a refugee. But you go back after two or three years, you see your family, then you come back and it changes you every time. One reason to write about Gita in that situation is she’s an outsider who is also suffering a trauma with the family. The going back and forth is actually an intensification of what happens with most people. But I think the biggest risk I take in the novel is when it shifts to Mohit’s perspective. I really tried to keep that very tightly linked to the main characters. 

MLD: Mohit, who is from the next generation, is very important in that last third, but until then, children are not very important in the novel—except to Gita and Sachin, who can’t have them. How did you approach writing about children in this and the role that they play?

KM: I think it’s part of the inversion of the family saga. When I started writing novels set in India, I was conscious of how Indian fiction is studded with grandfathers and grandmothers. There’s a lot of writing about your dadi and dada. I remember thinking, I’m gonna make it modern by not writing about them. I’m gonna avoid that. My fiction, even when it’s dealing with family, stays within a generation; it doesn’t get too much into the children or into the grandparents, except for when there’s a relevant reason for them to take over the plot. 

I do think that’s the dramatic irony of the book: On the one hand, there are these people who are longing for kids partly because they can’t have them. Between the sexual violence and then not being able to conceive, Gita becomes obsessed with having children. This is before IVF; they don’t know what they can do. On the other hand, there are other people who have a completely hands-off or neglectful relationships with their children. The children are painted as kind of annoying. They’re always in the background squabbling and screaming because, actually, the experience of children can often be that. This idea that children are going to cure you or give you happiness or give you meaning is just a social myth. But the real goal is the propagation of this particular clan.

MLD: Laxman becomes an increasingly influential Hindu nationalist politician near the end of the book. It felt to me that the family ideas—in terms of these patriarchal characters and the way that women are treated—and the political ideas become one in the same over the course of the novel because of the way it is structured. I’m curious about the synthesis of those two things.

KM: The writing of a novel like this is strongly influenced by the time we live in. Donald Trump was very much on my mind. It’s not a new observation that it’s not accidental that Trump is a rapist and has assaulted many women. It is part of the ideology. I’ve always been fascinated by the link between male sexual violence and political struggles and structures. There’s a strong link. A lot of it has to do with male entitlement, which plays out in sexuality. Rape is not necessarily about sex. It’s about power often. 

I had this one throwaway line in The Association of Small Bombs where one of the terrorist characters imagines committing a sexual assault. A lot of people were struck by it, not in a negative way. People just pointed it out. And I remember thinking, Okay, I think people are resonating with that because it is just true. There are men walking around with this in their head. They’re not committing the act, but it’s actually a very commonplace thing built into the male psyche by the society we live in, which is one which gives men more power. 

This was a period when rape was being discussed in a huge way in India because there’s always a crisis of sexual violence in India. I thought, How does one write about a character like Donald Trump without sympathizing or empathizing, but just recognizing that this is a person who exists in our world? From that, I very subtly weaved in the politics. Laxman first belongs to a more progressive reformist sect of Hinduism. But one of the things that Hindu nationalism does is collapse into Sanātana Dharma, which is more orthodox Hinduism, and does more idol worship. So very subtly, I show that shift. It might not be something that American readers get, but for Indian readers, it’s significant. Laxman moves towards this more ornate form of Hinduism even as he’s acquiring power partly through his sexual misdeeds. 

The part that was really important for me was to show that it’s not all about power, that at some point he does actually adopt the ideology in a real way. To me, that was one of the most important breakthroughs in the book, realizing, Oh, even someone like Trump might actually start to believe this stuff. It’s not just opportunism. You see Laxman actually becoming a figure of the Hindu right and realize it’s partly because society has let him get away with his other misdeeds.

In a novel, it’s not all done consciously, but I was conscious of not beginning with the politics in a heavy-handed way and seeing if it could emerge one character, one thread, one event at a time. 

MLD: It’s so hard to write about what’s happening in America right now, partly because things are changing so quickly and partly because people don’t want to read about it. Obviously, this book deals with politics in India, but why did you make the decision to set this in the past versus the current day?

KM: Some of it is just the way my mind works as a novelist. I am someone who is constantly trying to fill in different areas of darkness that exist around him. I was born in 1984. I grew up in Delhi. So I was interested in what was happening in the period right before I was born and when I was a child. I was six years old when these Mandal Commission anti-affirmative action protests erupted. I belonged to a class of people who were protesting against affirmative action. The image that led to that entire section in the novel is that I had a family friend who was in college who lay down in front of a bus to protest. 

But yes, I agree. It’s near-impossible to write into the news cycle because things change so much. I do wonder about this with American writers, why there’s been such a failure to write successfully about the biggest political movement of the last decade. I think there’s a weird, puritanical dishonesty here about the fact that all of us contain all those forces. It’s not just them. It’s not saying that there’s something bad about me if I contain them. You live in the society, so you contain a germ of racism or misogyny or ignorance. You contain all those forces that are in Donald Trump, and you should be able to write about your experience and the experiences of people you know, and be able to draw out conclusions about the present moment. That requires some degree of non-black-and-white thinking, of willingness to transgress, of taking risks—willingness to get canceled, even. 

I’ll take characters who come from a background similar to me and I will try to locate all these forces within them. That’s enough. I don’t need to write about Modi right now or about Trump right now. It’ll be clear to any halfway sentient reader that that’s what’s been commented on. And also, anything set in the past is completely inflected with the concerns of the present. It’s an artificial construction.