How this professor’s long-awaited novel confronts India’s hidden histories

Karan Mahajan was 6 years old when he saw a family friend lay down in front of a bus during a protest against India’s Mandal Commission affirmative action movement. While Mahajan did not “actually participate” in the protest, he “had a vague sense of what it felt like” for those who did. This memory (and several flesh-and-blood research trips to India throughout his 30s) inflamed Mahajan’s decade-anticipated third novel “The Complex.” The work unfolds amid the backdrop of 1980s India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Hindu nationalism movement and 1990s anti-Mandal Commission protests against India’s caste-based career selection system.

“The book itself was written in solitude and edited in silence because I was trying to mentally travel back in time to 1980s and 1990s India,” Mahajan says. “I didn’t want my vision for the novel to be occluded by anything.”

A fictional backstory of patriarch SP Chopra’s extended family’s demise, “The Complex” dissolves many of Mahajan’s — an associate professor of literary arts at Brown University — previous literary touchstones, ranging from musical inspiration to cinematic immersion.

“For better or for worse, ‘The Complex’ is my truest expression of myself as an artist yet because I wasn’t conscious of influences,” Mahajan says on a Zoom call from his home in Providence, R.I. “I was writing the way I wanted to about the subjects that I wanted to write about.”

The novel, partly narrated by SP’s great-grandson Mohit Chopra, illuminates the character’s rebellious awakening from his family with a punched-gut-riot stew of emotions. Chopra’s parents, aunts and uncles all live in the A-19 Modern Colony apartment complex, weighed down by the grandiose legacy of their late family elder. These drama kings and queens of the novel are a chameleonic joint family of disjoint motives. The push, pull and discovery of these motives morph into a violent blowout that ultimately dismembers their existing familial foundation.

Just as “The Complex” deviates from his first two novels, “Family Planning” and “The Association of Small Bombs” Mahajan’s career trajectory is also a deviation from that of a traditional novelist. After growing up in New Delhi, he double-majored in economics and English at Stanford University. Then, he pursued assorted careers in indie publishing, urban planning and entrepreneurial research before conclusively binding himself to a literary life.

“My wife, Francesca Mari, was the one who said that I should dedicate myself to writing — if I wanted to pursue it,” Mahajan says in a thoughtful, affectionate tone. “She is the one who convinced me that ‘doing things by halves’ was ‘not necessarily the best way to approach it.”

Wearing ‘writer’ as his primary professional identity was a plot twist in Mahajan’s life — one he solidified in 2013, quitting other jobs to pursue an MFA in fiction at UT-Austin’s Michener Center for Writers.

There, Mahajan’s pattern of perceptualizing violence materialized with the 2016 National Book Award finalist and the 2017 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awardee “The Association of Small Bombs” (dedicated to Mari). “The Association,” as much a literary revolution as a novel, gyrates around the psychosexual grief of a Delhi-based Indian couple who lose two sons in a marketplace terrorist attack and the “psychosomatic” gymnastics of the terrorists who ignite that very same bomb blast. Mahajan presses firmly into the inner lives and cerebral crevices of terror victims, witnesses and perpetrators. And out rushes a blazingly cathartic torrent of honesty and horror.

“The Complex,” more meandering and less searing — is a departure from such detonation. What it lacks in explosivity and pacing, “The Complex” at times compensates for in tension, tenderness and tenacity. Mahajan remains contagiously courageous and (narratively) humble. Here he deftly untangles how “sexual proclivities” rooted at the familial level can entangle with political upheaval. But this is made complex by his vast cast of characters whose minds he often thrusts in and out of — sometimes even between individual sentences or paragraphs. “The Complex” marks Mahajan’s shift to character-entrenchedness over “Association’s” plot-driven magnetic energy.

“Shifting characters is not a hurdle while I write, but once I am done, I do think to myself: will people be able to tolerate so many characters and switching?” Mahajan says. “To me, this is an accurate depiction of how consciousness is distributed in crowds; it has made me a much more fluid writer who puts the demands of the story before the demands of the individual.”

Yet Mahajan’s individualistic Chopras each still celebrate and mourn. They transgress in their personal, peculiar ways. They are hurt people who, sometimes inadvertently, hurt people — including themselves. But even Mahajan’s most “self-destructive” Chopras who “live deathwards” have motivations so sophisticatedly complex that readers will inhabit their eyes, ears and bodies without fully penetrating their psyches.

Vauhini Vara, is a tech journalist and the 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist of “The Immortal King Rao,” who spent several years with Mahajan at Stanford as his classmate. “Karan writes with such nuanced attention to what the critic Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘addressivity’ — the idea that the style of any communication is deeply influenced not just by who’s speaking but by who’s listening,” she says “I often ask myself some version of ‘What would Karan do?’ when I’m trying to deal with the complexity of addressivity — and its relationship to colonialism and capitalism — in my own work.”

Addressivity’s post-political-turmoil nuances are burned into Mahajan’s brain. Belonging to the Punjabi subculture of Indians — marked by their resilience during years after the post-1947 Partition of India and Pakistan — he risks in “The Complex” a raw fight to write with a creative, critical and sometimes careless attitude toward sacred Hindu establishments. Mahajan simultaneously shatters and showcases Hindu nationalism. He strips down the real stuff of reverse-immigrant struggles as eidetic text to be read. He pushes cultural boundaries in painfully truthful ways, strangling both stigmas against sexual shame and silence amid sexual violence.

“I was certainly thinking of partition’s era of sexual violence and also the current crisis of sexual violence in India when I was writing ‘The Complex,’” Mahajan says. “While I don’t make any direct connection between the two in the novel, I certainly make a larger point about that till recently women were very afraid to speak out about sexual violence and that it was a commonplace occurrence in families and society.”

This pursuit of this truth makes him not only a liberating literary executor but also a worthy moral educator.

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