Karan Mahajan on Literary Tradition, Trump, and Writing Multiple Points of View

In March 2016, Karan Mahajan made a splash with his second novel, The Association of Small Bombs. By telling the story of a Delhi car bombing, Mahajan earned high praise—including a spot on the National Book Award shortlist—for his ability to get inside the mind of someone who commits an act of terrorism.

Then, that fall, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. At the same time, public discussion of sexual assault was intensifying both in the US and in India, where Mahajan grew up. He was also trying to make sense of his own experience as someone “suspended” between two countries—an experience that was increasingly common but underrepresented in American fiction.

Mahajan’s third novel, the masterful The Complex, is the result of the novelist’s excavation of his own history and those of the two countries he’s called home. The story of a woman assaulted by a powerful man, it’s also the story of that man’s somewhat haphazard rise to power, and of the ways in which political movements can become vehicles for individual grievances and desires.

It’s impossible not to think of Trump and MAGA while reading The Complex, but it would also be a mistake to read the book, set between Delhi and the US, as a straightforward commentary on American politics. Really it’s the sprawling yet entirely specific story of the Chopras, a once-storied family whose members cannot escape one another or their shared past, no matter how far away they go.

The novel really started to work when I realized they would be linked by this assault, a kind of negative relationship that becomes the engine of the novel.

I first met Mahajan when we were studying creative writing in college, and we’ve been reading each other’s work ever since, so it was a joy to talk with him about his latest novel, his influences, the way his upbringing shaped his craft, and more. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

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Anna North: We’ve known each other for a long time, and we’ve had the great good fortune to be working alongside writers like Tony and Vauhini and Alice for decades now. Do you think of yourself as part of a literary tradition? And if so, what is it?

Karan Mahajan: I don’t feel myself to be part of any tradition, except for the ones that I’m unconsciously a part of. I clearly am someone who writes about families. I’m clearly someone who is operating within realism. I’m obviously someone who has self-identified as an Indian writer, and it’s been useful to have a powerful tradition behind me, because you can then start seeing what the gaps are in that tradition and what you might contribute.

In terms of our writing group, I do sometimes try to think about what we all have in common. I can see that with Tony, for example, I share a kind of sexual frankness, or a desire to transgress. And this is probably true of Jenny and Alice as well.

Most of us in the group were second-generation immigrants—I was kind of first-generation. There is something that we have in common.

AN: When did you have the idea that became The Complex, and what was that idea?

KM: The germ of it really was trying to figure out how to depict the psychological state of someone like myself—someone who grew up in India, moved to the US at a certain point in his adult life, but kind of remained suspended between the two places. I go back a lot imaginatively. I thought, that state of kind of being in denial about immigration hasn’t been captured.

Geeta Chopra was the character that appeared first, and she appeared to me as this character who has a career in India, but then she follows her husband to the US. She can’t find her footing there, and longs for her hometown, Delhi. But at the same time, she’s been assaulted by a relative. When she goes back, she’s suffering from the social shame of infertility, and so she feels cast out of home as well. So she is now suspended between these two places.

What was interesting was that I knew she would have an antagonist in the form of this character Laxman, who would be a rising Hindu nationalist in India and member of her husband’s family. The novel really started to work when I realized they would be linked by this assault, a kind of negative relationship that becomes the engine of the novel.

When I started writing this book in 2017 or 2018, there was a lot of discussion about sexual assault in India. And I just thought to myself, men are not being honest about the extent of this problem.

And then the other thing was the rise of Donald Trump. There’s a tendency where we look at someone who’s committed sexual assault and we just say they’re not a human being, or we can’t possibly understand that point of view.

But I thought to myself, a rapist is our president now. He’s interacting with all sorts of people. He’s married to a woman. There’s been people who probably have loved him. How does one explain the inner state of such a person, and also how it gets linked to patriarchy and political power? Once I started writing Laxman, all those things started to work in concert.

AN: It’s so interesting that you started with Geeta, because I do see her as the novel’s moral center.

KM: Totally. It’s funny, both with The Association of Small Bombs and this novel, I never set out to write from the perspective of the “evil” or “bad” character. But at some point, I think to myself, I don’t understand how they’re acting or why they’re doing what they’re doing, and then I start writing it, almost to explain it to myself. And often that character takes off because one of the perverse pleasures of writing bad characters is that they just do things and move on. They’re not reflective or conflicted in the way the good characters are, so they can actually be quite propulsive.

I do think people sometimes have to almost fake it til they make it within political movements.

AN: This is a book in which people get involved in nationalist movements in India for reasons that turn out to be mostly personal and not necessarily political. It’s not like Laxman, who is quite repellant—corrupt, a predator—has very clear beliefs that he wants to work out in politics. A lot of the things he does, he kind of does just because he wants to.

And then there’s Mohit, a kind of narrator figure, who’s much more sympathetic, but also has more personal reasons for getting involved in a protest that ends up being very consequential for him. How do you think about their stories in the context of reactionary movements both in India and in the US?

KM: It’s not an accident that Trump is a rapist and the leader of this movement. I think those two things are linked, and that sexual violence and sexual control is a key part of these movements. That’s one way in which you can begin with the personal and then move on to the political.

But I think the thing that really was satisfying to me writing the book was that Laxman begins as a pure opportunist, but there is a moment in the novel where he realizes that his personal locus of resentment can turn into a real politics. He realizes he truly does believe in this ideology: upholding patriarchy, upholding sort of traditional values, upholding a more orthodox form of Hinduism.

That, to me, was satisfying, because I do think people sometimes have to almost fake it til they make it within political movements. That’s what we see with someone like Trump. I think he does now believe the things he stands for, though we know from the historical record that he believed none of these things until five years ago.

I was also fascinated by the idea of a large group of people whose identity is linked to this great ancestor or patriarch, and they themselves have not found a system of meaning that transcends the patriarch.

Mohit was really interesting. He was my favorite character. He’s young, and he’s got a misguided idealism. When you’re in your 20s, you act out for reasons that are opaque to yourself. In his case, he’s only vaguely aware that he is rebelling against the family in which he’s growing up and is trying to get attention. And he falls in with a movement that is against affirmative action, which I drew in some ways, from my own background in Delhi.

When I was six, these Mandal commission protests occurred, and everyone from my sort of bourgeois class was against these reservations for Other Backward Castes. I remember a family friend who was in college lay down in front of a bus to protest this. That image really stayed with me, as did the knowledge that the Mandal commission protests did actually indirectly lead to the start of Hindu nationalism.

AN: Can you talk a little about the shared family apartment complex where the Chopras live, and which gives the book its title?

KM: One of the biggest factors in Indian family life is property, but it’s not represented often in a novel. I wanted to think about a way in which I could write it into the very fabric or the texture of the novel. Everyone is constantly obsessing about their space, which, of course, could be a stand-in for power.

I was also fascinated by the idea of a large group of people whose identity is linked to this great ancestor or patriarch, and they themselves have not found a system of meaning that transcends the patriarch. They need to essentially propagate the cult of his personality, and in doing so, are forced to lie about a number of things that are happening in front of their very eyes.

I wasn’t thinking of this actively when I was writing the novel, but the tagline of the Chopras could be, Make the Chopras great again.

AN: Can you talk more about how point of view works in this book? You move really seamlessly in and out of the perspectives of Mohit, Geeta, Laxman, and others. Did you always know you were going to shift points of view?

KM: I always wish I could write a novel that just stays with one character. I think that this must be from growing up in a crowd myself, but I feel like I’m most at ease when I’m jumping across the consciousness of several people.

I have this line in the novel, which is like, “I can be everyone but myself.” I feel like that’s true of me as a person, and why I’m a fiction writer.