A child of the 1980s, Aatish Taseer was born in London to a Sikh mother and Muslim father, brought up in Delhi and educated in the US. Yet the constant feature of Taseer’s intercontinental upbringing was first introduced in his Costa award-shortlisted debut The Temple Goers: “Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city of my childhood … There was no setting more evocative than a lamplit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals and perhaps an old Etonian lying flatly on a deep sofa.”

This deracinated, affluent milieu comes as second nature to a writer who attracts profiles in Vogue, has dated minor British royalty and has been feted by the Evening Standard as “a model-handsome, sought-after guest at the smartest London dinner parties”. The Delhi drawing-room set chattered away in Taseer’s second novel, Noon, and the increasing obsolescence of the post-colonial elite forms a significant part of his third work of fiction as well. Yet The Way Things Were is a more ambitious novel, in which Taseer seeks to reconcile the ancient mysteries of classical Vedic culture with the overcrowded, politico-religious minefield of modern India.

Such an epic endeavour – spanning the period from 1975, when Indira Gandhi proclaimed the Emergency, to the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 – risks falling short. Yet collapse of intellectual ambition is the novel’s principal theme, as Taseer bases the story on the grand delusion of a scholarly central character who cannot bear to acknowledge that his life’s work has been without significance.

Professor Toby Ketu is the last maharaja of a remote northern province (“A mere princeling,” he apologises, “and rather more -ling than prince”), who has spent more time on the international lecture circuit than in his ancestral lands, developing his theories on the origins of classical Indian poetics. His air of detachment and tendency to view civilisation as a grammar puzzle lend him a certain allure: “Everywhere he looked Toby could see, under layer upon haphazard layer of borrowed and vernacular language, the glorious and systematic bedrock of Sanskrit … that attitude – his aloofness – made him for all the wrong reasons attractive to people of a certain class in India”.

On a conference visit to Delhi he catches the eye of Uma, an intellectually curious, instinctively rebellious young woman who outrages her Brahmin family by taking a job as a flight attendant. Her attraction to Toby is visceral and all-consuming, yet once the flame of passion has burned itself out, she finds herself married to a man of infuriating passivity who refuses to engage in the series of political crises that threaten their comfortable existence.

The world of old, moneyed Delhi, in other words, comes to resemble a form of subtropical Middlemarch, in which Uma plays the role of a suffocating Dorothea, tethered to a scholarly egotist obsessed with the deadest of dead languages. Yet Taseer himself is an avid Sanskritist, and his reverence for the language appears both genuine and profound: “What of Sanskrit? Who spoke it? When? Where? For how long? A highly complex language, a whole system of thought and belief, but hardly a copper bowl, a seal, a stone, a dwelling, so little to say they really existed.”

The latter stages of the novel feel slightly enervated, as Toby and Uma go on to form more stable, if less passionate relationships. Ironically, Toby’s disillusionment becomes complete when his beloved language finally springs back to life, distorted by the pamphlets and slogans of the Hindu extremists responsible for the destruction of the Babri mosque. Toby’s despair at the appropriation of Sanskrit by the “saffron goons” is movingly rendered: “It was as if a faculty of his mind had been disabled and a whole world of meaning had gone quiet. There was nothing now holding his India together. Squalor was just squalor, dirt just dirt … India, for the first time, seemed to him devoid of an animating idea; it was just a place where a lot of people lived.”

The Way Things Were is a weighty, sometimes unwieldy novel that frequently takes more pleasure in pondering the third-person optative of class VII verbs than the reader may be willing to share. Yet its philological labours advance a significant truth: “If we were to associate the genius of a place with one particular thing – the Russians with literature, say, or the Germans with music, the Dutch and Spanish with painting – we would have to say the true genius of ancient India was language.”

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