Lives lived between shame and sunrise

There is something compelling about Indian fiction that returns to the soil — its memory, its violence, and its stubborn hierarchies — placing ordinary lives against the tremors of national transformation. When such fiction is also shaped by a supple, idiomatic use of language, as in Kavery Nambisan, the result is especially resonant: “No fighting the British. We must ask them gently-gently to leave.” “If a robber enters your home, and you request him to leave, by gently-gently leading him to the door, will he go, leaving behind the bag he just filled with your provisions?” The prose carries the cadence and rhythm of Indian speech, anchoring the novel firmly in its linguistic and cultural terrain.

Kavery Nambisan’s Rising Sons, set in a small village near Mysuru between the 1920s and 1940s, is a quiet yet searing account of the making of modern India — not through the grand speeches of history, but through the fragile interiors of a family trapped between caste, patriarchy, shame, and awakening. At the centre is Devaraya, a Brahmin patriarch whose pursuit of wealth and respectability masks deep fragility. His carefully curated identity begins to fissure from the opening line, when he announces — half-proud, half-playful — that he has “two sons and one-and-a-half daughters.” The “half” is Chinni, the adopted daughter whose presence inside a caste-sanctified household is both an affront to orthodoxy and a reminder that affection in such worlds is always conditional. Nambisan builds her narrative on this foundational crack.

The hamlet of Kesarugattu is evoked with tender fidelity: dusty lanes, temple bells, the drawing of water from wells, gossip thick as humidity, and the invisible yet unbreakable lines of caste that arrange bodies and destinies. Colonial rule hums in the background, but the more immediate and intimate oppressor is caste itself. Ancestral dominance and the fear of social humiliation govern every gesture inside and outside Devaraya’s house. Working in a bank as a peon in Mysuru while running a modest money-lending shop back home, Devaraya embodies the dangerous intersection of caste pride and capitalist ambition. His public face projects ritual purity; his private life is riddled with moral compromise. In a paraphrased confrontation, his younger son Anna articulates the novel’s central fracture: you speak of purity, but conceal your own stains — what kind of honour demands lies? It is a quiet but devastating rebellion, marking the first collapse of the old order.

The revelation of Devaraya’s hidden past — one that undermines the very caste purity he venerates — shatters the world he has built. The family collapses under the weight of shame; one son disappears; Devaraya is disgraced and imprisoned; the village that once deferred to him turns away with vindictive satisfaction. Inside the house, silence becomes a weapon. In another paraphrased exchange, Gowru, his long-suffering wife, speaks with restrained fury accumulated over decades: a home built on fear cannot survive a single gust of truth. The line is quiet on the page but detonates through the moral architecture of the novel.

From the family’s ruins, a new consciousness emerges. Anna is drawn into the freedom struggle. His rebellion is both political and personal — a rejection of shame as a mechanism of control. In a moment that captures the novel’s fusion of private and national liberation, Anna tells his father that if the nation must free itself, individuals must first confront older chains than those imposed by the British. Chinni, meanwhile, becomes the emotional heart of the story. Experiencing progressive hearing loss, dismissed by society and bound by deep affection to Anna, she embodies the resilience of the marginalised. Her silence is not weakness; it is resistance.

One of the novel’s notable achievements is its portrayal of how colonial capitalism intersects with caste hierarchy. In a sharply staged scene, a village priest — the former custodian of ritual prestige — visits the lending shop to deposit his money, bargaining for interest with head bowed. Devaraya’s paraphrased reflection is telling: even gods have begun to bow before Mammon. With this, Nambisan captures an India shifting uneasily from spiritual hierarchy to monetary hierarchy, neither offering dignity to the powerless.

Nambisan writes with felicity and restraint. Some readers may find the pace measured, but the emotional intelligence and historical density more than compensate. At a time when conversations around caste are often flattened into slogans or denial, Rising Sons insists on remembering.