“Our supreme objective” : Nehru, a suitable boy, and the moderation of feeling

Abstract

This article explores the various ways in which Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy privileges the affective (and aesthetic) quality of reticence. I begin by addressing the broader political significance of such moderation—relating it, more specifically, to the placatory content of the speeches made by Jawaharlal Nehru during the late forties and early fifties. I then trace the process by which Nehru’s “meandering pleas for mutual tolerance” eventually find their way into the very structure of A Suitable Boy, directly influencing its formal qualities and creating a general discursive “climate” of order and stability. In other words, I would like to suggest that the narrative not only privileges this Nehruvian virtue at the level of content—by explicitly advocating the renunciation of strong feeling—but also practices it at the formal or structural level. And by doing so, I shall argue, it ultimately obliges the reader to adopt a similar affective stance.