THE CAMPUS NOVEL has caught up and discovered caste, now a box to be dutifully ticked. To sate the current appetite for representation, contemporary novelists feel compelled to invoke it, and the publishing industry has obliged with a flurry of books. In April 2024, Simon & Schuster released Habitations, Sheila Sundar’s debut novel, following Vega Gopalan, a young academic struggling with her self-image as an immigrant in the United States. In August, the spoken-word poet Megha Rao’s Our Bones in Your Throat was published, a campus novel about two friends accosting the elitism that saturates their private college. October saw the release of Nayantara Violet Alva’s Liberal Hearts, a campus romance set in another private university, where a first-year undergraduate falls in love with the “golden boy” from the neighbouring village, their affair accentuating the friction between the minted lives of privileged students and the abutting local community. Alva’s protagonist, prompted by her romantic interest and the syllabus she is studying, realises she “can’t stop feeling guilty” about her privilege. Similar sentiments abound in the other two novels. Together, they seem to make the same appeal to their readers, as if whispering a challenge: if you are anti-caste, you must like these books.
The Mandal commission, private universities, and the New Education Policy, 2020 stirred up India’s collegiate order. Even novels written in English, a language that has long been a birthright for Savarnas and a privilege for everyone else, could not look away, marking a clear departure from earlier campus fiction that skirted around social realities.
The best-selling campus novel of the 2000s, when the patter of college-attending, Friends-watching millennials was studded with Americanisms, was Chetan Bhagat’s debut, Five Point Someone, written from the perspective of one such millennial. Hari uses phrases like “my answering machine” and “busted my butt” but is also scathing about the fact that his university, the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, “cared about America.” Caste should be an inescapable point of crisis in a novel about friends subsisting on five-point-something GPAs at IIT. Bhagat breezes past it without so much as a nod. His bestselling status, of course, could not have been guaranteed by didactic deliberations on caste, not in 2004. Culpability for one’s privilege was not exactly a prized métier just yet, and commercial publishing was, and always has been, a business set out to make money. No wonder caste barely figured in the campus novels of the time.
India’s renowned universities were convulsed by protests around the Mandal commission, which ushered in marginalised students, changing campus demographics, while more private universities cropped up. According to the sociologist Anirban Sengupta, writing in Economic and Political Weekly, the number of state private universities increased, from 19 in 2006 to 290 in 2018—over two hundred of these were established after 2009. Many contemporary novels are set in such universities, where caste is again a thing best sidelined, often bypassed in calls for social justice strictly for the economically disenfranchised. A caste-blind campus is an uneasy ground for novelists trying to write about caste. Not only do they have to portray the campus life of the marginalised student, relatively unknown and unimagined in this space, but they also have to wield the language of social justice. In the early 2000s, caste appeared only in passing in campus novels. Now it is shoehorned in, tokenised and traded for literary acclaim.