‘How to Date a Fanatic’: Aruni Kashyap’s new novel is hopeful of getting a more tolerant India

While reading Aruni Kashyap’s second novel, How to Date a Fanatic, I was confronted with a curious and delicious problem – how does one slot this novel and the novelist? When Kashyap debuted with A House with a Thousand Stories in 2013, a coming-of-age story about young Pablo set against the backdrop of insurgency, the novel could firmly be located in Mayong, Kashyap’s hometown in Assam, and in the tradition of Assamese novelists writing in English.

With the publication of his collection of short stories, His Father’s Disease, in 2019, one noted an expansion, both in terms of the geographical location that extended from Assam to Minnesota and its thematic preoccupation with violence, both personal and political, that stretched to explore issues of identity, sexuality, racism and belonging.

But with his latest novel, Kashyap seems to have shattered barriers of regionalism and set expectations for the writer belonging to the North East, the stranglehold of both of which he had scathingly critiqued in his short story “Skylark Girl,” to write a novel that compels you to place his writing on a wider, even planetary map.

Young and free

How to Date a Fanatic tells the story of Rohit, a young academic from Assam who teaches English literature in a Delhi University college and subsequently...

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