REVIEW: House of Caravans
On the Messy Constellations in Shilpi Suneja's Reclamation of the Karwan Novel
Note: House of Caravans was released by Milkweed Editions on September 19th 2023. This review attempts to avoid any spoilers or reference to specific plot points. However, several direct quotes and recurring thematic elements are necessarily included. Please be advised.
In the Summer of 1928, Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of free India, wrote a series of letters to his daughter to help bridge the gaps of time and responsibility between them – he as a rising member of the Indian National Congress in Allahabad and she as an inquisitive ten-year-old vacationing in Mussoorie. When the first thirty of those missives were published a year later under the title, Letters From a Father to His Daughter, Nehru was still hard at work as a key political figure in the country’s fight for independence. It would be another nearly twenty years before that goal was achieved. However, with each brief dispatch to young Indira, Nehru’s words seemed to reach for a more abstract politic of human relation than the impersonal demands of bureaucratic government allow. In letter #24 he writes:
“But surely history does not consist of battles and a few persons who became kings and generals. History should tell us of the people of a country; … their joys and sorrows; … their difficulties and how they overcame them.”
In Shilpi Suneja’s debut novel, House of Caravans, the author masterfully taps into the intimacies and tumultuous complications of such desire for one family living on the cusp of British departure, through the horrors of Partition, and eventually settling into a near-present orbit of mistrust and resentment in the wake of 9/11. Suneja anchors these moments of upheaval to the story of two brothers, Chhote Nanu and Barre Nanu Khatri, as they navigate love, honor, and family expectations that repeatedly draw them both toward and away from each other. The ebb and flow of their many relationships create two distinct caravans that travel across time, place, and memory in this Partition novel that, surprisingly, situates itself as a work of historical fiction for the modern day.
The novel opens with a brief prologue set in August 1947 as Chhote Nanu runs toward the Lahore-to-Amritsar train station. Immediately, our understanding of the caravan becomes embodied by the gruesome modernity of a bloody train car: “In Punjab, the land of five rivers, a sixth is born.” This train-as-caravan theme continues throughout the novel so that everything and everyone eventually passes through a train station of some sort. By extension, every modern threat of conflict, violence, or war is carried from that train (and, later, airplane) into the lives of these characters.
Only after such harm has been accomplished – and the train is no longer a viable option – does Chhote Nanu get steered toward a more traditional caravan by way of nearby refugee camps filled with tents, herds, and military vehicles. Like those camps, there are countless sites of a more communal pilgrimage or migration that appear throughout the novel as well. They don’t always offer a guarantee of safety, but within their confines does exist the possibility for a fresh start among other survivors. Suneja frames House of Caravans within a hybrid of these contexts.
The book toggles between chapters set in 2002 and the four-year period from 1943-47, allowing readers to witness both the roiling colonial spark and contemporary aftermath of this fratricidal beginning to Indian-Pakistani statehood. At times, Chhote Nanu and his fastidious older brother are clear stand-ins for the ongoing rift between neighboring countries that once existed as a single entity: “Partition in the same family. Poor Khatris.” However, Suneja takes pains to subvert any neatly-packaged answers that might come with such comparison. If the sleek orderly nature of a train car acts as modern-day caravan, the novel's many twists and turns repeatedly herd readers toward a more classical understanding of the karwan as its sprawling and messier Persian root.
Early in the novel, Chhote Nanu is introduced as “the little fool with his wayward ways" who dares fall in love with a mixed-race Muslim woman prostitute. He further defies his respectable Hindu family by planting a bomb meant for the British superintendent and “[going] to jail for the country.” With this depiction, Suneja crafts an idealistic yet noble 17-year-old who is both endearing and the perfect template for readers eager to syncretize him to either Pakistan itself or a more inclusive, tolerant version of free India than actually manifested. Of course, this temptation quickly fails when we realize that Nigar Jaan would never have been accepted in either country as a “liberated lady" of British-Indian ancestry working in the Heera Mandi red-light district. The only place where she is allowed to exist as fully Indian and equally autonomous is within the relative anonymity of her faith and, briefly, in her marriage to the doe-eyed Chhote Nanu.
Which makes for an even more confounding experience when the author revokes this “poetic disposition” only to reintroduce our protagonist in 2002 as a spiteful, bitter old man who routinely torments his niece, Bebe, along with his brother’s grandchildren, Karan and Ila. Barre Nanu’s personality, for that matter, also shifts from rigid, line-toting, social climber to the gossipy, doddering owner of six weaving looms (a profession he’d previously only overseen as business manager) who claims Bhagat Singh as his favorite revolutionary. It is interesting that the last name Khatri carries its own disputed etymology depending on the region, dialect, and associated caste one consults. The brothers may alternately be warriors, financial merchants, legalists, or weavers according to various translations from Hindi, Sanskrit, and Persian vernacular. Suneja dabbles in each of these meanings while keeping readers in anticipation of any literary explanation for what has led to these changes.
One could argue that part of the shift has to do with the nature of the modern caravan itself. That external force tugging at the reins of each character’s personal aspirations is made up of 200-years of violent British rule, followed by a famously botched and harried redrawing of Indo-Pakistani borders, leading to two-full-days of equally violent mass migration. Under these circumstances, Chhote Nanu and Barre Nanu do not become who they want to be but who life demands that they be. There are, however, degrees of consent throughout the novel. These are highlighted, for better and worse, by the narrative karwan along which Suneja continues to lead us.
Through countless moments of misdirection, misinformation, and delayed or missing letters, she enacts a metaphorical game of Telephone, much of which is informed by the women of the novel. Every moment of interpersonal subterfuge between brothers becomes heightened and echoed back via the women’s experience of marriage, daughterhood, or motherhood. In the most obvious example of this, Suneja positions Chhote Nanu’s ill-fated romance with Nigar Jaan as entry point for a deeper conversation about the politics of women as filial property in precedence over any caste system. Our beautiful beloved, darling is maligned at every turn for her profession, her religion, and her racial background but none of these are ever so damning as her status as Mistress to the wrong man.
It is no wonder then that Suneja attributes two of the novel’s most compelling passages to Nigar Jaan:
“She wanted to shut the window and hide, so she could extricate herself from this scene, their view. But she was part of the sky here. Extricating herself would mean breaking off from a constellation, like a star falling from the sky.”
And later:
“How tightly the institutions of marriage and prostitution held hands…”
The gendered and generational constellations in House of Caravans are many and intricately mapped. Barre Nanu’s undelivered letters to the Lahore jailhouse are a premonition of those his granddaughter, Ila, must wait twenty years to receive in Kanpur. His future landing place at the haveli of Attiya Rehman becomes reincarnation of the one entrusted to his neighbor, Ahmed Bhai, back home. And, if one mother refuses to abide the demands of Partition upon her life, it is an almost certainty that another will be made to do so in her stead. Suneja’s prose is sweeping and full of wistful nostalgia but it is always aware of the cause-and-effect relationship between each decision these characters make – including those made for them.
The author is equally aware of both the history and present-day challenges into which she writes. In that regard, Miss Pakistan, Miss India, and the Office of Restorations clerk are all strikingly reminiscent of Statistics Babu from Bhisham Sahni’s 1973 novel, Tamas. Likewise, Chhote Nanu and Nigar Jaan’s brief stay in Multan exists in the wake of Khushwant Singh’s 1956 classic, Train to Pakistan, where Juggut Singh and Nooran live in the fictional town of Mano Majra. Nehru himself even makes passing appearance in several of Suneja's scenes. However, his character also shifts from the hero of Chhote Nanu’s young fancy to the political architect of a peace-keeping ‘friendly neighbor’ policy predicated on the strict return of all stolen property, particularly the women of each country.
In this regard, how does a family recover when the impersonal demands of bureaucratic government win out? Suneja teases the dire implications of making a wrong answer to this question and adds to it with carefully portioned doses of heartache. Here, the novel seems most thematically aligned with contemporary titles like Megha Majumdar's critique of rising sectarianism in present-day India in A Burning and, more broadly, Tiphanie Yanique’s Monster In the Middle for its complex love story and generational-minded subversion of the American Road Trip novel. Suneja likewise writes against hegemonic ideas of the caravan as a neat, singular, or institutional entity.
I especially appreciated her emphasis on the self-naming and renaming of several characters in the novel, e.g. Mrs. Jamal’s decision to no longer carry the backhanded honorific ‘Jaan’ past a certain age as well as the constellation of names given to young Henry upon being registered for school.
On the subject of subverted institutional entities, my thoughts also return to the only letters to actually reach their intended destination, those between the not-yet Prime Minister Nehru and his real-life daughter, Indira. Counter to Nehru’s political status, the enduring appeal of Letters from a Father to His Daughter exists within the personal, the familial. Written from one future Prime Minister to another but extending beyond either of their professional accomplishments or missteps, there is a sense of temporal possibility to the intimacies shared between Indira Gandhi and her father. Something like “what is called co-operation,” as Nehru writes in letter #12:
“The first tribes must really have been large families. All the members … were related to each other. But the families grew and grew…”
Perhaps this is why I so often wanted to read Ila Khatri as a near-proxy for Indira Gandhi as well - not simply for her sharp political acumen but for her uncompromising heart. With House of Caravans, Suneja makes clear that despite any missed opportunities of the past, if the wounds of religious separatism are going to be healed, it will be accomplished by a constellation of families and neighbors – the literal house that propels this caravan forward. For Karan and Ila, especially, as they seek to reconnect with their own fathers there are all these moments when one of the ties that bind their caravan together becomes unhitched and we witness characters trying to bridge the divides that separate them, trying to reconnect those links. Suneja’s is a novel that aspires to the collective realization that Muslims and Hindus, Indians and Pakistanis are also links in a single chain, “a million little decisions to coexist … love spread as a cloud,” members of one house.
SHILPI SUNEJA
House of Caravans
Published: September 19th 2023
Milkweed Editions
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