Mahesh Rao’s 'Polite Society' Is Not Quite A Regular Modern Day 'Emma'

While I was reading Mahesh Rao’s new novel Polite Society, I was keeping an eye – and ear – on reports emerging from Kerala after the deluge. There were heart-warming newspaper stories of farmers in Nedumbassery who’d managed to rescue at least some of their precious goats and were now, in some small way, attempting to rebuild their lives.

Then there were stories from family and friends about the ways people were coming to terms with losing furniture, and those who were trying to recover spoiled furniture. The not-so-wealthy were getting rid of their sodden, muddy mattresses and salvaging modest wooden bed cots with power washers and disinfectant. The wealthy – like the neighbourhood filled with uber rich doctors in my hometown of Thrissur – were putting their branded American box springs under the heat of the harsh post flood sun, hoping they’d dry out and become usable. The only thing this exercise seemed to be doing, however, was to contribute a malodorous stink. The flood affected all classes in Kerala equally – and you only need to look at gardens and courtyards across the state to understand how.

Polite Society
Mahesh Rao
Penguin, 2018

Class and its implications ripple through Rao’s third book, which should come as no surprise given that it is modelled on Emma, Jane Austen’s fourth novel.

Here, the Khuranas take the place of the Woodhouses and Highbury is South Delhi (even if Ania Khurana, the Emma of this book, thinks of herself as “a native of Prithviraj Road, rather than Delhi.”)

The set-up as Polite Society starts is pure Austen: the first chapter is the most savagely funny of the book and is set at the India Art Fair where Ania and her father Dileep wander around hobnobbing with their wealthy cohort. Rumours of Diana Ross’s imminent arrival swirl around and at one point news of a sighting of the singer emerges:

“But the thrill is dissipated soon enough – when it was discovered that the lady in question was in fact the wife of the Rwandan Ambassador to India.”

As the novel gradually introduces its cast, the empathy and wit with which Rao has etched each of these characters stands out. It would be easy to scorn them – these few families that seem to have such undue influence on the country’s political, economic and cultural spheres. The narrative thankfully doesn’t overstay its welcome among the manses of South Delhi with their parquet floors and cabanas and Goya sketches – Rao roams far and wide to small hill towns and coastal cities and the rural expanses of Rajasthan.

This he does mainly through the characters of Dimple (playing Harriet to Ania’s Emma) and Fahim (Mr. Elton imagined as an upwardly mobile New Delhi journalist). Dimple is not as helpless as the original Harriet and is blessed with ample self-respect and a spine of steel. She enters the novel as the subject of Ania’s matchmaking experiments, but eventually charts her own path and even if in thrall of the Khuranas and the refined world they inhabit, is grounded enough to realise soon enough that true happiness doesn’t lie there.

Which brings me to the character of Ania, a socialite blessed with a trust fund, front row seats at Paris fashion shows, unshackled by employment which allows her to flit from city to city and country to country on a whim, and a huge amount of self-confidence in her ability to create good matches amongst her set. At the start of the novel she’s already set her aunt up with a Colonel and is now trying to engineer a suitable match for Dimple. Oh, and Ania is an aspiring novelist, much like every other twenty-something you meet these days, whether from old South Delhi families or working in a cubicle in an IT park in Bengaluru. You never do get a peek at Ania’s output, though you do get a title  – “The Enigma of My Effigies”. She’s thematically the central character of the book, but also the one that interested me the least.

I will confess here that I never had much affection for Emma as Austen imagined her. I appreciated the original’s comedy, but its heroine had always seemed a bit annoying with her matchmaking and makeover attempts. Her superficiality grated and I found I couldn’t care less if she and Mr. Knightley (the most uptight – yes, even more than Mr. Darcy – of Austen’s male protagonists) got together.  The secondary cast of strivers and chancers were mildly entertaining, but at the end of the book, as the matches that should have been encouraged in the beginning are finally cemented and weddings take place, you realise that in Austen’s world, only the truly foolish would attempt to marry out of their class. Dreams of social mobility in regency England are for mugs, a game of snakes and ladders where it would be useless to escape one’s place in the established hierarchy.

Mahesh Rao. Credit: Facebook

In the world of Polite Society too, there are those who aim to reach the top. And as you spend more time with the people who occupy this stratosphere, the more you’re glad that none of them succeed. You come to care for the outsiders in Rao’s novel and his story remains true to Emma – and the real world we inhabit – in that the social order is not upset with any outwardly revolutionary acts of inter-class or inter-communal couplings.

But Rao doesn’t let his wealthy protagonists luxuriate in bliss in the well-appointed interiors of their homes. The space they occupy is not built on as solid a foundation as you’d think. The cracks are very much there, under the surface, in the corners and lurking at the edges of the story. When they finally come into focus towards the end, it’s not with vulgar violence but with stealth, like a thief in the night.

And this is where Rao’s craft and achievement becomes apparent: what might have started out as a breezy romantic comedy in the vein of any number of Emma adaptations (Amy Heckerling’s masterpiece Clueless stands in a class of its own), transforms subtly and surely into a story that could have come from the imagination of that other doyenne of class narratives in literature: Edith Wharton. In the travails of one particular character who loses her fortune and her composure at the opening of the Royal Opera House in Mumbai, it’s impossible not to see the echoes of the fate of Wharton’s tragic Lily Bart.

This is what ultimately gives the novel its power: it doesn’t let its fortunate and obscenely rich protagonists off the hook to enjoy happily-ever-afters. In the hands of a lesser writer the fates of these characters would have come off as moralistic, preachy grandstanding. But that’s not Rao’s style and it’s a testimony to his skill as a writer that none of these people come off as caricatures.

A review of this book wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Rao’s superlative ability to bring alive the environment with his writing. Not just the built environment – the well-designed living rooms and hotels and restaurants – but the natural environment, too.  You can almost hear the birds and insects in the early winter mornings of Uttar Pradesh and feel the humid dampness of a rainy day in Fort Kochi.

As I reached the end of the book, I was glad to have been a fly on the wall of this fictional world Rao has conjured with such intelligence and eye for detail. Close brushes with the real thing that inspired him, I suspect, would be absolutely intolerable.

Saudha Kasim is a Bangalore-based writer and communication professional.

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