You could change your own life in small doses, safe and contained—or you could change everything by committing to political upheaval. It is precisely this opposition that Vivek Shanbhag dramatizes in his novel Sakina’s Kiss, in which the individualist and psychologized prescriptions of self-help books are counterposed with the potential for meaning-making and transformation inherent in radical politics. The story unfolds not through a spectacular conflict between these two modes, but in a series of redactions and ellipses, demanding the reader’s full attention by denying them the indulgences of moral simplification and obvious resolution.
The novel was first published in India as Sakinala Muttu in 2021 in its original Kannada, a language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka, with a rich literary history. Srinath Perur’s English translation, released by Penguin India in 2023, and republished in the United States in July 2025 by McNally Editions, has been widely praised; the novel itself has drawn admiring reviews and comparisons to Chekhov. Its central thematic friction—between self-improvement and political change—emerges quietly, almost imperceptibly. The narrator, the middle-class Venkat, and his wife Viji are immersed in Bangalore’s corporate world and their blandly prosperous existence. Yet the disappearance of their daughter Rekha, a university student with leftist commitments, uncovers the rifts underneath their comfortable lives.
Venkat, a thwarted striver who is addicted to self-help books, would prefer to ascribe an easy passivity to his daughter. But Rekha defies that confining patriarchalism, asserting her own identity—until she goes missing on the way back from visiting her father’s ancestral village of Mavinamane. Venkat grew up in the remote village, where his uncle Antanna still lives, managing the family lands. Propelled by this inciting mystery, the novel follows Venkat and Viji as they retrace their daughter’s footsteps.
Earlier in the narrative, before they’re aware she’s disappeared, two young men arrive at the family’s door and ask after Rekha. Habitual viewers of Indian film and television will recognize this as the signal of a genre: an amorous entanglement turns ominous and a woman disappears, then either re-enters the protective fold of a man (a father, a brother, a husband) or meets an unsavory end: abduction, assault, and death are all on the table, looming as the implicit moral consequences for the woman who strays.
These conventions are of course not confined to Indian narratives—one can find them in all sorts of literature from Anna Karenina and The House of Mirth to contemporary romance literature—but they continue to enjoy popularity in the “masala” film, a generic assemblage which often blends action and romance. The “masala” or “spice” of these films often derives from classically patriarchal conventions like the damsel in distress, and almost inevitably follows the age-old trajectory of the marriage plot.
Indeed, Rekha’s mother Viji at first dismisses the men as infatuated suitors, inconsequential and unrelated to Rekha’s disappearance, while Venkat thinks to himself, “As the man of the house, it was my duty to step forward and take care of it.” In this genre, the dutiful family man’s virtue is typically emphasized by its contrast with a backdrop of violence and vague criminality. Conscious of these tropes, the novel suggests connections between the men in search of Rekha and the local underworld. When the men’s gang-affiliated uncles intervene, asking Rekha to stop talking to someone in a rival gang, Venkat thinks: “It sounded like a movie dialogue.” When Viji later reprimands him for his too-cinematic sense of the real, he counters: “And why shouldn’t things happen as in the movies? Don’t people imitate Hindi films and dance crazily at weddings?”
In short, the reader is primed to expect a story about a woman’s honor and the patriarch in charge of that strange substance—the grandiose motivator that robs female characters of their agency even as it drives entire nations of men to violence: from abuse to murder and war. Honor always intervenes to maintain the boundaries of caste and religion, operating as a kind of reproductive coercion that fortifies hierarchies of power. This reproductive control is distilled into a dominant common sense, even as it takes on more brutal, symptomatic forms.
So it comes as no surprise that the gangster uncles suggest Venkat tell police the rival is offending his religious beliefs in order to separate the pair. When Venkat refuses, they grumble that they have no grounds for starting a “caste riot,” since both Rekha and the man happen to belong to the same caste. The men rely on a well-worn and ruthless code that needs little elaboration; in fact, it depends on silence for its strength. Interfaith and inter-caste love is a popular, if controversial, cinematic trope, and an issue of growing urgency under the reactionary Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, led by the invidious Narendra Modi. Proliferating accusations of “love jihad”—a right-wing conspiracy theory that alleges Muslim men are forcing Hindu women to convert to Islam via seduction—have gained unsettling cultural and legal legitimacy, and are well on their way to becoming consensus reality in India. The group Dalit Human Rights Defenders reported a spike in “honor killings” based on caste infractions in India between 2019 and 2021. Such are the stakes of love in Modi’s India.
In narratives of honor, the woman is a screen for projection, a mute presence who must be redeemed. This vision Viji quickly punctures: “It’s unbearable. Three men sitting around, talking about what the women of a house can or cannot do.” It soon becomes clear that Viji and Rekha have become frustrated with Venkat’s poorly concealed conservatism, which he attempts to disguise as realistic moderation. When a misogynist candidate runs for election, Venkat insists on engaging with anti-feminist arguments on the pretext of “hearing both sides.” He interprets Rekha and Viji’s instructions not to vote for the candidate as a petty censure, with merely private consequences: “A vote might contain the glow of virtue needed to sleep with one’s wife or the torment of a woman compelled to give her body to a husband she loathed.” Marriage appears either as trick or compulsion; the possibility of love is effaced.
If Viji says, “It’s like there’s another man inside you, waiting to get out,” then it is the reader who is best placed to perceive that other persona within the narrator. The novel is focalized solely through Venkat, who embodies a hapless bourgeois masculinity, caught between embracing the Western liberalism that seems expedient in his corporate workplace and craving the control that has traditionally belonged to men, and which the family structure is meant to guarantee. His reliance on self-help mantras emblematizes his essential hollowness as well and his dual impulses: their affirmations serve as a balm for the alienation he feels at work while also supplying him with the language to camouflage his orthodox beliefs in platitudes.
In his mind, Rekha’s action and “revolutionary talk” are dismissed, attributed to her youthful naïvete and the influence of her English professor. To Venkat, her ideas betray an infatuation with the words of men: “There is nothing more frightening than the prospect of one’s children, especially girls, coming under the sway of outsiders.” Shanbhag uses this set of relations to trace the deceptive operations of patriarchy, an order under which the family believes itself virtuous, bringing women under the shield of protection and vigilance.
Our stifling proximity to Venkat’s interiority—which displays an aggression that belies his outward attempts at even-handedness, while revealing the true extent of his groveling and opportunism—contributes to the novel’s sense of unease. When Viji and Rekha refuse to tell him everything, the reader’s curiosities are equally frustrated. Venkat, as rendered in Shanbhag’s skillful free indirect discourse, is an unreliable narrator, yes, but his unreliability is not only a narratorial device. He persists in misapprehensions that drain the sincerity from all his relationships, so that he becomes fundamentally isolated from those he claims to love and protect.
As it turns out, Rekha has disappeared of her own accord, and her departure has nothing to do with the clichéd gangsters. Why, then, does Shanbhag mislead us? Maybe I’ve misled you in turn, trying to make sense of this red herring. The novel presses genre cues into service, but it does so only as a means of constructing something much more subtle. Its fundamental maneuver is one of elision, leaving almost every subplot dangling, where perhaps lesser authors might have been tempted to resolve things in melodrama and catharsis. The novel’s beguiling restraint supplies both its aesthetic conceit and the mechanism through which its political stakes emerge. Closer attention to Venkat’s repeated insistence that Rekha is devoted to men with revolutionary ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, makes this clear.
The novel’s tropes of romance tend toward satire—but they also prove bracingly real, demonstrating how Rekha’s actions are read through a social script by her father, and by extension, the world at large. Put another way, Rekha is conscripted into romance by default. When it turns out that she has actually traveled to a secret location to write for a newspaper run by Suresh, a leftist in Malnad, our narrator defaults to the assumption that Suresh must have seduced her. Elsewhere, Venkat concocts an unsettling imaginary scenario in which militant men ask Rekha if she would be willing to sacrifice her virginity for the struggle.
The force of her actions is repeatedly subordinated to this romantic and sexual imaginary, a line of thinking that betrays a deep-seated heteropessimism. Even as Venkat finds the idea of “handing over” Rekha to a husband “strangely comforting,” he betrays at every turn his own disbelief in the possibility of an equal relationship between a man and a woman. The novel’s critique of normative patriarchy also emerges in its depiction of the distance between Viji and Venkat. Even the leftist Suresh—an anti-traditionalist who may associate with Naxal rebels and is rumored to have aided an intercaste marriage—expects tea from his wife Kavita and curtly orders her not to interfere in Rekha’s departure. In Sakina’s Kiss, gender emerges as the most convoluted of knots, even within the already-tangled framework of revolutionary politics; it remains as unresolved and unresolvable as the novel’s circuitous subplots.
A precedent for Rekha’s radical tendencies emerges when Venkat and Viji return to Mavinamane in search of her. The novel starts to condense around the imaginary of the class traitor. Venkat’s maternal uncle, Ramana, begins to haunt his consciousness like a ghost. Ramana was involved in an underground resistance, which the novel loosely hints was connected to the Naxalite-Maoist movement, an ongoing peasant and tribal insurgency. Through an extended flashback, Venkat’s childhood in the village with Ramana and his mysterious activities emerge into the novel’s present. The appearance of Ramana explains the significance of Suresh’s remark: “It [that is, being a class traitor] seems to run in the family.” The Naxalite movement began in the 60s; it is now deemed a terrorist group by the Indian state. This year, India launched Operation Kagar, deploying its military capabilities to assassinate Naxalite insurgents in the forest strongholds of Chhattisgarh and Telangana, where their presence has stalled corporate efforts to exploit the areas’ natural resources.
Venkat’s memories of Ramana also revolve around questions of property—Ramana’s inherited property was usurped by Venkat’s father. This causes familial conflict and public gossip. Venkat thinks: “We have smeared ourselves with the ink of betrayal.” Ramana, however, appears uninterested in his inheritance. He reveals little of his politics to his family except in cryptic letters, written in illegible handwriting like the footprints of “crows and sparrows.” Decoding his letters becomes a shared pastime; Venkat and his family skewer meaning as they trip over words like “bourgeois” and “tyranny.” Ramana’s literal illegibility underscores how his politics have alienated him from his family, even at the level of language.
Interestingly, in this sequence of the novel, the letters make Ramana’s writing in Kannada almost as illegible to its native speakers as to an Anglophone reader like me, allowing another kind of metafictional play to emerge. These faltering experiments with collective interpretation seem to anticipate the book’s translation. But in aligning the difficult work of translation with the epistolary form, the novel suggests that translation is not only a dynamic movement from one language to another, but an intimate act of address. Through Perur’s understated translation into English, the circle of Ramana’s interpreters grows.
It seems no coincidence, then, that Ramana’s last letter is deciphered in the flashback by a large, festive audience. It is here that the other red herring—the novel’s title—is explained. Without giving everything away, the true nature of the eponymous Sakina and her kiss abruptly clarifies the novel’s dialectical play with romance. The title suggests romance right at the outset, providing cover for its more explicit politics. But, as the novel makes clear, every romance is also political. In the letter, Ramana also reveals he has been living with a woman, possibly unmarried: one alternative to the novel’s pessimistic portrait of heterosexual marriage. He asks his property be handed over to her or redistributed among the family’s workers—though this request is never honored. The family never sees him again.
We learn that long ago, when the police arrived to investigate Ramana’s activities, Venkat (still a child at the time) had no qualms about cooperating along with his father and uncle. In his memory his actions are almost mechanical; only his mother resisted, while the others repeated well-worn liberal alibis: “Of course, the law had to be followed. Of course, violence was unacceptable.” The family unit is shored up by these minor, automatic acts of capitulation, and by expelling the class traitor for good from its socioeconomic fabric. The slow-burning reveal of this secret through the novel’s form—brought to the surface as Venkat returns to Mavinamane in search of Rekha and is confronted by Ramana’s memory—demonstrates how figures like the militant, the rebel, and the class traitor return to haunt the same field from which they are forcibly disappeared. Its minimalism, then, is instead a layering of secret erasures. The novel’s strained silences are not only a matter of style, but a means of depicting a middle-class existence founded on both political and psychological repression.
The centrality of the class traitor to Sakina’s Kiss—its displaced and disappeared protagonist—is romantic in its own right, forming a certain vision of political struggle. The insurgents depicted are never poor or working-class or Dalit, but that possibility is foreclosed only in Venkat’s imagination, whom we might now understand as the kind of everyday anti-hero produced by the haywire postcolonial assemblage of modern liberalism, traditional masculinity, and caste and class-based privilege. Suresh, for example, is a highly educated leftist who can run his independent newspaper because he generates income from his land, a contradiction recalling Engels’s reluctant work in his father’s cotton mills to fund the activities of Marx.
Rekha, meanwhile, is on track to defy her father’s dreams of upward mobility. We learn only as much as Venkat does about her disappeared days, which is next to nothing. Her actions—read by him as both a result and betrayal of her elite Westernized education—are not even afforded the currency of rumor or gossip, unlike those of Suresh and Ramana. Here, one might wonder whether the novel’s tactic of redaction falls in on itself, obscuring Rekha’s actions and motivations so they lose specificity, blunting the narrative’s critical edge. But then again, perhaps this erasure affords her act a sort of clandestine significance, closing her off to further misreadings and objectifications. It is not Rekha who is threatened by the world around her; instead, she deliberately threatens its oppressive order.
In the end, Venkat imagines how the story of his life might be told in a film—but what seems like a neat wrapping up of the novel’s commentary on cinema turns out to be an anti-climax. Suddenly the outlandish stylings of the masala film fall away, becoming spare and documentarian, leaving Venkat to venture defeatedly that his life might amount to no more than the sum of its parts, an almirah of mere possessions, an ordinary vessel “waiting to be assigned meaning.” We leave him behind, in reluctant assent with his feeling that something is indelibly missing. The novel is most effective when it bears down on its elisions, agitating the guilt, anxiety, and faithlessness that attempt to paper over the void. but ultimately can only highlight it.
One wonders how clear these absences and their echoes will be to the Western reader. The novel’s American release, alongside Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi’s 2025 International Booker Prize, suggests a growing international audience for Kannada writing. Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, which examines Muslim women’s lives in South India, is in the tradition of the 1970s Bandaya Sahitya movement, a progressive Kannada movement committed to writing as social justice. Such recognition of a regional language and its explicitly left literature also unsettles the primacy of Hindi, which has long been promoted as the defining national language by conservative and Hindu-nationalist factions.
On the international stage, South Asian literature, often collapsed into the category of the postcolonial, has been dominated by Anglophone writers. Shanbhag’s craft exhibits a sort of generic playfulness—a wry threading together of romantic banalities with a muted political undertow—that’s common to South Asian narrative structures. But perhaps the figure of the class traitor will have no difficulty making a transnational journey after all, as fascist repression, Islamophobic expulsion, and extrajudicial vanishing become shared routines across India and the United States. In different forms, on different timelines, both nations seek to militarize their borders and homogenize all that remains within, imposing fascism’s ideal state: a disinterested complacency, an exhausted resignation, an unopposed state of subjection.
But there is another way, too; not the path of least resistance, of convenience and individual progress, but the thorny terrain of organized resistance and the risks it entails. The family unit—which the nation claims to protect just as the family seeks to safeguard its women—is a primary means by which the psychic absences of the fascist subject are formed and buried. Two kinds of betrayals work in tandem in Sakina’s Kiss: one that subverts the bourgeois family, and one that upholds it. Those “who take it upon themselves to set right the injustices done by others” seek to widen the sweep of freedom beyond the narrow remit of their own social fabric.
By contrast, Venkat embarks on a shrinking trajectory in which betrayal becomes easy. The horizons of his freedom are shaped by neoliberal maxims, urging a slow and perfidious crawl towards a top that doesn’t exist. It results in a consciousness whose limits are defined narrowly, composed of slogans that insist on complicity with and adaptation to a brutalizing political order, and never liberation from it.
As Ramana said to Venkat once: “You are aspiring to a dull and ordinary life. […] Do something that changes the course of people’s lives. There’s meaning in that.” ♦
