In Ruthvika Rao’s dazzling first novel, an 11-year-old develops a frightful fixation. She is Vijaya, daughter of the feared Deshmukh family, feudal landlords who live in a “resplendent, fortress-like manor house” on a hill overlooking the fictional village of Irumi in southern India. The year is 1955. The bloody Naxalite revolt of the oppressed, landless poor that will engulf her family – described in the opening pages – is still many years away. The immediate threat is a man-eating tiger stalking the village, and all Vijaya can dream about is setting forth into the nearby forest with her uncle Surendra’s hunting rifle.
From this modest and curious premise, Rao – a copiously gifted writer – weaves an intricate and wrenching tale around class and caste. Vijaya notices Krishna, the younger of two sons of a widowed washerwoman who works in the Deshmukh household, after he stands up for her against a bullying classmate. She is enthralled by the ardour of his gaze. “It was a visceral sensation, being looked at this way. She felt separated – momentarily, secretly – from the overwhelming sense of loneliness she continually endured.”
At the core of Vijaya’s isolation is her strained bond with her mother, Saroja, and her more beautiful four-year-old sister, Sree, whom her mother adores unreservedly. She is also expressly forbidden to speak to anybody at school. After first spitting at Krishna, Vijaya makes an effort to befriend him. Does he want to go into the hills with her to track down the tiger? Recklessly, he agrees.
Vijaya is accompanied by an overexcited Sree, and Krishna by his brother Ranga, who knows the way through the forest. The outing ends catastrophically. Sree is severely wounded. Ranga takes the blame and receives a vicious whipping that nearly kills him. Krishna is banished from Irumi.
In a different book, the punishment meted out to the two brothers might seem outsized. Within the brutal and unforgiving world Rao so convincingly depicts here, it feels utterly ordinary. In an earlier scene, Ranga steals a mango from the Deshmukhs’ orchard. When Surendra disciplines Ranga with a beating, “he was not an adult and Ranga was not a child, that distinction between their respective conditions dissolved, and was replaced by their respective roles: master and servant”. This cold, ruthless philosophy extends to the Deshmukhs’ dealings with the indentured peasants who owe them rents and taxes, their harvest as well as their children.
Ten years will pass before Krishna’s return, and in the intervening years he will have finished his studies in Hyderabad and earned a doctoral scholarship. We learn that neither Ranga nor his mother ever allowed him to visit, providing for him from afar. “It was as if Krishna was purposefully orphaned; as if they believed that in this state of orphancy lay his safety, his future, his otherness from them. It was how they’d chosen to love him.” Vijaya, too, suffers in her own way, tethered to the pain of her sister who grows up crippled.
When Krishna and Vijaya meet again, the love story that ensues feels inevitable and miraculous. Rao has a touching, old-world flair for romance. Krishna had lived within Vijaya, she writes, “like a melody she was born with but could neither sing nor forget”. The times they are together or writing letters to each other are some of the most affecting moments in the novel, whether it is Krishna admitting his guilt over the “trade in fates” he made with his brother, or Vijaya agonising over what she did “to his sense of family”, to her own family, to Sree, to Ranga. But as violent, radical communism begins to sweep through the country, threatening to topple the old, abusive order in Irumi, Vijaya and Krishna are forced to face the frailties and faultlines in their relationship.
The Fertile Earth is a magisterial look at a segregated nation in the throes of cataclysmic transformation. It is at once a study of cruelty, bondage and power, and a parable about the downtrodden and humiliated standing up to their persecutors. Rao wears her research lightly, allowing the novel’s politics to spark off organically from her characters’ hopes and predicaments. She possesses a chameleonic ability to shuffle between contrasting perspectives; as confident and canny inhabiting the mind of a communist rebel as that of a Hindu nationalist, a house girl or a landowner’s wife. Throughout, she insists on the complexity of human action, and the blurred separation between good and evil, charity and self-interest.
The novel is grand in the way that the Indian epics are grand. It is plot-packed, emotionally extravagant, dramatically intense, and populated with a memorable cast who breathe fresh urgency into the everyday stakes of love, friendship, pride, duty and dignity. The writing, moreover, soars. Rao is judicious in her portrayal of revolutionary violence, but she can occasionally shock with a grisly detail, such as an infant who is tossed into a fire, or a mother who is force-fed the blood of her slaughtered son.
The main events of the novel conclude in 1970, returning the story to the horrific opening sequence, where a young boy witnesses the murder of the Deshmukhs. The reader, then, has known the ending throughout – and yet has read on, rapt. Such is the unique power and enchantment of this novel that seems destined to be a future classic.
• The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao is published by Oneworld (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
