Whenever we read about the internet, we constantly seek answers: is social media a boon or a bane? Should we escape from the internet, or will it save us? Prayaag Akbar’s new book, Mother India (Fourth Estate), navigates these questions without offering definitive solutions. What he offers is hope, a silver lining in the bleakest of times. Akbar’s debut book, Leila, adapted into a Netflix series, was speculative fiction set in a dystopian future that felt frighteningly close to the present. In contrast, Mother India is realist fiction, chronicling life as it is now.
Mother India is the story of Mayank and Nisha, growing up in the age of social media, artificial intelligence, and dwindling ideas of truth; it is set in Delhi’s peripheries and its underbelly. The narrative reveals the aspirations, pressures, and dilemmas of young India. “I wanted to write about the new economy, the new digital landscape, from the perspective of someone like Mayank and Nisha who are trying to maximise their opportunities,” Akbar says. “They want to work within the system and fashion the best lives for themselves, and I think that is a very important part of what is happening in India right now.”
World-building
Mayank has worked at various jobs, such as service-event assistant and delivery executive, all fancy titles for manual labour-heavy roles in the ‘new economy’. Currently employed at a far-right propaganda YouTube channel, his task is to create an AI image of Bharat Mata for a response video to “PhD-waale. Jihadis. Khalistanis. Maoists and missionaries”, whom his boss Kashyap, the channel’s founder, sees as threats to the nation. Mayank decides to use an image of a random girl from social media and manipulates it into a video poster of Bharat Mata. The girl whose image he uses is Nisha, who has moved to Delhi from a small town in the mountains and works as a salesgirl at a high-end chocolate brand outlet in a south Delhi mall.
At the centre of the fiction is Delhi itself. Akbar says he chose it as this city is an important part of his life. “Mahipalpur, where the book is set, is near where I lived and went to school. I had been thinking of a boy like Mayank, who has grown up amidst this neighbourhood going through wild transformations, from dusty village shops to global chain outlets. How does he feel being from the neighbourhood yet unable to access this new urbanscape, as the stores are not meant for him but for the cars passing by?” The city in flux is a metaphorical character, alienated from the people who fuel its engine. “Changes after changes are driven by the demands of the external city—the airport, Aerocity, and such. The people living there are not the ones demanding these changes,” adds Akbar.
Internet’s new anthems
Amidst these changes, the novel’s characters are lost, searching the internet for a sense of history and direction. “It is easy to view social media cynically, but for many, it’s a source of transformation,” says Akbar.
Teaching young people at Krea University and becoming a parent have changed his perspective. He empathises with various characters, including the founder of a far-right YouTube channel, who says, “It matters…what we make of the words of the student activist arrested, so that our followers click on the video. It’s a jungle out there. Everyone eats. To make an impact on the internet, you don’t need ideas, you need enemies.”
With Like, Follow, Share, and Subscribe becoming the anthems of our time, the fire around which humans used to gather to tell each other stories has been replaced by the internet. “There is so much fake news, and everything is subjective. Earlier, there were certain historians, thinkers, and people whom you could trust, but today everything has been challenged. I see my students; they are so bright, but they don’t have any foundational truths to stand on, and the absence of those leaves one in a constant state of anxiety,” remarks Akbar.
The ‘mother’ symbol
Mother India, the title of the book and a powerful symbol of nationalism, have been used by the author to evoke primal feelings of truth, belongingness, and power. “The reason I have used it is because no one is unaffected by the mother. The contrast between glorifying and deifying Mother India and the actual experience of our mothers is stark. In this book, there are a lot of mothers—Mayank’s mother, Nisha’s mother, puppies’ mother, and the jailed activist’s mother. I was thinking about how mothers give and how we always want more. Even with Mother India, the idea is ‘give me your all, I’ll protect you, you protect me,’ and yet we have so much environmental destruction.”
In the book, the mother has not yet ‘left the chat’, so goes Gen Z lingo. The characters might be lost, feeling abandoned by the mother—history, nation, and city—but their search continues. There is violence erupting under the garb of serving and protecting Bharat Mata; there is a virality that does not care about the truth; there is the noise of social media and its puppets. Yet Akbar shows us a kinder and more courageous side to this time, urging us to hold on to it in all its complexity.