Inside New India: Run and Hide, by Pankaj Mishra, reviewed

The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative and engagé as you’d expect. An exploration of Narendra Modi’s autocratic, Hindu-nationalist New India seen through the progress of three graduates from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, it’s also reassuringly rich in characterisation and the sheer sensory overload of modern life.

Narrated by Arun Dwivedi to an initially unnamed interlocutor, the book follows his journey from poverty to modest success as a translator in Delhi, while his feckless friends Aseem and Virendra make it big in America. A desire to escape ‘the material deprivations and the moral shabbiness… determined much of our lives’, Arun reflects, as they embark on their ‘strange, self-distorting journeys’.

His own lucky break comes when he’s transformed into ‘an upper-caste Hindu by the stroke of a schoolmaster’s pen’, giving him a Brahmin surname resulting in ‘a lifelong fear of being found out’.