The English Problem

A young Indian man is tapped to help his country’s fight for freedom—but his heart engages him in a different war.

“Grand, sweeping, mesmerizing . . . a richly detailed, politically profound story of love, of migration, of individuals caught up in the great convulsions of history.”—Joseph O’Neill, PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of Godwin

Shiv Advani is an eighteen-year-old growing up in India. But he is no ordinary young man. Shiv has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to England, learn their laws, and then return home and help drive the British out of India. Before he leaves, his family insists he fulfill his arranged marriage, and he is hastily betrothed to a young woman he hardly knows.

He arrives in London and soon discovers a world he is both repelled by and drawn to. Shiv knows his duty: get in, learn the letter of the law, get out. But as anyone who has ever lived in a British colony can tell you, “the English Problem” is multifaceted. The racist colonialism of “the empire on which the sun never sets” seeps into everything—not just landed territories, but territories of the mind: literature, language, religion, sexuality, self-identity. Soon the people Shiv sought to be liberated from will be the people he desperately wants to be a part of. In the end, Shiv must fight not only for his country’s liberation but also his own.

Set against the backdrop of the Indian independence movement, with appearances by historical figures such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Mahatma Gandhi, The English Problem is so self-assured and ambitious, it is hard to believe it is a debut.

Beena Kamlani is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer whose work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review; Ploughshares; Identity Lessons: Learning to Be American, eds. Gillan (1999); Growing Up Ethnic in America, eds. Gillan (2000); The Lifted Brow (2008); World Literature Today; and other publications. She has been awarded fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, Ledig House/Writers Omi, Hawthornden Castle, Jentel Arts, and Hedgebrook. A former senior editor for the Penguin Group, she taught book editing at New York University for nearly two decades and was presented an award for teaching excellence. The English Problem is her first novel.