Gurnaik Johal’s Saraswati: myth and politics in modern India

Gurnaik Johal’s 2022 collection of stories, We Move, introduced a big talent working at a small scale. His tales of life in Southall’s “little Punjab” area were intricate miniatures, with many of the best stories clocking in at fewer than 10 pages. But nothing there prepared us for the scale of his debut novel, Saraswati, a tumultuous book about a river that may or may not exist.

The novel opens in north-west India, where a young man, Satnam Singh Hakra, has returned from Britain for his grandmother’s funeral. In London, he worked for a green startup as head of its racial equality network: “deciding on culturally appropriate snacks for heritage days, ordering in the right bunting”.

He never intended to come back for long – “India, as he’d understood it, was a place for leaving” – but then he discovers water in the dead well behind his grandmother’s farm, which she has bequeathed to Satnam. Some people believe it means the mythical holy river the Saraswati has returned beneath the ground. Cue nationalistic fervour, egged on by the country’s new (fictional) prime minister, Narayan Indra: the river must return!

This set-up provides the hub for five spin-off stories of people connected to the Saraswati. Each time, Johal pulls us into their world with efficiency and colour. Take Katrina and Jay, a couple who meet on the island of Diego Garcia when their plane is delayed by donkeys on the runway. Or Nathu, an asexual man drawn into the archaeological digs around the new Saraswati development. And Gyan, a member of an eco-terrorist group bent on disrupting the building of a dam that will divert water from local communities. (“The only good dam is a broken dam,” one of the group says. “And a beaver dam,” adds another.)

Then we meet Harsimran, a stunt double for an action film star (whose personal trainer is named Surge Gainsburg: a typical example of the delightful throwaway wordplay sprinkled through the book). And finally Mussafir, connected to a guerrilla group protesting the diversion of other rivers into the new Saraswati, who’s involved in a plot to reintroduce the eradicated livestock virus rinderpest to India’s cattle.

Although Saraswati has a different scale than We Move, it shares with the earlier book a certain restlessness. Roving everywhere from Canada to Singapore, with six central characters, plus a first-person narrator, and interludes from ancestors’ tales in the 19th century, the story, like a river, is always moving. Its culture-crossing volubility – taking in podcasts, reality TV and fake news (“A stretched truth is still the truth. It just reaches further”) – is reminiscent of Salman Rushdie, though the debut novels it most resembles in energy and range are David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.

Like those books, it sometimes overreaches, and the sheer abundance of detail – always stylishly delivered – can obscure the underlying themes of capitalism and nationalism and their role in ecological collapse. Fewer secondary and tertiary characters would have allowed more focus and fluency in the main sequence of stories. But if Saraswati sometimes suffers from an excess of ambition, that’s far more appealing than the alternative.

Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). Order your copy from observershop.co.uk to receive a 10% discount. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Dewang Gupta/Unsplash