New Delhi, April 20 -- In Karan Mahajan's acclaimed new novel, The Complex, readers are introduced to the fictional Chopra family as they navigate the personal and political turmoil of India in the late 1970s. As each member of the family struggles to forge an identity in the shadow of patriarch SP Chopra's legacy, buried tensions surface and rival visions of power, belonging, and ambition collide. Mahajan discussed his new book on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by the Hindustan Times and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is an associate professor in Literary Arts at Brown University and the author of two earlier books, Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs. The Complex, Mahajan's latest, traces the roots of many forces that continue to shape contemporary India-from political radicalisation and shifting class structures to the pull of the global diaspora and the evolving meaning of family itself. The New York Times has called the book "magisterial" and written that "[Mahajan's] work has always woven a subversive, contemporary sensibility into a traditional, almost 19th-century approach to form and style." "The Complex is a novel about one clan living in the pressure cooker of a compound, and the ways in which the dynamics in that family change as people go abroad and then come back," Mahajan told host Milan Vaishnav. "It is also a book about the ways in which reactionary thinking can fester in a family before it explodes onto the national stage," he added. The author said that setting the story in Delhi was "crucial to the architecture of the book and its forward momentum," and drew on his own personal experience. "When I was growing up in Delhi in the 1980s, there were a lot of joint or semi-joint families, especially in South Delhi. You could see people slowly dividing these large post-independence bungalows into apartments. When you are focusing on a setting like this, questions of space, privacy, and how you make a life for yourself as an individual in a crowd become very central," he said. While Mahajan has lived in the United States since college, he noted that he has always held a special place in his heart for the national capital. "I uncomplicatedly love it in the sense that it is a place I really understand and which is almost contiguous with my soul. Even all these years later, it is the place I think about when I am looking for really charged memories for my writing," he explained. "There are many writers for whom the period of life that existed before they became writers is the most alive, because it has not been processed and there is infinite material there." The push-and-pull that India exercises on two of the book's key protagonists, who immigrate to the United States, is one of the novel's central themes. "The germ of the novel was the idea that immigration is not a linear process. I arrived in the US in 2001 to go to college but always believed I would move back to India. I continued holding onto that belief even as more and more of life accreted in the US," Mahajan said. "At some point, the denial about not moving back becomes something you have to contend with. Each time you go back, you gain a kind of intimacy with the place, but it is a discontinuous intimacy," he added. The author further said he wanted the book to help make sense of these dynamics and "attempt to understand how you rationalise these decisions-especially at a time when there was a great deal of disparity between the two nations."...