Review | Finding freedom in colonial india – novel explores the meanings of liberation
All the Lives We Never Lived paints rich characters with sparse prose as it explores the meanings and misunderstandings of freedom
All The Lives We Never Lived
by Anuradha Roy
Hachette
Is freedom a collective or individual concept? Is the struggle for freedom a grand idea, a battle to seek independence from a colonial power? Or is it about recognising an individual’s right – and agency – to do what she wants, and respecting it?
Must an individual comply with the demands of those who wield power? And if she discards the ties that bind her to roles assigned by society, and vanishes to discover herself, to pursue life as she wishes to live, is she being selfish?
These are the profound questions at the heart of Anuradha Roy’s fourth novel, All the Lives We Never Lived, about a spirited woman named Gayatri Sen, trapped in an unhappy marriage in pre-independence India.
Roy’s previous novel, Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her 2011 novel, The Folded Earth, won India’s premier award for fiction.
The “lives we never lived” in the title refers to the roads we don’t take because convention, propriety and decorum prevent us from doing so. But what happens when you follow your heart? Myshkin Rosario, the oddly named narrator, begins this novel by saying: “In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother ran off with an Englishman.” In fact, the man was German, but in small towns in pre-independence India, any white man was assumed to be English.