A People’s History of Heaven

Mathanji  Subramanian

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, February 2nd 2020

The title of essayist and educator Mathangi Subramanian’s first novel comes from the fictional Bangalore slum in which it is set, the sign showing the settlement’s original name, Swargahili, having been truncated to Swarga – Heaven – during one of the city’s many attempts to obliterate it.

The irony is not lost on the novel’s narrator, one of five teenage girls (Banu, Deepa, Rukshana, Padma and Joy) around whom the story is centred. For them, Heaven is a place where the usual divisions of religion, caste and culture are meaningless in the face of the fight to survive in a city that wants to erase them and a society where, whether cis, trans, gay or straight, they are expected to subsume their identity to traditional gender roles. 

Like adolescents everywhere, they do their fair share of grumbling about schoolwork, pretending to be movie stars and chafing against maternal restrictions (fathers being, with few exceptions, unreliable or absent). But they are also resourceful beyond their years and, encouraged by their indomitable headmistress, Janaki Ma’am, aspire to more than marriage and motherhood. But first they must defend the home that two generations of women have built from nothing against developers who intend to bulldoze it to the ground.

Each girl is sketched in brief but vivid strokes, their individual stories captured at moments of particular significance – Padma answering mail at the Lost Letter Office where her mother cleans, Anand’s baptismal transformation into Joy – and intertwined with the broader history of Heaven and the families who live there. Through them, we trace the effects of economic and urban transformation on rural communities and the ongoing fight for survival waged by the poor and dispossessed in the face of civil indifference. But rather than a plea for sympathy, the novel celebrates strength and resilience. The girls are openly contemptuous of a Western photographer who insists on capturing images of Heaven’s destruction rather than its inhabitant’s defiance, for example, and cynical about promises that her pictures will bring their plight to international attention. And whilst their mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives have been hard, these formidable women have created a place where they and their daughters have the opportunity for something better.

My one criticism of the book is its disconcerting point of view. References to ‘us’ and ‘we’ imply it is told by one of the young women at the story’s heart, but the narrative itself is oddly delocalised. Not only are the girls described in the third person, but we are also privy to selected glimpses into the inner lives of other women within and outside their immediate circle. The effect is simultaneously inclusive and distancing, inviting us to share these women’s experiences yet showing them one step removed. Whether this is because, as an Indian-American, Subramanian is something of an outside observer herself or is making attempting to capture the girls’ collective identity is unclear, but it takes a little getting used to. That said, I soon found myself heavily invested in her characters, and A People’s History of Heaven offers a glimpse into a life seldom seen by the wealthy, white, Western world. At a time when politicians are actively rewriting history to exclude the undesirable, novels such as this are also a vital reminder that we retain the power to create our own communities from the inside out.