Rishi Dastidar in The Guardian:
Santanu Bhattacharya turned heads with his 2023 debut novel One Small Voice, which intertwines the personal fallout after a boy watches a mob burn a Muslim man with a panoramic survey of how modern Indian society is changing – buckling, almost – with the rise of Hindu nationalism as its dominant ideology. It marked him out as a novelist able to tell the biggest of stories with the most precise and haunting of details.
His follow-up, Deviants, is even more ambitious. It tracks how India’s attitudes to homosexuality have shifted over the past 50 years, by following the lives of three gay men in the same family: Vivaan, a 17-year-old who can pass for 21 on dating apps; his uncle, nicknamed Mambro, growing up in the mid-1990s; and Sukumar, his great-uncle (or grand-mamu, and Mambro’s uncle), whom we meet in 1977, fitfully studying commerce in Kolkata.
Vivaan’s story is written as if dictated via voicenote: apt, as he lives and studies in the “Silicon Plateau” of Bengaluru, India’s hi-tech centre. Rather than feeling gimmicky, this gives his voice an attractive and vivacious quality, as he revels in the freedom he has online to hook up, to exist on the wild frontiers of contemporary sexuality, where one can be “heteroflexible, homoflexible, objectumsexual, omnisexual, skoliosexual, bi-curious”.
More here.
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