Hello, friend! Recently, I shared my thoughts on Mani Choksi’s The Newlyweds, a non-fiction about love and marriage in modern day India follows three couples of diverse backgrounds. I had the opporutnity to reflect on Indian culture, my upbringing, the circumstances and situations surrounding the characters and much more. You know how much I love hosting authors for an interview to learn more about the book. I am so honored that Mansi was open to connecting! Read on about the book and check out the interview that follows.
The Newlyweds
by Mansi Choksi
A literary investigation into India as a society in transition through the lens of forbidden love, as three young couples reject arranged marriages and risk everything for true love in the midst of social and political upheaval.
In India, two out of every three people are under the age of thirty-five. These are men and women who grew up with the internet and the advent of smartphones and social media. But when it comes to love and marriage, they’re expected to adhere to thousands of years of tradition. It’s that conflict between obeying tradition and embracing modernity that drives journalist Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds.
Through vivid, lyrical prose, Choksi shines a light on three young couples who buck against arranged marriages in the pursuit of true love, illustrating the challenges, shame, anger, triumph, and loss their actions and choices set in play.
Against the backdrop of India’s beautiful villages and cities, Choksi introduces our newlyweds. First, there’s the lesbian couple forced to flee for a chance at a life together. Then there’s the Hindu woman and Muslim man who escaped their families under the cover of night after being harassed by a violent militia group. Finally, there’s the inter-caste couple who are doing everything to avoid the same fate as a similar couple who were burned alive.
Engaging and moving, The Newlyweds raises universal questions, such as: What are we really willing to risk for love? If we’re lucky enough to find it, does it change us? If so, for the better? Or for the worse?
Welcome to Armed with A Book, Mansi! It is a pleasure to host you. Please tell me and my readers a bit about yourself.
Thank you for having me. My name is Mansi Choksi. I grew up in Mumbai and started my career as a reporter for the Times of India. After five years reporting on crime, gender and climate change, I won the Fulbright Fellowship to attend Columbia Journalism School in New York. I returned to India the next year and began writing longform stories for the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic and Slate. I now live in Dubai with my husband and son.
What is it like going back to India as an adult?
Although I’ve lived away for long stretches since 2013, I never really left.
The Newlyweds is your first novel. When did the idea for it come to you and what made you pursue it?
The Newlyweds is a work of narrative nonfiction that grew out of a magazine assignment for Harper’s. In 2016, when I began spending time with the Love Commandos, I believed I was telling the story of cash-strapped middle-aged Indian men who, at great personal risk, protected young lovers marked for honor killings by their families. As I spent more time at the shelter, it became clear that the story was something else. In the end, it made me think about how a single act of choosing one’s partner can upend the peaceful order of tradition, and challenge the survival of power hierarchies dictated by class, caste, class and religion.
Neetu and Dawinder’s story was first published in the 2018 issue of Harper’s. I would love to hear about your journey from writing stories to a novel.
I wanted to write a book that dwells in the afterlife of the kind of love stories we consume in pop-culture and use that space to investigate the larger forces that make us who we really are. What does grand love look like when it is reassigned into the smallness of daily life which is shaped by religious bigotry, homophobia, casteism and income inequality?
In 2018, you won New York University’s Reporting Award to explore Hindu nationalism. Can you tell me more about how you approached that research? What kind of people did you meet? What did you learn?
I wanted to tell the story of Hindu nationalism through ordinary people who found themselves entangled in the love jihad narrative pushed by the Hindu right-wing; Monika and Arif’s story is a result of the research.
You mentioned in the book that you closely worked with the couples mentioned in the book. What was it like connecting with them and getting them to open up to you?
For a lot of young people in India, our worldviews are defined by grand portrayals of love stories in pop-culture, especially Bollywood and daily soaps. We grow up internalising the idea of romantic love as a subversive force that can bridge divides shaped by biases around caste, class, community and language. Real life is, of course, messier. As individuals, we are shaped by various degrees of these same biases. As a result, the hum of daily life often drowns out and diminishes the grandeur of subversive love.
A moment that will stay with me for a long time is from my reporting on Reshma and Preethi, who struggle with their own heternormative ideas of what a respectable relationship should look like. When Reshma suspects that Preethi is growing close to a male colleague, she picks up a knife and lops off Preethi’s braid in a fit of rage. It was a moment that was a terrifying reminder of how love can make us do cruel things.
How do you feel about the response you have gotten from your readers so far?
It’s been wonderful and terrifying.
What was the hardest part of writing The Newlyweds?
I wrote most of this book in the weeks and months after giving birth. I taught myself to write late at night, early at dawn, in fifteen-minute instalments, in the waiting rooms of doctors, while feeding, diapering, cooking and cleaning.
What are your hopes for this book? Is there anything you would like your readers to take away from it?
My hope for this book was that it would ultimately not just be a reflection on how young love forms and falls apart but a portrayal of India as a society in transition.
How has your career in journalism shaped you as a writer? Are there people whose stories you would like to share similar to how you wrote The Newlyweds?
This book is a result of spending time, listening, asking questions, recording conversations and interactions, returning to them again and again, transcribing, fact-checking and keeping an open line of communication to do my best to portray the full complexity of their truths.
What are some books about India that you would recommend to someone who enjoyed your book and the themes it touched on?
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (Goodreads)
- A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (Goodreads)
Thank you for hanging out with Mansi and me! Connect with Mansi on her website and Instagram.
Read my review of the book here.
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