Still, she agrees to step in and makes the journey to the country's dark reaches. The story confirms everything Smita dislikes about India: its social backwardness and lack of respect for civil liberty. She has filed a lawsuit against her brothers with the help of a lawyer activist, Anjali, and is awaiting the court's verdict. Abdul has died but Meena, pregnant at the time, survives, although severely disabled. Infuriated by the perceived dishonor she has caused to the family, Meena's brothers set them on fire in their home. Meena, a Hindu woman, and Abdul, a Muslim man, fell in love and married in defiance of the social proscription against interfaith marriage. In truth, Shannon wants her to cover an assignment for her: a grisly crime in a village named Birwad on the Maharashtra-Gujarat border. Twenty years later, she arrives in Mumbai to help her friend, a fellow journalist, Shannon Carpenter, recover from a serious injury.

Umrigar's reportorial style is particularly apt because her central character, Smita Agarwal, is a journalist. If you are familiar with the country, the novel's depiction of Indian manners will seem startlingly true-to-life. Her reportorial style takes us deep into the lives and minds of vividly realized characters, showing us their gestural quirks, geniality and, at times, horrific cruelty. Umrigar writes not only as an elegant storyteller but as a sharp-eyed reporter, no doubt informed by her experience as a former journalist. Honor adds an element that the author has not addressed before: extreme violence. Her critically acclaimed novel The Space Between Us told with impeccable delicacy a story of friendship between two women of different backgrounds. Umrigar, an English professor at Case Western Reserve University, has set several of her past novels in this tumultuous India, investigating fraught social issues such as caste and class divides, the lure of fundamentalism and culture clash.

It's the unseemly side of the country, blighted by cultural conservatism, poverty, sectarian violence, caste hierarchies and misogyny. This isn't the globalized India of news or the India of IT excellence and an ambitious space mission. It's a searing meditation on the meaning of dignity in a dehumanizing world.

Thrity Umrigar's important new novel Honor isn't an easy read.įrom depictions of casual misogyny to distressing scenes of public shaming, mistreatment and torture, the novel shows the terrifying social forces that strip vulnerable people of dignity and render them animal-like.

Honor by umrigar