‘The Tiger’s Share’: In Keshava Guha’s second novel, a family man does the unthinkable

It is inheritance, not love, that is a tale as old as time. If Jane Austen is to be believed, marriage, now notorious as the “culmination” of love, only began to bother with love in the late 18th century. Most of Austen’s men, like the imperious Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, are comfortably off. If, God forbid, they are a little beggared, either through disinheritance, like Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, or because of sheer bad luck, like Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, born into nothing, they still end up with a living. Wentworth, in fact, wins a lush fortune through prize money and the navy. Anne Elliot marries him only after he is flush, of course.

“A man without a family, without evident roots, is no one’s idea of a son-in-law, whatever his achievements,” says Tara Saxena, the protagonist of Keshava Guha’s second novel, The Tiger’s Share. Tara’s maternal family, however, could hardly afford to be choosy. Her grandfather, having lost a case in which he tried to claim ancestral land he “believed his brothers had diddled him out of”, was left penniless, having spent what he had in a bid to acquire more. The situation was so dire that his legal fees exceeded the value of...

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