When our father Sundara Ramaswamy (SuRaa) wrote Oru Puliyamarathin Kathai (The Tamarind Tree), our country’s reins were in the firm hands of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. By the time the novel was published in 1966, two years after Nehru’s death, secularism was the uncontested ideal of the Indian state. However, while the novel deals with larger themes of modernity and secularism, it is deeply informed by a regional peculiarity: the story plays out in a region of India where Christians and Muslims outnumber Hindus. This is uncommon in a nation in which Hindus constitute over eighty percent of the population. In the 1960s, political Hinduism did not have a strong electoral foothold at the center or in the states. Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu nationalism, was not a major player in public life, except in the states bordering Pakistan, an Islamic nation-state carved out of British India.

Yet, the novel is prescient about the realities of India today—an India that bears little resemblance to the India of Nehru. The novel anticipates the popular appeal of Hindu narratives and aesthetics in politics. It indicates that the majority can develop a minority complex of being oppressed and victimized in their own country. It narrates the triumph of popular beliefs over the laws of the land and exposes the cynical politics espoused by religious, rightwing fanatics to gain power. It is also a story of how the media shapes narratives, promotes alternative truths, and exploits social fault lines for its own benefit—in the novel, when a municipal chairman and a local tabloid conspire to cut down a majestic tree at the center of the town, in a cynical ploy to win elections, they pave the way for the “arrival” of Hindutva forces. These are issues that are at the center of public life in India today. But not just in India. These concerns have a global appeal today; they speak to the central concerns of many liberal democracies, including the US and UK.