The Anger of Saintly Men

In June 2018, Thomson Reuters Foundation pronounced India to be the most dangerous country for women. Just on the heels of this report, India had its #metoo movement in October, young women raging and questioning centuries of male privilege. Over time, artists, writers, gender experts and feminists have realised we have to talk about men. We have realised there is something deeply wrong with Indian masculinity.

The Anger of Saintly Men is one attempt to explore Indian masculinity through a family, three sons being raised in a suburb, Gurgaon, near the capital of India, Delhi.

The stories are situated in the context of south Asian masculine cultures; they explore desire, fear, courage, taboos, and other sexualities. Each tale reveals the fault lines of how Indian boys are made MEN. Be it the elder brother's need to excel even at masturbation as he is the eldest and thus should be a model for the siblings or the younger one's final fall from grace in the family due to his divorce. More than a rites of passage novel, this is about the changing hopes and ambitions of of a generation growing in a fast changing, globalising India, stifled by the oppressive family still tied in Indian traditions. Much like Alice Munro's women & John Updike's men, Yadav's Men find themselves caught on the margins of shifting cultural mores and pulled between conflicting imperatives — between rootedness and escape, domesticity and freedom, desire and guilt, between tending to familial responsibilities or following the urgent promptings of their own hearts.

In her debut novel, Anubha Yadav delves into the frustrations, embarrassments, joy and bewilderment of adolescence, and to the brushes with sex, death, violence that shape the lives of these boys and men. The book is divided into three parts, each part with stories loosely emerging from the life of a brother- Saurabh Singh (Sonu), Anurag Singh (Anu) and Vikram Singh (Vicky).