Raj Kamal Jha - Themes

Themes

Jha's fiction is known for its stark simplicity and ability to evoke emotion through attention to detail. John Fowles described The Blue Bedspread as the "Coming of age of the Indian novel." His fiction is strongly grounded in contemporary themes around change, often taking off from newspaper pages. From domestic violence to the urban-rural divide, from inequality and intolerance to vulnerabiity of the marginalised, Jha's books engage with disturbing subjects unusual in Indian contemporary fiction in English. His writing, simple as it appears, calls for a lot of reader participation which evokes sharp, divided reaction.

One strand that runs through Jha's work is the art of storytelling itself and the power of imagination to counter despair. Be it in "The Blue Bedspread" which tells a story of domestic violence and child abuse in an urban household or "If You Are Afraid of Heights" which tracks the dream lives of a father, a mother and their daughter over the course of one night, Jha's characters are always creating their fictions to live with their facts.

Wrote Alfred Hickling in The Guardian: "Readers are left to formulate their own theories and connections. But Jha's writing functions more through power of association than sequential narrative. His prose has the febrile, cold-sweat quality of the most vivid waking nightmares. He suspends his work in a realm of improbability, where it is possible to think the unthinkable...Perhaps the biggest taboo that Jha seeks to breach is the sacrosanct, hierarchical structure of the family." According to writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri, Jha's writing is in the tradition of more cinema than literature. Referring to the works of Tarkovsky, Bunuel and Almodovar, Chaudhuri says just like their films are "destined to be foreign even to those who speak the language they are made in," Jha's novel speaks a "foreign language."

"Fireproof" is set against the backdrop of the 2002 Gujarat violence, the first attack on Muslims (In retaliation of attacks on Karsevaks in Godhra) after 9/11. The novel is a chilling tale of a father and his deformed son on a journey across a city where the ghosts of those killed have decided to seek justice. Commenting on Fireproof, India Today said: "Here is a chronicle for the 21st century, then, a bildungsroman that tracks the education of the crime-infested soul, completed when the soul cries 'I am guilty' and acknowledges that the burden of this enormous guilt will darken the rest of his life. And that will be his punishment, not the release of the noose or of public abasement in prison."