A Dalit boy born to a family of coconut farmers in 1950s’ India “possessing not even a name” is named King. There is something to this fortuitous naming, because the boy not only goes on to rule the world of global tech, but eventually becomes the leader of a corporate-led government whose citizens are called Shareholders.
The Immortal King Rao is Canadian-born American journalist Vauhini Vara’s much-anticipated debut novel. Thirteen years in the making, it draws heavily from Vauhini’s career as a tech reporter for The Wall Street Journal — she inaugurated the paper’s Facebook beat — and business editor at The New Yorker.
We have had multi-generational sagas and we’ve had novels about the Indian diaspora’s American Dream. More recently, we’ve had dystopian novels by writers of Indian origin. The Immortal King Rao manages to be all three while also being a clear-eyed chronicle of a Dalit success story. To read the novel for any one aspect would do it a disservice because its merit lies precisely in Vauhini’s trapeze act between narratives and genres.
The Hindu spoke to Vauhini ahead of her novel’s global release:
From several accounts, you started writing this novel 13 years ago. What was the seed of the story? And how did you navigate the rapid real-time developments in science and technology—did you find yourself having to change important details along the way?
In January 2009, I was travelling in Peru with my dad and his wife. We were on a train, and my dad was teasing me about working only on short stories; he thought I should start a novel. I joked that he should give me an idea. So he suggested that I write a story based on some real-life events in the family coconut grove where he grew up in Andhra Pradesh. At the time, I was in graduate school, on leave from my job as a tech reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and I was also thinking about the rising power and wealth of the tech elite. As I wrote, my dad’s idea — about a child growing up in rural Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s — merged with an idea I had to write about a fictional tech CEO.
And, yes, because I started the novel so long ago, the world — and tech — kept changing as I wrote. I thought I was writing about this distant dystopian future, but then the things I was making up (a Trump-like figure becoming president of the U.S., a technology that lets people connect to the Internet with their minds) started coming true in real life. So then I’d have to revise to make the world of my novel stranger still.
Like your protagonist King Rao, your father is Dalit, and grew up on a coconut farm in rural India. Were you at any point worried about leaking biographical detail in your debut novel?
I wasn’t. I did make sure, after my dad gave me that initial idea, that he was truly okay with me writing about a place based partly on where he grew up — in a family that bears some resemblance to his family. Once he affirmed that he was fine with it, I took the material and ran with it. As I kept writing, though, the story kept moving further and further away from the actual facts of my dad’s life and hometown and became something else entirely — such that no one who reads my novel will learn much at all about my actual family or the village we come from, on my dad’s side.
In his blurb, your friend, the novelist Karan Mahajan calls ‘The Immortal King Rao’ three books in one and I tend to agree. There’s almost too much going on in terms of a father-daughter relationship, Dalit oral history, the speculative end-of-the world elements and more. It swims between genres, from literary fiction to speculative fiction to what some might call science fiction. Where do you stand on this assessment of genres?
As a writer, I’m less interested in formal distinctions among genres than I am in figuring out what the book I’m writing wants to be doing. In this novel, for example, I wanted to write about King Rao’s childhood on a coconut grove, and I also wanted to write about a future in which King moves to the U.S., starts a tech company, and eventually engineers a transition to a global corporate-run government. That necessitated certain things in the writing, like needing to imagine the technologies that would exist in the future I was building. Now that the book needs to be packaged and sold, people are using terms like speculative fiction and science fiction to describe aspects of it — but for me, it was never about one genre or another, it was just about putting together this one book the way it needed to be put together.
“As a writer, I’m less interested in formal distinctions among genres than I am in figuring out what the book I’m writing wants to be doing”
‘The Immortal King Rao’ also presents alternative modes of governance with ideas of Social Capital ratings and anarchists among other things. What were your political influences in this aspect of world building?
To develop the Exes — the anarchist group that rejects the society King has built — I read some foundational texts by anti-capitalist thinkers; I found the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the anarchist philosopher, fascinating and inspiring. In trying to figure out what the day-to-day lives of my anarchist characters might look and feel like, I read Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life, which threads the development of her radical way of thinking and living with the most mundane, even petty, details of her everyday life. I also returned to a book I read when I was young, in high school or college, the Zhuangzi, an important Daoist text whose philosophy feels, to me (and to some scholars), like a precursor to anarchism.
To think through how King, as an adult, views the world was, in some ways, easier, because — especially being a tech reporter — I find the rhetoric of tech solutionism ever-present, including on a minute-by-minute basis on my own Twitter feed. I also read biographies of Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates — all of whom started their companies in the 70s, around the time King, in my fictional world, starts his. I also read and learnt a lot from Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology.
In your book, Dalits are not oppressed victims, but ambitious entrepreneurs and innovators. At the time you started work on this book, there were no South Asian leaders in the global tech industry. But your Dalit protagonist goes on to become a global tech mogul. How important was this representation for you?
That King Rao, a Dalit, becomes a global tech mogul was, for me, more than a matter of mere representation. The goal wasn’t to showcase a Dalit character capable of greatness in the business world; it was more complicated than that — I was interested in seeing what would happen when this particular character from an oppressed group (one who isn’t as attuned to the nuances of his own oppression as some other members of his extended family) gains economic, social, and political power. What does he do with that power? What kind of world does he seek to create?
Your novel is studded with short paragraphs punctuating the text with microhistories, everything from the Wright Brothers to the evolution of human tools. Do you attribute these to the journalist Vauhini Vara?
Ha — yes, I do! There’s a sense in which those “microhistories” were just an excuse for me (that is, the journalist version of me) to find a home for the material I’d discover by traveling down all these research rabbit holes.
Since your book occupies so many different fictive Venn diagrams, it’s hard to pin down your literary influences. Do tell us who they are.
When I began this book, I had just read Moby Dick for the first time, and I admired the singularity of the vision of that book; I’d never read anything like it. I’m not comparing myself to Herman Melville, but my ambition was to try, as he does in that novel, to convey something big about how the modern world functions in the space of a couple hundred pages.
With my novel, I was also interested in the relationship between the domestic and sociopolitical spheres; a piece of literature that I turned to for inspiration in writing in that mode is Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.
The interviewer is a Mumbai-based arts journalist and editor. Her debut novel The Illuminated was published in 2021.
