A Suitable Boy ostensibly opened as a chronicle of a groom-hunt with Mrs Rupa Mehra’s stern words to her younger daughter: “You too will marry a boy I choose.” As the search began, however, the novel acquired an expanse which even its hundreds of pages may not have prepared the reader for. It took in the social and administrative changes sweeping through a country than had now been independent for five years and was preparing for its first general election. And for a book likened by its small band of shrill critics to a soap opera, it provided what is still one of the most engrossing accounts of land reform in north India. It anticipated the decline of Calcutta as a corporate hub, the axes of communal tensions that would appear by the ’90s, and the rise of the new middle class.

In writing so, Seth joined a new generation of fiction writers, who drew the comment that the first drafts of India’s post-Independence history had been first written by novelists, then historians. The sequel will be interesting, and the worst shock Seth can hope to administer is by making it slim.