His name is Vikas. Once, he buried landmines under Jharkhand’s sal trees; decades later, he supervises the laying of roads over the same soil. In Snigdha Poonam’s ‘The Thin Red Corridor’, he is both a man and a metaphor, a reminder of how India’s idea of progress has always been uneven, improvised, and borne mostly by those who never asked to be symbols in the first place.
In British literary magazine Granta’s latest issue on India, Vikas becomes an unintentional guide. As I moved from his story to the others in the essays, I found him resurfacing quietly in the tension each writer grapples with. Everyone in this issue is wrestling, in their own way, with the question that Vikas has lived through: what does vikas (progress) actually look like on the ground?
Granta’s editor, Thomas Meaney, in his introduction to this year’s issue, talks about a country caught in a strange loop. Where myth bleeds into politics, where television debates collapse epics into soundbites, where development and memory blur into each other. It is a sharp portrait of a nation that often tries to manage the future by retrofitting the past. Yet even here, Vikas hovered in the background for me, because his life shows what Meaney’s framing only hints at: that for crores of Indians, myth and modernity are not opposites but the two languages through which they make sense of change.
Not theatre but yearning
The Ramayana entering politics is not the collapse of reason alone; sometimes it is also the search for continuity in a decade that has moved faster than people can catch up with.
Vikas, a former Maoist commander, evolves from a teenage guerrilla to a middle-aged contractor as his idea of justice keeps contorting, and life keeps narrowing his choices. What Poonam’s piece leaves unsaid – and perhaps cannot fully capture – is how many others around him carry similar contradictions without the spotlight.
The villagers who lost sons to both landmines and combing operations, the soldiers who patrolled forests they never understood, the children who grew up learning the difference between gunfire and thunder. They, too, are part of this long negotiation with the State, neither embracing nor rejecting it fully, but adapting to whatever form of vikas arrives that year.
That same tension appears, unexpectedly, underwater in Raghu Karnad’s article ‘Under the Ruins’, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi descends to the seabed off Dwarka in a saffron wetsuit.
It is easy to see only spectacle in the televised choreography—the AI-generated ruins, the gleaming helmet, the idea of a prime minister communing with a mythic kingdom—and Karnad rightly exposes how archaeology gets entangled with political longing.
But reading about the villagers in Uttar Pradesh’s Barnawa proudly guiding tourists through a tunnel they believe the Pandavas escaped through, I felt the faint echo of Vikas again: people investing in stories because they want their own landscape to matter. Progress in India often arrives wrapped in theatre, yes, but the desire for a place in history is not theatre alone. Sometimes, it is yearning.
Karan Mahajan’s account of Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s killing in Canada takes that longing in a darker direction. His essay is about a state that is now a global power and about a diaspora that carries the wounds of Punjab in ways that feel suspended in time.
Mahajan traces rage, fear, exile, and suspicion with clarity. What lingers beneath his narrative, though, is something quieter: the weight of unresolved grief. The Sikh families who’ve lived through 1984, militancy, counterinsurgency, migration, and all without a clean story to hold.
On the other side, a state is still shaped by those same traumas, responding defensively, sometimes aggressively, because it doesn’t know how to metabolise that history either. Vikas, here, becomes a push outward rather than inward, projecting strength across borders while old wounds remain tender.
Against these large, heavy movements, two smaller essays offer a different kind of vocabulary. Sarabjeet Garcha’s meditation on hukam – a word that folds acceptance, fate, and a divine order into one – reminded me that not every form of progress is measured in speed or scale. When he describes an elderly neighbour’s death as “completion” (Babaji poorey ho gaye hai), he points to an India where dignity is not a policy outcome but a cultural instinct.
Similarly, J Devika’s reflection on shraddha (devotion) follows women in Kerala’s health system who continue making calls to patients even while on strike. Devika doesn’t romanticise this labour; she simply observes how care persists even when systems falter. In their essays, vikas is not transformation but attention; the everyday stitching-together of a society that does not want to slip into neglect.
And then there is Salman Rushdie. In his conversation with Granta, ‘Reclaiming the Territory’, he reflects on how Midnight’s Children opened the door for Indian writing in English by allowing it to be capacious, disorderly, full of energy rather than apology. His most striking observation, for me, is his belief that India is now living through a period where language – political, cultural, literary – is being contested again. Not destroyed, not reborn, but reargued.
He speaks of “territory” not as geography but as imaginative space and how writers must keep reclaiming it if they want to remain truthful. In that sense, Rushdie offers what the other essays imply but never name: that storytelling itself is a form of vikas, one that expands not through consensus but through friction.
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Restless, jagged evolution
Reading a bunch of essays, I realised that none of the writers agree on what India’s progress looks like. Some see erosion, some see assertion, some see fatigue, some see resilience. But taken together, they create a portrait that is neither hopeful nor despairing but simply honest about the fact that countries evolve in ways that are jagged, restless, and unresolvable.
Which is why I kept returning to the former Maoist Vikas. He is not the moral of the story; he is the mirror. He reflects an India trying to move forward while carrying the weight of what it cannot forget.
An India where vikas is sometimes a road, sometimes a referendum, sometimes a ruin, sometimes a word your mother once used for death.
The Granta issue does not offer a verdict on India. It offers a set of lives caught in its acceleration.
And in the silences between those stories, Vikas walks quietly as a reminder that progress here has always been personal before it becomes political.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)