A Review of: A People’s History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian

Format: 304 pp., cloth; Size: 5.7 x 8.3″; Price: $26.95; Publisher: Algonquin; Population of Bangalore in 2017: 12.34 million; Estimated number of population living in slums: about 20%; Another book by the author: ; Representative Passage: “They’re wrong, of course. There are plenty of secrets in Heaven. Secrets that hide in pots and pans, waiting for an excuse to bang and crash and roll and boil. Secrets that soak in pooled-up sunlight, watching the world with half-moon eyes. Secrets that lunge out of doorways, wind around windowsills, baring their fangs, making sure they are seen. Secrets shaped like the space between stars, the edges of shadows, the bottoms of clouds. Hues and textures that are woven so tightly into our vision that they are easily missed, even when they are right there, right in plain sight.”

Central Question: Who defends the slums?

It’s easy to imagine the landscape of a slum: a string of shanties with aluminum roofs, open sewers, and rats nests of wires strung from electric poles to feed siphoned power. But what about its inhabitants? The structures of modern capital have kept these people at such a distance from us that a ready-made image does not come to mind. At best, these people come to us as so hazy outlines in a prefabricated cityscape.

Mathangi Subramanian, author of the 2016 young adult novel Dear Mrs. Naidu, vividly portrays these lives in her new novel, A People’s History of Heaven. Heaven is a constellation of stories about Swargahalli, a Bangalore slum at whose entrance hangs a sign that once proclaimed the slum’s name. By the time the novel opens, that sign has broken, so that it reads simply “Swarga”—the Sanskrit word for heaven. Swarga provides the novel’s narrative spine: each chapter tells the story of one of the girls and women living on the margins of the gleaming tech hub of Bangalore. These include Joy, a girl coming to terms with her transgender identity; the hinterland migrant Padma; and Janaki, the school headmaster who keeps all the girls together.

These women live in a city that has experienced development and displacement at a rapid clip. It’s a place where, as Subramanian writes, “If you ask our mothers, they’ll tell you Bangalore has just one problem: engineers.” Tech money and poverty seem to go hand-in-hand. In focusing on the women in these spaces, Subramanian acknowledges those twice erased by their poverty and their gender. A recent report from the Indian government argued that 63 million women were missing from India due...