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Legal Fiction : A Novel

By Chandan Pandey| Bharatbhooshan Tiwari

 299.00 inclusive of all taxes

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About the book

This is like Kafka in Deoria. Or Camus in the cow belt. But more accurate to say that Legal Fiction is an urgent, literary report about how truth goes missing in our land. I read it with a racing heart.

Amitava Kumar, author of The Lovers

Chandan Pandey goes looking for the story that lurks just out of sight, getting under the skin of news headlines and extracting a story that is as compelling as it is devastating.

Annie Zaidi, author of Prelude to a Riot

Chandan Pandey has written a brilliant, gripping political novel. Legal Fiction is a nuanced, absorbing snapshot of our times — it captures the minefield of hate politics, the intricate almost invisible fault-lines in relationships, and the power of art in imagining a better society.

Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You

The Hindi novel was already destined to be a marker for this era. Now this translation fills a big gap, for no work originally written in English in India has scratched the surface of what Legal Fiction approaches the cold, dark centre of. Here, in the form of a thriller and the tone of an elegy, is a sharp look at a terrifying Indian –ism and the currents against it. Be ready for a heart of darkness.

Tanuj Solanki, author of Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

Legal fiction: A rule assuming as true something that is clearly false. Often used to get around the provisions of constitutions and legal codes.

A late-night phone call from his ex-girlfriend Anasuya forces writer Arjun Kumar to leave his wife and home in Delhi and travel to the mofussil town of Noma on the UP-Bihar border. The reason — Anasuya’s husband, Rafique Neel, a college professor and theatre director, has mysteriously disappeared.

Soon after he arrives, Arjun realizes that things are not as they seem: the police are refusing to register a missing-persons case, Rafique’s student Janaki has also disappeared, and the locals are determined to turn it into a case of ‘love jihad’. And when Arjun begins to dig deeper, what he finds endangers him and everyone around him.

Inspired by true events from today’s India, Legal Fiction is a brilliant existential thriller and a chilling parable of our times.

Pages: 168

Available in: Paperback

Language: English



Bharatbhooshan Tiwari

Chandan Pandey is the author of three short-story collections and one novel in Hindi. He has won the Bharatiya Jnanpith’s Navlekhan Award, the Shailesh Matiani Katha Puraskar, and is a recipient of the Krishna Baldev Vaid Fellowship.

Bharatbhooshan Tiwari is a writer and translator in Hindi and English.

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We’re very excited to have acquired the publishing rights to the English translation of Chandan Pandey’s brilliant Vaidhanik Galp – Legal Fiction. This is an urgent, topical novel that has set the Hindi literary world talking, and one that will resonate equally with readers in English. It is a book for our times and will be the highlight of our translations list for 2021 - Rahul Soni, Executive Editor – Literary, HarperCollins India

Every time I try to speak about why I came to write this work, I find myself with new answers. Sometimes I think I have answered it in my title – about the legal fictions that our society propagates. Sometimes I think about the spate of mob lynchings in recent days. I still want to not believe in the fact that there have been lynchings just to get some political mileage. For me, after this, the whole idea of society has become compromised. So the forces that made me write this novel were the easy belief of the public in false narratives and fake news. I wanted to explain that, in these surreal times, many mob lynchings are the result of precisely orchestrated activities. - Chandan Pandey

Chandan and I have known each other for more than a decade but hardly communicated. But a year ago, when the pandemic had not yet acquired its monstrousness, I got hold of a copy of Vaidhanik Galp and was moved to ask his permission to translate parts of the novel – as I could never imagine myself finishing a book-length translation. It’s only after I had finished close to a quarter of the text in a couple of weeks that I started believing that I could really do it all. The next four or five months were quite intense, as Chandan and I went over multiple drafts, sitting in different time zones, grappling with the realities of the ‘new normal’. It was pretty exhausting, to be honest, but the sense of achievement and satisfaction I feel looking back at those months is unmistakable. - Bharatbhooshan Tiwari

This is like Kafka in Deoria. Or Camus in the cow belt. But more accurate to say that Legal Fiction is an urgent, literary report about how truth goes missing in our land. I read it with a racing heart. - Amitava Kumar, author of The Lovers

Chandan Pandey goes looking for the story that lurks just out of sight, getting under the skin of news headlines and extracting a story that is as compelling as it is devastating. - Annie Zaidi, author of Prelude to a Riot

Chandan Pandey has written a brilliant, gripping political novel. Legal Fiction is a nuanced, absorbing snapshot of our times – it captures the minefield of hate politics, the intricate almost invisible fault-lines in relationships, and the power of art in imagining a better society. - Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You

The Hindi novel was already destined to be a marker for this era. Now this translation fills a big gap, for no work originally written in English in India has scratched the surface of what Legal Fiction approaches the cold, dark centre of. Here, in the form of a thriller and the tone of an elegy, is a sharp look at a terrifying Indian ‘-ism’ and the currents against it. Be ready for a heart of darkness. - Tanuj Solanki, author of Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

On The blog

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An Excerpt From Chandan Pandey’s Chilling Novel, ‘Legal Fiction’

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