The Archer

Following her story collection A House Is a Body, which was nominated for PEN/Robert W. Bingham and Los Angeles Times Book Prize First Fiction honors, Swamy offers an accomplished first novel about art and self-definition within the context of Indian social class. At its heart is Vidya, growing up hard in 1960s Bombay (now Mumbai), who ends up shouldering all the responsibilities of the unruly mother she loses but is saved because she discovers Kathak, a rigorously gorgeous form of dance that takes over her life. As she says, “One minute I was a girl dancing, …then, suddenly, the feet began to gather the rhythm into them, to understand it, and the world flared open.” In college, she studies engineering while promising a new, more challenging dance teacher that she will never desert Kathak, but she is forever split between dance and social expectation and her own uncertainties in a world that values male over female, rich over poor, and fair over dark-skinned, as she is.