Swallowing the Sun
Swallowing the Sun is a sweeping historical novel set during India’s independence movement, following Malati’s pursuit of education and autonomy within a nation experiencing growing political upheaval. As she comes of age, her personal struggle against patriarchy becomes inseparable from the making of modern India.
Born into a rapidly changing India under British rule, Malati grows up between tradition and transformation, shaped by family expectations, early experiences of injustice, and an expanding awareness of education as both privilege and possibility.
As she moves from rural life to Bombay’s more complex political and intellectual world, her journey becomes entangled with the rising momentum of the independence movement. Personal desire, social constraint, and national struggle begin to converge in ways that redefine her understanding of freedom.
Across decades of change, Swallowing the Sun traces how women’s lives are shaped—and reshaped—by the forces of history, and how private choices can become acts of resistance within a nation in formation.
In the tradition of Indian historical and feminist fiction such as The God of Small Things and Sea of Poppies, this is a sweeping novel of women’s lives within the political awakening and cultural transformation of modern India.
At a moment when questions of nationalism, historical memory, and gender remain deeply contested, Swallowing the Sun revisits the origins of modern India through the experiences of women whose stories have been left at the margins of history.
Swallowing the Sun has won:
– the Delhi Literature Festival Fiction Prize 2024
– the Kalinga Literary Award 2024
the Pandit Hari Dutt Sharma Award 2024
– the 2025 REC-VoW Award for Fiction, and
– the Special Jury Award 2025 from the FICCI Publishing Awards for Book of the Year – Fiction.
NOW TO BE A MULTI-FILM SERIES ON INTERNET MOVIE PLATFORMS,
FROM ABUNDANTIA ENTERTAINMENT.
The novel has now been reprinted SEVEN times just for the Indian market.
Launched outside India, starting with the UK, on February the 5th, 2026