Manu Joseph vs India’s chatterati: ‘In most situations I’m an outsider’

“There is something very innate about marriage,” Manu Joseph tells me over Zoom from his home in Gurgaon, an entrepreneurial satellite city of New Delhi. “If the world is destroyed and we rebuild it, 35 per cent would still be the passmark for maths in India and we would still get married.”

A prominent Indian journalist, the 47-year-old writes a widely read column for the Delhi financial newspaper Mint and has established himself as one of the country’s most sardonic and unconventional voices. He has also written a comic Bollywood screenplay (for 2009’s Love Khichdi) and three successful novels — the first, a caste satire called Serious Men was adapted in 2020 into a Netflix movie. Now he has India’s chatterati fizzing with excitement and outrage over Decoupled, the comedy series he has written for the streaming platform.

Charting the moribund marriage of curmudgeonly middle-aged novelist Arya Iyer (Ranganathan Madhavan) and his glamorous, no-nonsense venture-capitalist wife Shruti (Surveen Chawla), it puts the urban upper-middle class under forensic and unsparing focus.

The Iyers epitomise the nouveau-riche “New India”, living in a plush gated Gurgaon colony, a modern couple who married for love across ethnic lines (Arya is Tamil, Shruti Punjabi). But the show finds them sleeping apart in the same house while both committed to their adolescent daughter. Arya is paunchy and disheveled, confused by his wife’s lack of interest in him but resigned to it. As “India’s second-best-selling author”, he obsessively competes with the real-life number one, pop-fiction writer Chetan Bhagat, who very sportingly plays a version of himself.

By contrast, Shruti is energetic, bored of her husband’s misanthropic humour and in the process of starting a company with the backing of an alluring Korean billionaire. She wants a divorce while Arya remains amusingly uncooperative. “It’s remarkable, the different view men and women can have of their own marriage,” observes Joseph, who has been married to his wife Anuradha for 16 years and has a daughter.

“It’s the calm after the storm,” is how he describes the couple’s sorry condition. “When you’re fighting, it’s because you still have hope . . . I think marriage is extremely interesting and important, though easy to make fun of. I remember a headline in the New Yorker calling marriage ‘an abduction’, which is probably how most people feel.”

The banality of marital life isn’t a subject all Indians are comfortable with, and describing romantic chemistry as “the meeting of two equal handicaps” will challenge a marriage-obsessed society whose estimated 10m weddings a year fuel an industry that in 2017 was valued by KPMG at $40bn-$50bn. “People know that this is as good as it gets and they stick to it . . . ” says Joseph of his characters’ high-functioning dissatisfaction. “We are trained to believe that boredom is a trivial thing while I think it is a very insidious form of sorrow.”

Joseph relishes exposing the pretensions of India’s privileged, privately educated elite who, until recently, dominated the country’s anglophone media and whom he has termed “the asparagus-eaters”. The scorn some critics have directed at Decoupled may be driven by an animus against him among those he has mocked. “You are going to love it or hate it,” conceded one disgruntled reviewer in The Hindu, “much like his columns.”

I remark that the Iyers’ marriage resembles those depicted in Curb Your Enthusiasm and Joseph admits to being “a big fan of Larry David”. As with David’s screen character, much of the comedy arises from Arya’s foot-in-mouth pronouncements on everything from sex and inequality to religion and caste, but those it skewers best are the “asparagus-eaters”, wickedly represented in the figure of Dr Basu, a Bengali economist.

A self-proclaimed feminist and social activist, he cannot bear his maidservant using the household lavatory — hers is on the roof — and makes constant graceless overtures towards Shruti. “He’s a quintessential Delhi character,” says Joseph, “and if he looks like a caricature it’s because they have become that. It’s exactly how those people are.”

Born in Kerala and raised Catholic in a Tamil Brahmin community in Chennai, where his father was a journalist and writer of Malayalam screenplays, Joseph is unusual amid India’s English-language media for his breadth of life-experience, which includes poverty.

“We were a lower-middle-class family who increasingly became poor. By the time I was 17, I had to fend for myself. My writing is deeply influenced by the shock of poverty and how worthless you are to people when you have no value to them.”

When he was 21, his employers put him up in a chawl, the sort of low-quality tenement seen in Slumdog Millionaire, while making him write lifestyle features for glossy magazines. “I was living alone but everybody else was living 10 or 12 per room. I had to share the bathroom with the entire floor, maybe 100 people. I would go to the office to use the bathroom and realised there is a whole civilisation there using the facilities, the peons and the support staff.”

This familiarity with ordinary Indian life has led him to express unfashionable but resonant opinions, such as urging young people to abandon activism and to go out and make money instead of “fighting battles they do not understand”. He says: “I would go for a walk, and parents would come and congratulate me on that column.”

Similarly, while the rest of the media bemoaned the disruption caused by prime minister Narendra Modi’s sudden withdrawal of large-denomination rupee notes in 2016, Joseph recognised the political capital to be gained among the poor: “It made sense to them that this was a move against corruption, and Modi won 12 or 15 state and municipal elections after that.”

Now that he’s working towards a second season of Decoupled, he reflects that “I see things which are not being articulated, the subterranean layers of conversation, and find it hard to be part of the mainstream. In most Indian situations I’m an outsider.”

‘Decoupled’ is on Netflix now

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