Romance: Retelling Pride and Prejudice

In a country as diverse as India, if there is one thing that’s universally true, it’s this: India loves romance.

So much so that when it came to my first book - which was supposed to be a comedy set in a Mumbai advertising agency - my publisher wanted to market it as a romance. They even wanted to make the cover pink! Because that would help it sell better in India. And in my subsequent books – both comic thrillers – although I insisted on keeping the romance to a bare minimum, I couldn’t remove it from the equation entirely. Because India loves romance.

You can’t really blame us. We’ve been fed a steady diet of the stuff by Bollywood. We’ve watched a hundred versions of Romeo & Juliet. Generation after generation has grown up familiar with the tropes of the genre. Our most hummable songs are all romantic and we all secretly hope to have a meet-cute for the ages. Love at first sight, perhaps.

Or an accidental meeting. Ooh, we lurrrve those. The girl’s net dupatta or chiffon saree gets caught on the edge of the boy’s wristwatch. And a thousand desi content creators burst into reels on Instagram. Ah, romance!

All these hearts in our eyes, it was bound to seep into our reading habits, sooner or later. I mean, Mills & Boons has always had a huge Indian readership and a lot of it is, apparently, male. As are some of India’s most popular romance authors. Romance is arguably India’s highest selling genre. Simply put, regardless of gender, we’re a country that loves to fall in love.

So when I started writing What Will People Think? I had a decision to make. Would I shamelessly pander to my love-crazed fellow Indians? Put in the kind of scenes Shah Rukh Khan would one day portray on the silver screen? A quick elevator to bestseller status, that strategy. Or would I show some damned integrity and stay true to my source material?

I was writing a retelling after all. And not only had I never adapted a story before, I had decided to do a retelling of Pride & Prejudice, one of the most timeless love stories in literature. If I didn’t want legions of Jane Austen fans at my front door with torches and pitchforks, I couldn’t just reduce that classic love story to a steamy enemies-to-lovers tale. It had to be more.

Because Pride & Prejudice, of course, is so much more than a romance. It is a commentary on the society of the time, a gentle mockery of its mores, and if my book was to be a patch on the original, it had to do that as well. And of course, be interesting and different from all the other Pride & Prejudice retellings out there. Easy peasy.

Write what you know, is the conventional advice given to writers. So I started with a society I knew about – Indian society. Specifically, the part of it that lives in my home state of Maharashtra. Even more specifically, the part of it that is populated by my community – Konkanastha Bramhins. I looked closely and I saw quaint customs, unique cuisine, colourful idioms and sharp humour. A lot to love and laugh about. I also saw colourism. Regressive attitudes towards women. Dowry. A lot to infuriate any young woman facing the prospect of marriage.

I had a setting to set my book apart. Next, came my heroine.

She had to be similar to Elizabeth Bennet, her 19th century counterpart, but face challenges that were truer to the century and society she lived in. 1970s Mumbai, to be precise. (That’s right, because adapting a beloved classic wasn’t ambitious enough, I went and gave it a period setting. Something else I’d never done before.)

So Ila was feisty and spirited, like Elizabeth – but also, dusky. The thing about Konkanastha Bramhins? They’re usually light-skinned, often light-eyed. And the Indian marriage market is notoriously obsessed with fair skin. Making Ila dusky meant she had to contend with all the prejudice that a darker skin tone invites in this society. And because she is feisty and spirited and has her pride – she would want absolutely nothing to do with any institution that decides her worth by the colour of her skin. ‘Make things difficult for your protagonist’ is the other piece of writing advice that gets thrown around, see?

I had the setting. I had the heroine. I had the pride and the prejudice. All that remained… was everything else. But that’s the thing about writing, isn’t it? The rest of the pieces do fall into place eventually. All you need is a solid foundation.
Funny, that. Because in my experience, that’s exactly how love works too.

What Will People Think? by Vedashree Khambete-Sharma is published by Corvus £17.99)

If you want readers to ship your romance characters you need to think about the hero! Read about writing male characters for romance novels here

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