| Abstract: |
Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993) stages the search for a husband for Lata Mehra against the wider backdrop of a newly independent India negotiating custom and modernity, and the novel has long invited readings that treat marriage as the site where communal duty and personal autonomy collide. Much of the existing commentary on this tension, however, remains impressionistic, resting on close reading rather than on any systematic account of how the text itself distributes freedom- and duty-related vocabulary, or of how contemporary readers actually respond to the four suitors among whom Lata must choose. This study addresses that gap through a mixed-methods design combining a structured reader-perception survey (N=150) with a quantitative lexical analysis of the four principal narrative strands the Mehra, Kapoor, Chatterji, and Khan family lines. Likert-scale responses indicate that readers rate Kabir Durrani and the Maan-Saeeda subplot significantly higher on perceived individual freedom than Haresh Khanna, while lexical counts show "duty" concentrated in the Khan and Kapoor strands and "freedom"/"choice" concentrated in the Chatterji and Mehra strands. Chi-square testing further reveals a significant association between respondent gender and interpretation of Lata's eventual choice of Haresh as either compromise or empowerment (χ²=14.62, p=.001). Together these findings support the abstract's premise that the novel does not resolve the marriage-freedom tension but distributes it unevenly across its narrative architecture, and the conclusion returns to this distribution to argue that reader reception is itself patterned by the same social variables gender and marital status that the novel dramatises within its plot. |
