The Indian intergenerational gay novel is here

“I always liked writing,” novelist Santanu Bhattacharya tells me from the cloistered workspace of his house in Islington, London, as we connect over Zoom. Bhattacharya, who grew up in the ’90s, has already won the 2023 Desmond Elliott Prize Residency, the 2021 Mo Siewcharran Prize, and The Observer’s Best Debut Novel award in 2023 for his maiden work, One Small Voice. Typical of his writerly ways, the wall behind him is stacked with an envious collection of paperback titles. But the shelves are also lined with smaller totems—a colourfully irreverent canvas with the Eiffel Tower and stray silver frames with monochrome portraits. Fresh off a trip to Italy to celebrate a friend’s birthday and still reeling from the overwhelming response being received by his sophomore title, Deviants (released earlier this year in February), Bhattacharya exudes a strange calm. As we chat, his almost meditative and matter-of-fact demeanour explains his zen vibe in the midst of all the acclaim and fame.

Bhattacharya’s journey from an Engineering graduate in Sikkim to an award-winning novelist in London is one rooted in exploration, transformation, and a deep commitment to telling stories that matter. “I’d won prizes in school [for writing],” he says in his grey round-neck T-shirt, “and every time I read a good book, I’d feel inspired to add my own words to the canon,” he says. Moving to the UK in 2013 for a Master’s in Public Policy at Oxford, Bhattacharya transitioned to London soon after. But throughout these pitstops, another quieter aspiration persisted: the call of the writer.

Although this ambition was often relegated to the margins, Bhattacharya kept a blog, dabbled in short stories, and eventually dusted off a 25,000-word draft in 2017 that would become One Small Voice. “It was a hobby until I finished the first draft of the novel, after which I said this is something,” he chuckles. His sophomore novel, Deviants, pushes further—both in form and scope. Spanning three generations, it unpacks queerness, shame, and digital identity in contemporary and historical India.

“I was interested in the silent, behind-closed-doors existence of queer men from the previous generation. And then, when I returned to India in 2023,” he shares, “I met younger queer people whose lives had been shaped by a completely different digital landscape.”

These contrasting experiences compelled him to structure Deviants around three characters: each a snapshot of a different era’s relationship with queerness. Vivaan, a modern-day teenager leading a risqué life of queer desire in the digital sphere; Mambro, his uncle, who fell in love with a classmate 30 years ago during the repressive enforcement of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code; and finally Sukumar, Mambro’s uncle, who too fell hopelessly in love with a man—only to keep it a secret all his life. 

One of the most distinct elements in the novel is the voice of Vivaan, the youngest of the three protagonists, whose narrative unfolds entirely through voice recordings. “Vivaan had to speak in the first person. He’s having a conversation with the reader instead of writing it down,” Bhattacharya explains. “He’s a 16-year-old living in 2024; there’s no reason why his story should be mediated by anyone else.” Voice notes, he felt, captured the immediacy and informality of Gen Z communication better than traditional journaling, an activity that he believes is on a steady decline today. “We have all these tools now that allow you to flip open a device and make a video recording or send a voice message. Writing his thoughts down felt too quaint a narrative device for Vivaan,” he adds. But embodying Vivaan’s voice wasn’t just a technical choice—it was also a cultural challenge. “I wanted to ensure he came across as intelligent and emotionally deep, even while using the cadence of today’s youth,” Bhattacharya says. “Too often, we equate formal language with intelligence. But smart kids don’t always speak in perfect sentences.” 

The novel also delves into the complex relationship between queerness and digital technology. Vivaan, Bhattacharya notes, is a character given every privilege—class, education, familial support—just so the novel could focus squarely on his relationship with desire, loneliness, and the digital world. “I wanted to isolate one variable: what happens when a privileged, supported queer teen navigates love in an increasingly virtual world?”

Despite growing up as part of a generation in India that came of age under the draconian enforcement of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, Bhattacharya is acutely aware of how technology has reshaped queer identity and community, especially post-pandemic. He is particularly fascinated by the paradox of the digital age: the freedom it offers, and the isolation it can breed. “We now live in a world of endless choices, especially when it comes to dating,” he says. “The idea of community, expression, and experimentation having now moved online has opened up a lot of possibilities but it also means that we have the fallacy of choice. You’re constantly hopping between so many options that you don’t even know what you wanted in the first place.”

In the world of online dating today, it is analogous to having simultaneous access to a platter of apps, each offering the promise of something the other lacks. If some promise to be more sex-forward, others offer connection, and a third entices you with long-term dating. “This abundance is driving us all crazy because the choice at the end of the day,” he says, is to seek a tangible human connection that makes us feel seen for the humanity underneath our skin. “With our atomised technological existence today, technology knows us so well that it is serving up curated AI experiences to us, and in the process taking the human connection out of the picture altogether. In the end it’s just you, your device, and an algorithm.” 

Growing up, Bhattacharya had little to no access to queer media or community. “I didn’t read Bombay Dost [India’s first queer magazine]. And I didn’t know about gay Bombay parties until I was much older,” he says. Part of that was a lack of visibility and criminalisation, but part of it, he admits, was fear. “I didn’t feel like I fit into the straight world, or the queer world. I was always careful and reserved.” That emotional caution has since evolved. 

For him, writing Deviants has been deeply personal. Pulling from memory, family stories, and conversations that were both affirming and painful, he describes the writing process as “emotionally intense”. He recalls, “While writing, I was talking to my mother about my uncle who was gay. But editing forced me to be surgical. To take the emotion out and focus on the craft.” That duality—of raw emotion and refined creation—has shaped the life of his book.

Despite living in London, Bhattacharya is hesitant to shift his narrative lens abroad. “London and New York are overrepresented in English literature,” he says. “With Deviants, I deliberately kept the story rooted in the subcontinent. I didn’t want the immigrant narrative to distract from the queer experience in India.” Still, ideas are brewing. He isn’t actively writing at the moment, but the urge is simmering. “I have ideas,” he says. “I just need to choose one.” Whether it’s London or Kolkata, fiction or memoir, it’s clear that Bhattacharya is a storyteller unafraid to sit with discomfort, to push beyond caution, and to carve out space where people can see themselves fully.

Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya is out on Tranquebar, Westland Books; ₹799