‘August 17’ by S Hareesh: Few novels inhabit India’s unrealised future with such conviction

S Hareesh’s latest novel, August 17, translated into English by Jayasree Kalathil, poses a layered question: How does one write, translate, and read a novel that embodies a complex counterfactual: what if a small state at the southernmost part of India had remained independent in 1947?

A complex process for each, one can assume.

First, even within the country, many are unaware of what actually happened in Thiruvithamkoor: the decisive moments that might have altered the course of this once-independent state and, perhaps, the history of the subcontinent itself. Real and imagined stories, remembered and forgotten histories come together in August 17, creating an ambitious world for the reader to step into.

Once one of the larger princely states under British rule, Thiruvithamkoor (Travancore) stretched across what is now southern Kerala and parts of Tamil Nadu. It was not just a kingdom awaiting its integration into independent India but a polity with its own rulers, institutions, social hierarchies, reform movements and competing, struggling visions of the future. The land of Sree Narayana Guru and Mahatma Ayyankali, of powerful caste structures and equally powerful movements against them. It was a state with substantial Hindu, Christian and Muslim populations and a political culture that often charted its own course. By the 1940s, Congress nationalists, communists and defenders of royal authority were all aiming to shape what would come next. The Punnapra-Vayalar uprising had uncovered deep social and political tensions, while Sir CP Ramaswami Iyer was openly exploring the possibility of an independent Thiruvithamkoor. When the British finally left, the future of the state was not yet settled. For a brief moment, the remaining sovereign was not just a political imagination but a genuine possibility. It is from that opening in history that August 17 emerges.

A speculative reality

If this alternate world is created with new stories, tales of what-ifs, a speculative reality woven from myths, then what is the nature of the reimagination? The narration begins with a confession that echoes throughout the novel: “This writer is not a historian.” At the same time also answers a question that might come to a reader: why bother, then? Why imagine a country and a history that never existed?

Hareesh’s answer seems to be: because someone has to bear witness. Not necessarily to explain what happened, but to understand what could have happened. What follows is not simply an alternate history but a meditation and mediation of memory, nationhood and storytelling itself. A new nation that is being built from power, armies, propaganda, and regimentation, but also from myths, beliefs, and acts of remembering and forgetting. The spies, the revolutionaries, and the political figures are all slowly becoming entities in a narrative that outlives them.

What we experience here as historical truth is not merely what happened, but what we come to believe happened. An independent Thiruvithamkoor may never have existed, but the possibility did. August 17 exists in that possibility, refusing to treat history as something immovable.

The epigraph of the novel is curious: “Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.” Quoted from Borges’s Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, feels like a key to the novel. Is August 17 simply interested in replacing one history with another? The answer is no; rather, it asks how histories are made, who gets to tell them, and how quickly the improbable becomes inevitable once enough people agree upon it. If looking back, Thiruvithamkoor’s integration into India feels predetermined, Hareesh asks us to inhabit a moment when it was not.

One of the joys of August 17 is the way real people appear in reimagined forms. Take Basheer, for example. He is not quite the Vaikom Muhammad Basheer we know, yet he remains recognisably himself: not a writer but a revolutionary, marching in protests, editing newspapers, writing pamphlets, and becoming a wanted man, while the incidents surrounding him uncover the surveillance state's deathly grip on its people.

The novel slowly but coolly allows such figures to drift between the complexities of reality and imagination, enveloped in a world that gradually acquires its own internal logic, most of the time convincing the reader to accept even its most improbable turns. There is also a strange awareness of the fragility involved in recreating these very real-life characters and at times, the effect is unsettling.

A novel of endless meanings

These departures from recorded history are hardly arbitrary. Why else would we come across a line at the end such as, “Oh Basheer, you trapped me inside a story. Listening to the stories you did not write, imagining the stories you might have created, I pursued you”? A lament for unwritten stories? Or something beyond that? Like “On his table was the book of history, written without my involvement,” it points once more to one of the novel's central concerns: who writes history and who is merely written into it.

Kalathil’s translation carries these layers with remarkable ease. Translating August 17 involves more than a straightforward understanding and rendering of the Malayalam text into English. It requires creating an entire political and cultural world through words, affects, tones, and rhythms that are simultaneously familiar and strange, understood and questioned, historical and speculative. The translation preserves the novel’s historical playfulness without sacrificing its emotional and political weight. There are moments that require a pause and a retracing of steps through the lives of the many real political and cultural figures who appear in the novel, especially for readers unfamiliar with them. The descriptive list of central and recurring characters at the end of the novel comes in handy. But that adds to the experience, inviting the reader deeper into the novel's many overlapping histories and possibilities.

A phrase often too easily used to describe ambitious fiction. Does it work here? Yes. August 17 begins with a historical possibility that never became reality and follows it with unrelenting faith. The faith is evident in the care with which S Hareesh treats both his imagined nation and the people who inhabit it. August 17, at no point treats its premise as a mere intellectual device or a clever exercise in counterfactual history. Rather, it insists on living inside that unrealised possibility, letting it unfold with all its contradictions, aspirations, fractures, and confusions. Memory, storytelling, politics, power, and death all converge here, forming the novel’s inner world. Death, especially, appears in many forms: as loss, erasure, and the disappearance of futures that once seemed possible. Few novels inhabit an unrealised future with such conviction. August 17 is one of them.

August 17, S Hareesh, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, HarperCollins India.