After transforming Hindu folklore into well known novels, Vaishnavi Patel has moved onto new genres, an example being her latest book, Ten Incarnations of Rebellion, a work of speculative historical fiction. In this she imagines, what if India had not gained its independence from the British empire in 1947, and instead languished as a colony for decades after? What results is rich with strategy and yearning, casting its heroines not as waiting women, but revolutionaries in their own right. As an imagination of rebellion, the novel shines. Where it runs into roadblocks are those ideas intersecting with character and narrative.
We follow Kalki Divekar, a young woman whose father disappeared some years ago after a failed rebellion against the British. Kalki shares her father’s dream of independence and immediately gets to work, stealing contraband music from British archives and pasting them in public. From there, she makes connections with other past freedom fighters, creates a troupe of her own, and starts to launch a full scale rebellion in her hometown of Kingston. She deals with the intersections of racism and sexism in her own community and in the broader city, and must overcome her own grief for her father and her struggles with interpersonal relationships in order to succeed.
Kalki’s transformation from idealist to fully realized revolutionary is not gradual, but occurs in stops and starts across the novel. Part of this is a product of the format, a ten chapter framing with each chapter named for a different avatar of Vishnu. These chapters allow the story to take place over a number of years, creating more summary than scene across the novel. While this is believable, as revolution of this scale takes years to build and is far from linear, what we lose in this structural choice is continuity. Moments of growth occur during scenes, and as much of the novel is dominated by summary to catch readers up from year to year, Kalki comes across as a stable presence unless otherwise disrupted. This is a subtle difference and doesn’t detract from the success of the novel as a whole, but does make personal throughlines like Kalki’s family relationships and her at times volatile relationship with her best friend feel like interruptions.
Indeed, Kalki herself is so devoted to the revolutionary cause that part of the novel involves her finding humanity and grace for others. As a result, the sections of the book without these elements feel mercenary and cold. When Kalki accidentally kills a British man, there is a brief moment of pause, but she quickly replaces her guilt with justification and lashes out at her friends for being shocked. For a single minded rebellion leader, these are essential qualities, but for a well-rounded first person narrator, the reader craves more moments of introspection. It is odd to call out a speculative novel for not enough speculation, but when Fauzia (Kalki’s best friend), points out that Kalki can’t even imagine the kind of India she wants, the reader also realizes that this is missing. There is no rich imagination of a free and just country, what the landscape might look like, what Kalki wants apart from the broad concept of independence. The benefit of a first person narrator is to allow for these moments of pause, but with the distance created by narrative summary and Kalki’s one-track mind, one wonders if the novel could have been served by a third person perspective, or multiple perspectives.
While Kalki herself occasionally lacks nuance, Vaishnavi Patel’s revolutionary ideals are wellcrafted and multifaceted. The novel does not fall victim to Gandhi-worship, the way older Indian independence narratives often do. Instead, the novel critiques Gandhi’s methods and how nonviolent methods often gave way to needless bloodshed. Hindu-Muslim conflicts also feature in the novel, having both colonial as well as historic basis. One of Kalki’s friends, Yashu, is a pivotal piece in this critique as well. As a Dalit woman, Yashu is quick to acknowledge that under colonial rule, she receives more protections than she potentially would under an independent India. We even witness Anglo-Indian characters and colonizers with redemptive arcs adding nuance to this story. While the book never devolves into heinous tropes such as colonizer-colonized romance, Patel clearly knows her history and sociology and integrates these ideas quite well into her fiction. While conversations can feel stilted and expository at times, due to the need to exhaust all this historic context, we as readers get the impression that revolution is neither easy nor straightforward.
The framing device of the novel is the major piece reminiscent of Patel’s previous books, Kaikeyi and Goddess of the River. Pieces of the avatar stories themselves find their way into the narrative, as memories and as correspondence, but they tend to break the cohesion of the novel and more could have been done to embed these stories and their motifs into the narrative itself. The novel is not the sprawling myth-based epic that Patel is known for, it leans closer to political thriller at times, and for readers willing to embrace these heady political ideas, the novel satisfies from beginning to end.
FICTION
Ten Incarnations of Rebellion
By Vaishnavi Patel
Ballantine Books
Published June 3, 2025
