M K Shankar on how his novel, The Convert, is an enquiry into faith and belonging

Shankar’s works are animated by a single thread: the search for connections between art and science, tradition and modernity, memory and imagination. The Convert, his debut novel, is the latest expression of his lifelong pursuit. “For me, The Convert is an inquiry into belief and belonging in the messy business of the everyday. At its heart is the story of identity, faith, and one’s reckoning with the past,” says Shankar in an interview to The Federal at his Malleshwaram residence, Melukote.

“Over the past century or so, writers such as Hermann Hesse, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and Umberto Eco have examined the moral and metaphysical dimensions of humanity through the novel, inquiring into the tensions between belief and doubt; conscience and willfulness. Their view on the oriental spirit was mediated largely by Christian beliefs, or psychoanalysis as in the case of Hesse, and remained at the level of the abstract. Their philosophical reflections were, to that extent, received, abstract knowledge; the lived experience of the east remained elusive,” says Shankar.

An inquiry into faith and identity

The Convert, he underlines, can be seen in the same tradition of fiction, with the difference that the epistemological turn has been turned on its head: its philosophical search derives not from abstract theory but from lived reality; from the multilingual, caste-marked, faith-entangled life of the Deccan in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its questions arise from the ground upward, out of the daily struggles between devotion and dissent, and power and compassion. It moves from life toward thought, letting the particulars of history become an instrument of moral imagination,” he adds.

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The novel tells the story of Christopher, an orphan raised by the enigmatic Father Francis. His search for roots leads him into the extraordinary and turbulent life of Dharmadhara, a visionary whose story gradually entwines with his own. “Dharmadhara’s life unfolds as a living experiment in equality and trust, a utopian experiment that provokes fierce resistance from orthodoxy and ends in its violent undoing,” says Shankar.

He describes The Convert as ‘a novel for our times’, and adds: “We live in a world fracturing at fault lines of faith, language, class and nation. We continue to be guided by animal instinct, tribal intuition, and a prejudice that we mistake for awareness. These subliminal motivations are continuously surcharged by what has come to be a preferred reading of history as a cycle of vengeance and reprisal. Yet if we were to look behind the curtain of irony, that very history will reveal to us heirlooms that may offer the healing ointment; the wisdom of dialogue, the compassion of the Buddha, the prudence of cooperation. None of these pathways is easy. But, a good life — even a godly life — takes much effort. In realising this cardinal principle, one makes a beginning. The Convert points us toward the choices that are still open to civilisation at the edge”.

According to Shankar, The Convert is about the long struggle to become oneself. “It’s a philosophical and historical novel through which runs a thread of inquiry for identity and truth across the intertwined worlds of faith, caste, and power. You could call it a philosophical Bildungsroman with a nose tilted toward history and investigative mystery,” says Shankar.

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What the novel asks of us, adds Shankar, is to consider conversion not as an escape from one world into another, but as a detour of fellow travellers, along spurs of the primal journey that began long before caste or creed, back in the shared migrations out of Africa, carrying our stories as proof that we belong to one human circle, continually diverging and continually, again, folding upon itself. “The reader will learn that identity is often an agonising process of becoming. They will experience Christopher’s confusion, prompted by hallucinatory spells of his infancy and the discovery that his Christian upbringing concealed his origins as a Brahmin named Krishna Degaonkar,” says Shankar.

‘A novel of ideas’

In following Christopher’s scholarly journey, the reader will also gain an understanding of tensions that shaped modern Indian society and spiritual thought; of the “two visions of truth” represented by MK Gandhi (spiritual intuition and nonviolent negotiation) and BR Ambedkar (reason, realism, and the need for demolition of unjust social structures). “The novel seeks to engage seriously with the human condition: of people deprived of social justice; of victims of a utopian failure. It explores what happens when people are required to change the work they are used to doing: a Brahmin man mandated to clean wastes and male resistance to women’s supervising them at work,” says the author.

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It is also a kind of philosophical-historical whodunit. The mystery, however, is not only about a death or conspiracy, but about the soul’s need for coherence. It has a philosophical narrative that remains anchored in the tangible lives of ordinary people. Incidentally, it is the first work to be published by ExLibris Osage (Latin for ‘From the Library of Osage),’ which was founded in 2014 by a group of writers, thinkers, artists, and theatre and film personalities. “Osage believes that knowledge of the past, while it helps us gain an understanding of how we have come to be who we are and why we think and behave the way we do’ it is always open to contention and is an inadequate basis for resolving problems of today. This is also a key idea underlying the novel,” says Shankar.

The Convert began as a biography and grew into a novel of ideas. Its uniqueness lies in how it merges history, philosophy, and mystery within a single human story: the search for a moral self in a fractured world. Drawing on the textures of the 18th 19th century Deccan — a time when faiths, languages, and castes were in dynamic conversation — it asks what it means to live ethically in such a divided order. “In form, it may remind readers of the philosophical fiction of Hermann Hesse or the layered moral investigations of novels that explore belief and doubt and ways to transcend both. Yet its setting and idiom are distinctly Indian, rooted in local speech, regional histories, and the moral dilemmas born of caste and conversion,” concludes Shankar.