BOOK REVIEW: The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff is an entertaining revenge fantasy that is simultaneously amusing and disturbing. Set in an unnamed rural village in India, the novel incorporates tropes and truths of poverty, the caste system, male privilege and oppression of females, alcoholism, domestic abuse, rape, and governmental corruption. 

Geeta, the protagonist, is an outcast. Five years ago, her husband disappeared. Everyone assumes she killed him. Even those who don’t believe it pretend to, and she is feared and mocked as a churel, a witch-figure. Since her husband’s disappearance, Geeta has supported herself by jewelry making – her entrepreneurship aided by a government micro-loan. The loan is not to her as an individual, but to a group of five women, who must meet weekly to make payments to a loan officer. The women are not her friends (though one of them used to be her best friend) but they are bound to each other by economic necessity. It’s a lonely life, but aloneness has its advantages.

Her life changes when one of the women comes to her for a favor. Farah wants to kill her own abusive husband and needs help. Geeta reluctantly helps her, and before long, she is the go-to murder consultant.

It’s a novel of female friendship, or at least, solidarity. The plot, however, requires a good deal of female cattiness and backstabbing before friendships are cemented. It’s a fast-paced book with numerous plot twists, some of which surprise and some of which are predictable. The pacing of the book is aided by easy-to-read “familiar” language. There is a good deal of snark. The women’s dialogues and Geeta’s inner monologues sound like young Americans talking (“yeah, right,” the verbal tic “like,” “screw it” etc) – but I have no knowledge of, so can’t claim to judge, whether this jargon is realistic in translation or a sort-of Americanized style of speech adopted so readers can be in on the jokes. The over-the-top violence, particularly at the story’s climax, is interwoven with a cartoonish bumbling to counteract the darkness of what is going on. The ending gets preachy. Nevertheless, it’s a page-turner. And readers will want the women to prevail.