Grand Tamasha · Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Inside The Complex: Family, Power, and India in Turmoil

April 8, 2026·52 min·4 clips

A grieving young immigrant drives a cab through Newark at night, thinking he could vanish from the universe and yet, this is freedom.

Granthamasha stages a live recording at Carnegie HQ in Washington, D.C. Milind Vaishnav introduces Karan Mahajan, author of Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs. Mahajan is there to discuss The Complex, a new novel set around the Chopra family. The book follows a large family as India moves through political and social turmoil from the 1970s toward the early 1990s. S.P. Chopra, the patriarch, stays at the center of the family's shadow. His legacy leaves the children and relatives sorting through ambition, belonging, and their own competing visions. Vaishnav presents the novel as a way to see how private life gets pulled into public instability. Mahajan reads a passage that moves from cremation fire to a son striking his father's charred skull, and the moment is left to sit there. The reading gives the conversation a stark sense of family rupture and ritual. Vaishnav then turns to the novel's immigrant thread, especially the push and pull of going back to India after building a life elsewhere. Mahajan says immigration is never linear, even now, when travel and communication can make return feel constantly within reach. He traces that idea to his own move from India to the United States in 2001. He says he always assumed he would move back. Over time, life in the United States became something harder to peel away from. The conversation also touches on repeated trips home and the way distance can create a different kind of intimacy. Mahajan suggests that attraction and repulsion can both be true when a place remains emotionally central. Vaishnav uses that tension to ask how the novel thinks about identity and belonging. The discussion stays patient and analytical, letting the larger ideas come out of the book instead of forcing them. It treats the family story as a route into larger questions about power and self-making. By the end, the episode becomes a conversation about how immigration, return, and place shape what people carry with them.

As heard by us

A literary interview that uses one family's story to connect fiction with politics, migration, and belonging.

Granthamasha frames a live author conversation around the Chopra family, using Karan Mahajan's The Complex to trace family power, ambition, belonging, and the political and social turmoil of India from the 1970s into the early 1990s.

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Why you'd press play

You get a novelist tracing immigration, return, and family power through India’s political and social turmoil.

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