Granta’s India issue goes into the heart of ‘vikas’. Restlessness written all over it

H is name is Vikas. Once, he buried landmines under Jharkhand’s sal trees; decades later, he supervises the laying of roads over the same soil. In Snigdha Poonam’s ‘ The Thin Red Corridor ’, he is both a man and a metaphor, a reminder of how India’s idea of progress has always been uneven, improvised, and borne mostly by those who never asked to be symbols in the first place.

In British literary magazine Granta ’s latest issue on India, Vikas becomes an unintentional guide. As I moved from his story to the others in the essays, I found him resurfacing quietly in the tension each writer grapples with. Everyone in this issue is wrestling, in their own way, with the question that Vikas has lived through: what does vikas (progress) actually look like on the ground?

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