Mansi Choksi

Review in The Times by Marianne Power: Three taboo-defying couples in modern India—This astonishing piece of reportage, following six young people who risked everything for love, gets under the skin of India.
“A staggeringly good work of literary journalism... it does what all great writing should — it puts us into the world of someone else, so completely that days later I find myself missing the couples and wondering how their stories end.”

Review by Jenny Bhatt in The Star Tribune: Can love tainted by shame survive? Indian journalist Mansi Choksi follows three rural couples whose love defied community norms.
“Choksi's narrative structure braids the three couple strands cleverly so that, as the stakes keep rising, the tension escalates through cinematic jumps and cuts. Her scenes are alive with singular details, vivid language and crisp dialogue. The net effect is that we become so vested in the lives of these six people — and the collateral damage they leave in their wake — that they linger with us long after reading. This very quality might leave a reader feeling like the stories end too soon or without satisfying resolutions. But, as she writes in her introduction, her aim was to discover whether love could endure with dignity if it became tainted with shame.”

The New Yorker Briefly Noted Reviews
“This examination of love in India follows three couples whose relationships contravene societal norms concerning religion, caste, and sexuality. In India, where marriage is seen more as an act of duty than as one of passion, the families of people who buck expectations can suffer harassment and violence. Choksi’s couples run away to be together but must then reckon with the costs of their actions. A woman who marries into a less prosperous family notices her mother-in-law’s “empty-stomach stench”; another woman’s frustration at people’s refusal to recognize her same-sex partner morphs into dangerous cruelty; a couple leaves their village only to return later. Choksi writes that each of her subjects “is tormented by one central question: Was it worth it?”

Review in the Financial Times by Nilanjana Roy: India seen through the eyes of its women
“In The Newlyweds, Choksi unpacks the challenges and aspirations of three couples who fall in love, breaking rigid inter-caste, inter-faith and gender norms. Monika and Arif cross Hindu-Muslim barriers, Reshma and Preethi pretend to be sisters in order to live together, while Dawinder and Neetu, from different castes, run away to escape the displeasure and reprisals of their families. I found The Newlyweds compelling, and sometimes heartbreaking, because Choksi followed the couples’ stories beyond happy endings. In a country where two out of every three people are under the age of 35, and where marriage is often presented as an inescapable familial duty for young women, the simple act of choosing to fall in love has radical repercussions for the four women who opened up to her over six years.”

NPR’s Books We Love by Lauren Frayer
“In Bollywood films, boy meets girl, they fall in love – and everyone dances in unison. In real life, more than 90% of Indian marriages are arranged by families. Caste and religion matter more than chemistry. This book is about the less than 10% who defy tradition and follow their hearts. Bookending The Newlyweds with her own parents’ story, Mansi Choksi braids the love stories of three couples who break boundaries of caste, religion and gender to be together. Choksi observes them like an anthropologist, documents their courtships like the investigative journalist she is – and writes like a poet. The result is a meditation on love, and what we sacrifice for it.”

An interview with Milan Vaishnav on the Carnegie Endowment’s Grand Tamasha Podcast Mansi Choksi joins Milan on the podcast to talk about modern love in a changing India, how love and politics intersect, and what her book tells us about India’s social fault lines.

Review and interview with Dhruti Shah in The New Arab: The Newlyweds: A rare insight into modern love in India
"Choksi wants her storytelling to highlight what happens when an ordinary couple not involved in national politics or anything in the public eye suddenly find themselves embroiled in controversies they hadn’t even ever heard of."

Interview in Open Magazine by Aditya Mani Jha: Mansi Choksi’s book chronicles the lives of three young couples who chose love over all else
“Choksi has a novelist’s instinct for narrative structure and characterisation. Her por­traits of these passionate young people —as well as everybody else around them — are very well-observed. She has the knack of reeling you into a new charac­ter’s world with a startling description or phrase: Reshma, for example, ‘has a tongue sharpened through the knife grinder of a bad marriage.’”

Feminist Book Club with Niba: In this episode Niba interviews Mansi Choksi about her debut book, The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India. The Newlyweds is a literary investigation into India as a society in transition through the lens of forbidden love, as three young couples reject arranged marriages and risk everything for love in the midst of social and political upheaval.

Interview in India Today with Shikha Kumar: In her debut book, Mansi Choksi paints a sombre, compelling portrait of three couples who defy all odds to be together in modern India

Review in the Asian Review of Books by Mariyam Haider + An interview with Nicholas Gordon on the Asian Review of Books Podcast
“This is where Choksi’s writing is at its best, with love as the centerpiece to be examined and re-examined. The Newlyweds ends up describing love in the face of oppression and resistance, and recognizes it as a force to reckon with—not just for the Indian society, but for the couples themselves.”

Interview with Ketaki Desai in The Times of India: Three couples elope, each of them running from families because of their caste, religion and sexuality respectively. But what happens after they ride off into the sunset?

Interview with Platform Magazine: While we constantly hear rallying cries of an India that is championing development and modernity, much of our reality remains rooted in oppressive bigotry regarding various facets like religion, gender roles, sexuality and caste. Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds probes perceptively into this socio-political reality while examining the transgressive notion of love amidst its all.