The Village

Nikita Lalwani’s literary novel The Village (2012) explores prison reform and rehabilitation in India. Garnering many positive critical reviews, it won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2013. The story is about BBC filmmaker Ray Bhullar and her small team, Serena and Nathan, as they shoot a documentary about the experimental open prison, Ashwer. Although the novel’s prison is fictional, it is based on a real-life experimental prison in India. The novel contains a couple of different themes: ostensibly, it is about the role families and communities should play in prisoner rehabilitation and dignity, but it also explores contemporary media ethics as related to reality television and the ways that prejudices and stereotypes are exploited.

At the beginning of the novel, Ray arrives at Ashwer. She and her team will be living in the open prison among the prisoners for the duration of their stay. By the first night, tensions arise between Ray and Serena. As the director of the film and the only one who speaks a dialect of Hindi, Ray prefers verisimilitude in her filmmaking: “The desire to film this way was about indulging a perverse curiosity, an inexplicable hunger to know and understand why people acted a certain way.” She wants to contribute to the greater good of knowledge and understanding, believing television is the “least elite tool, the most egalitarian.” However, Serena wants drama, something salacious and shocking that will up the ratings. Nathan, the presenter for the film, arrives last. He was once a convict himself, and since getting out of jail, he makes his living presenting in documentaries and television shows about the prison system, including a famous documentary called Doing Time.

The camp is for garden-variety murderers who did time in a closed prison but were moved to the open camp for good behavior (serial killers and rapists are excluded from this opportunity). At Ashwer, they must live with and support their families, learn a useful trade or profession, and may even work outside the camp, so long as they obey the 6:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. curfew. The prison governor, Sanghvi, models the place on the Gandhian idea of a sustainable and self-reliant village. He believes that being given gainful employment and community involvement gives prisoners dignity and a way back to society, especially since many of the prisoners committed murder in self-defense or to escape brutal relationships when they had no other recourse. The governor maintains that murders are committed for three reasons: passion, property, or personal revenge. Sanghvi emphasizes that their recidivism rate is zero.



Ray meets a diverse cast of characters. Nandini is a young woman who killed her mother-in-law when she tried to escape an abusive marriage. She has a master’s degree and works as a counselor in the camp, but she attends college once a week to work on her law degree so she can someday take her husband to court for attempted murder. Ram Pyari, who had been a child bride to a man who beat her until she had an affair and murdered her husband. She and her lover were imprisoned at separate locations and write each other love letters. A couple that is forced to live together in the camp because it is a condition of his release to Ashwer, do not like it, or the fact that their children are being raised in a prison. Rana Pratap likes living in the village so much that he bought a nearby plot of land and is marrying his daughter to a local businessman. The most insightful of them all is Jyoti, a woman who runs a tight household for a husband and children and stitches for a living. She correctly identifies Ray’s Anglo-ness despite her dark appearance; although Ray claims her northern Indian heritage, no one—least of all Jyoti—buys it. Ray is a product of the U.K. and Western culture. Throughout the novel, she struggles to reconcile the cultural differences between herself and the other Indian women.

They interview Ashwer’s inhabitants, but Serena is impatient for action to happen, and if trouble does not arise naturally, she will stir something up. She wants scripted storylines and active characters. Friendly interviews are not interesting enough—Serena and the producers back in London want conflict, adversity, and compelling stories more than a truthful documentary about a successful open prison. One plot Serena and Nathan hatch involves setting up an interview with a prisoner and then springing a diagnosis of HIV on him so they can film his reaction on camera. In another interview, they tease out the entirety of Nandini’s tragic story of murder in self-defense when her husband sets her on fire and her mother-in-law helps him.

At the end of the novel, they follow through with their plan to get an on-camera diagnosis for HIV. The test comes back positive and the man’s wife, Jyoti, panics. An HIV diagnosis is more than just having the illness, it is a shame that will follow all of them. Getting a job or a home would be impossible, and the family will be condemned to abject poverty. She grabs a knife and runs out of the hut, threatening to kill herself. She is intercepted at the river by Nandini, who tells Ray to get out of the camp. Ray leaves, but before she leaves, she deletes all the footage from Serena’s laptop and steals the camera rolls, which she throws out of a train window.



The Random House eBook edition (2016) contains a readers’ guide at the back of the book. The first is a description of a real-life open-air prison that Lalwani visited. Sanganer fascinated her and became the inspiration for The Village. The second item in the guide is a list of eleven discussion questions ideal for a classroom or a book club.