Higher Education

There is no outside of history...

California, 2002. 

Rohan is a freshman at Irvine College, a student in the painful shadow of 9/11. He dreams not of war or politics, but of making his parents proud by excelling in school. Fearful of the national mood and protective of his only son, his father, a proud Indian immigrant, suggests Rohan find safety among other first-generation Indians. Dutifully, Rohan pledges a fraternity, finding friendship and acceptance among those so seemingly like him.

But in one of his classes, Rohan meets Azada, a beautiful Muslim American. Though he knows his parents and pledge brothers would never approve, he can't help seek her out, he can't help falling in love.

As President Bush's drumbeat for invading Iraq grows louder, and as anti-Muslim rhetoric grows in the national discourse, Rohan's fraternity becomes increasingly radicalized and suspicious of Irvine College's Muslim population.

When a controversial Muslim cleric is scheduled to speak at school in the name of free speech, the political and ethnic tensions on campus come to a head and Rohan can no longer avoid taking a side. Caught between his heart and his clan, his idealism and his patriotism, Rohan must confront his beliefs by learning that the political is always personal and there is no existing outside of history.

As America approaches the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, Indira Tagore's Higher Education reminds readers through brave, unflinching prose of the innocence lost and darkness unleashed in the wake of that tragedy: the Islamophobia, the xenophobia, and the domestic disorder still very much with us today.

At a time when the very definition of what it means to be American is under attack, Indira Tagore's Higher Education is the literary novel for our current moment.