Abstract

Chetan Bhagat’s 2 States: The Story of My Marriage (2009) occupies a distinctive place in contemporary Indian popular fiction, dramatizing the tensions between individual agency and entrenched cultural norms in post-liberalization India. The novel traces the relationship between Krish Malhotra, a Punjabi Hindu from Delhi, and Ananya Swaminathan, a Tamil Brahmin from Chennai, whose decision to marry across regional and caste lines becomes a site of intense familial and social negotiation. This article examines how 2 States constructs regional identity as a lived, affective category attached to language, cuisine, ritual, and space, while simultaneously staging an inter-caste union as both personal choice and political act. It argues that the narrative represents modernity and tradition not as simple opposites but as mutually entangled forces that shape the subjectivities of India’s aspiring middle classes. Through close reading, the discussion foregrounds three interlocking domains: the dramatization of North–South cultural difference; the partial, often oblique treatment of caste; and the deployment of English-medium, elite education as a putative route to social mobility. The article also analyses gendered agency, showing how Ananya’s apparent autonomy is circumscribed by patriarchal family structures, even as the text celebrates romantic love as liberatory. While Bhagat’s narrative endorses the ideal of a pan-Indian, meritocratic order in which love and hard work can overcome prejudice, it ultimately leaves untouched deeper structural inequalities related to caste, class, and gender. By situating 2 States within debates on popular literature, middle-class consciousness, and national integration, this study contends that the novel functions as both a document of aspiration and a symptom of the limits of liberal individualism in contemporary India.