28 January 2019 marks the 206th anniversary of Jane Austen’s celebrated novel Pride and Prejudice. Not only is the book indubitably a classic, it continues to sustain a cottage industry of TV and cinematic adaptations, literary sequels, prequels and rewrites, tourist tours of related venues, as well as merchandise of every description.
The book has also permeated our cultural imagination to an amazing extent: its first sentence is regularly quoted across a multitude of disciplines and platforms, Mr Darcy has become shorthand for a rude but hot man, and the plot trajectory of enemies-to-lovers has forever cemented itself as a popular trope in all romance writing.
How then does one acknowledge and celebrate such a juggernaut two centuries later, particularly when we in India are also so removed from its cultural context? With a dash of that Lizzie Bennet irreverence, we say.