Meena Kandasamy's new novel: a deepfake, a Marxist woman, and the machinery of online shaming

Meena Kandasamy does not do gentle entrances. Her fourth novel, reviewed by Scroll on 22 June 2026, opens on a synthetic sex tape of a forty-two-year-old Chennai-based Marxist academic named Yamini — a video that never existed in any real room, but which nevertheless arrives, frame by frame, into the phones of every colleague, neighbour and former lover she has ever had. Within forty-eight hours, Yamini's marriage is over, her party membership is suspended, and the commentariat on Indian Twitter has rendered its verdict. The novel then does something more unsettling than the premise: it refuses to let the reader settle into the role of voyeur or vindicator, and asks instead who, structurally, profits from a woman's unmaking.

The book is a deliberate collision between two of Indian public life's most combustible materials — the gendered violence of non-consensual intimate imagery, and the ideological hysteria that greets any Indian woman who refuses to keep her politics out of her bedroom. Kandasamy has spent two decades writing at that seam, and her latest work reads as a thesis on what online shaming actually is: a public-goods problem dressed up as a morality play.

What the novel actually does

The book's architecture is unsentimental. Yamini is not a saint. She is described by the narrator, her younger protégé, as a difficult colleague — sharp-tongued, doctrinaire on caste, prickly in seminars, and possessed of the specific charisma that Indian left-wing academia has long associated with the public intellectual. Kandasamy builds her as a person before she destroys her. The deepfake arrives; the apparatus of online judgement engages; Yamini's life disassembles in real time. The novel's second half tracks the slow, bureaucratic impossibility of legal recourse in India, where the Information Technology Act's Section 66E and the 2022 amendments to the criminal code have created overlapping jurisdictions and stalled prosecutions. The narrator — a Dalit woman journalist who has her own grudging relationship with Yamini — narrates the unmaking without ever quite endorsing it.

This refusal to be cleanly on Yamini's side is the novel's structural argument. Kandasamy is not interested in producing a sympathetic victim; she is interested in producing a recognisable woman and letting the reader feel their own complicity in the pleasures of the pile-on. The deepfake works as a plot device because it works as an internet device: it needs no original, it needs only distribution, and once distributed, the truth of its fakeness is permanently a footnote to the truth of its virality.

The political framing the book is refusing

Indian mainstream coverage of women-targeted deepfakes has, since 2023, defaulted to a particular arc: a young woman is targeted, an outrage cycle follows, the platforms issue statements, the BJP's women-and-child welfare ministry promises a task force, and within a fortnight the news cycle moves on. Kandasamy's book rejects this arc, in part because Yamini is not young, not apolitical, and not interested in being saved by the state. Her Marxism is not a decorative biographical detail; it is the reason the pile-on finds a permission structure that a non-political woman would not. The narrator makes the point plainly: "She was not being punished for the video. She was being punished for the politics." The deepfake is the occasion, not the cause.

This is where the novel's most uncomfortable work happens. It treats the online shaming of an Indian Marxist woman as a continuous product of the same media ecosystem that produces the country's broader moral panics — from the Wankhede-narcotics cases to the bulldozer-as-policy genre — and it refuses the easy liberal consolation that better laws, or better platforms, would fix it. The argument implicit in the book's structure is that the technology is downstream of the politics. A country that has spent a decade normalising the public dissection of women's lives will find synthetic tools to do it more efficiently. That the tools are now AI-generated rather than Photoshopped does not change the social function.

What the counter-narrative looks like

The novel will not be universally well-received, and the reviewer at Scroll anticipates this. A plausible counter-narrative runs as follows: Kandasamy has constructed a character whose political affiliations guarantee her a sympathetic reading from a particular readership, and whose targeting by online mobs is therefore legible as the persecution of dissent rather than the ordinary humiliation of women. By making Yamini a Marxist, the argument goes, Kandasamy has smuggled an alibi into her victimhood — the suggestion being that non-political women suffer worse, in silence, without an international literary apparatus to metabolise their humiliation.

The counter-narrative has a structural point, and a serious reader of the novel should hold it. But the book also anticipates the move. The narrator is not unaware that Yamini's class, language and caste-credentialed Marxism give her tools of articulation that a domestic worker in the same situation would not have. The book does not pretend otherwise. It is, however, arguing that the fact of differential vulnerability does not produce a moral ranking of whose unmaking is more worthy of literature. The deepfake hits Yamini with the specific velocity of her political identity; that is the story, not a deflection from it.

The stakes, for India and beyond

The reason this novel lands in mid-2026 is that the underlying infrastructure has matured faster than the law. India's Computer Emergency Response Team has, since 2023, run a takedown portal for non-consensual intimate imagery; enforcement is uneven and the portal does not extend to the WhatsApp forwards and Telegram channels that do most of the actual damage. The country's draft Digital India Act, repeatedly delayed, would for the first time give a regulator teeth on synthetic intimate imagery, but as of the publication date its parliamentary path remains unclear. Kandasamy is not writing about a future dystopia; she is writing about the present tense of a country whose laws treat the deepfake as a technicality and the woman's ruined life as a sidebar.

There is also a literary stake. Indian fiction in English has, over the past decade, produced a generation of women writers — Kandasamy among them — for whom the personal-political seam is not a genre tic but a research method. To read the novel is to be reminded that the deepfake question is not, fundamentally, a question about technology, models, or detection algorithms. It is a question about who is permitted to exist in public without their image being weaponised against them. India is one of the largest generative-AI user bases in the world; the volume of synthetic intimate imagery in circulation is not a forecast but a present condition. The novel's quiet claim is that, by the time a country builds the legal infrastructure to deal with the technology, the social damage will already be in the bones.

There is genuine uncertainty in how to read the book. Kandasamy's earlier fiction has been read variously as formal experiment, political tract and autofiction-adjacent memoir; this novel will likely produce the same range of reception. What can be said with confidence is that it refuses the safety of distance. The reader is not asked to pity Yamini from a clean remove; the reader is asked to recognise the apparatus that makes a Yamini possible — the same apparatus that, on a smaller scale, on a different Tuesday, makes any of us possible. That is the book's wager, and it is the wager that puts it inside the conversation India's literary culture most needs to have.

Desk note: Monexus treats this as a culture-desk piece, not a tech-policy piece. The review at Scroll anchors the reporting; the structural argument stays inside the literary and political register the source supports. No theory name-drops; the frame is built from the book itself.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meena_Kandasamy
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-consensual_intimate_imaging
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Act,_2000