How to Date a Fanatic: A Novel

by Aruni Kashyap

In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.

Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

Genres: Fiction, India, Literary Fiction, Queer, Adult

368 pages, Paperback

Expected publication July 14, 2026

About the author

Aruni Kashyap is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and the forthcoming How to Date a Fanatic. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. A 2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, he is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, the Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and the Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry.
His translations, which have been shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation and VOW Book Awards 2024, include The Bronze Sword of Tengphakhri Tehsildar by Indira Goswami (Zubaan), My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign by Anuradha Sarma Pujari (Penguin), An Illuminated Valley by Dipak Kumar Barkakaty (Penguin), and Ten Love Stories and a Story of Despair (Westland). He has served as a visiting writer at Lander University, Minnesota State University, Converse University, The College of William & Mary, Valdosta State University, Dibrugarh University, Assam Don Bosco University, and delivered the Tagore Lecture in Modern Indian Literature at Cornell University. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, Bitch Media, The Kenyon Review, The LitHub, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from the Northeast, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel, Noikhon Etia Duroit, and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.

Reviews

[Shefali · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

I enjoyed this book overall, but it felt very inconsistent to me. At times I was completely engaged while other times I felt like I was reading just to get through the book. I loved the vast representation of queer characters and the description of fundamentalist right-wing politics in India. And while I know this book isn’t meant to focus solely on romance, I found the relationship between Rohit and Dhruv exhausting and somewhat annoying. The last section of the book was my favorite. I appreciate NetGalley for allowing me to read this ARC!

[Kyle C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rohit is an Assamese Indian academic with a PhD from America. He is bi, well-read, cosmopolitan in his life experience but, strangely, parochial in his life-goals and ambition. He teaches at Delhi University but has no desire to write or publish, and he is desperately in love with his friend Dhruv. He could become an academic in America; he could get a more prestigious, higher-paying job; he could also, just by virtue of his good looks and charisma, have a relationship with any number of men and women, but he prefers instead to give technical lectures on Petrarchan sonnets and obsessively think about Dhruv—the man who tells Rohit that he loves him more than anyone else, but can never love him in the way Rohit wants.

This is a book about messy, not necessarily tragic, queer lives. Rohit surrounds himself with supportive gay and lesbian friends: Minti, a lesbian therapist at the university whose girlfriend cheats on her after a decade of being together, and Sarfaraz, a model and a student with an erratic love life. After his falling out with Dhruv, Rohit dates a slew of younger men. Even though the novel is set around 2015 and Section 377 of the Indian penal code (the prohibition on sodomy) is still in effect, the characters seem to have built their own insular queer world, full of academics and professionals, and they seem largely removed from (and sometimes oblivious to) the rise of extremism around them. At the start of the novel, Rohit goes on a date with a man, Karan, who is in a complicated relationship with a married Hindu extremist (whose brother is a minister in Modi's government). When Karan breaks up with the man, he is blackmailed, then outed, and then ostracized by his family, who are forced to move to another state. Rohit sympathizes with Karan but, as the country descends into more extremism, he is still mostly preoccupied with Dhruv and trying to figure out how to be friends with a man he still pines for. Violence, civic unrest, homophobia, these are all peripheral to his emotional life (or maybe even blasé)—until suddenly they intrude into his life.

A few hundred meters from Rohit's apartment stands a church dedicated to St. Sebastian. It's a church that Rohit passes frequently in the novel. He argues with Dhruv in front of it. He looks at it in moments of crisis. After an outbreak of nationalist riots, he first notices that the church has been desecrated. St. Sebastian is, obviously, a queer-coded reference for many gay readers: the early Christian martyr who, in the Renaissance, became an icon of homoerotic beauty and suffering, his lithe, nude body slung to a tree and riddled with arrows. Rohit is not a tortured gay man but he is in therapy and he struggles to form meaningful intimacy with the men he dates. As the novel unfolds, India regresses into illiberalism and extremism. Modi's party is consolidating power across the country; Rohit's state is breaking apart as the majority Jat population riots for recognition as a "backwards" people (which would grant them access to affirmative policies—government benefits, employment preference). And Rohit's friends are caught up in this political chaos: Sarfaraz is beaten up; Dhruv is charged with sedition; Minti disappears.

While set in an era in which sodomy is outlawed and in a country where homosexuality is still heavily stigmatized, the novel has a surprisingly 'post-gay' sensibility. None of the queer characters in this novel struggle with their identity per se—coming out is undoubtedly a risk and many of the characters must be discreet with their families, and yet they are internally comfortable with their sense of self and with each other. St Sebastian for Rohit is not—as it is for many gay writers of the 20th century—a symbol of queer loneliness and persecution. Rather, what Rohit sees in St. Sebastian is perhaps a more complicated kind of suffering: Rohit and his queer friends are all struggling with the familiar hardships of relationships (intimacy, honesty, fidelity) as their country shifts rightward and as leftwing politics becomes dangerous and school campuses—often a queer refuge—become unsafe. They must navigate queerness in a nation split by religious and ethnic upheaval and conflict.

I can understand why some early reviews question the pacing and structure of the novel. At times, this novel can be painfully tedious and messy—like the queer characters who inhabit it. Rohit is 35 but, like many queer people who delay the formative experiences of teenage relationships and might never have dreamed of the possibility of marriage, he seems stuck in an adolescent stage of immaturity, not sure how to date (let alone date a fanatic) and not sure what a queer future would look like for him. He spends much of his time like a brokenhearted teenager agonizing over whether Dhruv loves him, whether Dhruv is sabotaging him, whether Dhruv is a true friend, whether Dhruv will fall in love with him if he can just make him jealous. Rohit teaches high-brow Indian literature (Amitav Ghosh and Indira Goswami) but his mind seems to be more fixated on relationship drama and he has to keep reminding himself that life is not like a Danielle Steel novel or a Bollywood romcom: Dhruv won't suddenly fall in love with him. A bisexual, Assamese, first-gen graduate, contracted lecturer, Rohit was never going to live according to a tidy narrative template.

Overall, I enjoyed it and would recommend it. Thank you to the publishers for the advance copy.

[Mariah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⛤ This book was not the rom-com I blindly expected it to be, which left me happily surprised. Kashyap nailed the feelings and thoughts behind unrequited feelings for a friend; both how difficult it is to constantly overcome and how much you grow as a person after it. I loved Rohit and his cast of friends but sometimes I felt the plot dragged at times. I have zero context for the political climate of North India in the mid 2010s, so I had to do some reading up on Wikipedia to get the full sense and got a little lost here and there. The historical fiction angle was well-done though and I felt very immersed by the last couple chapters.

[Kristia Peschka]

DNF @ 55%

Good Lord am I bored! I've tried so hard to push through. But the interesting parts to dull incredibly boring parts is too much. I don't know what this book was attempting to do. But we spend a lot of time just reading the most random conversations between these characters that don't move the story forward. Think of the random chat you have with your partner on a Tuesday after work about how your day went when nothing of note happened, and that's a large part of this book.

I found myself skimming just to get through, so I'm stopping now.

[Michael B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is deeper than the books I usually read, but it was a great change of pace. We follow Rohit and his life as an instruction in higher education in India. Struggling with his unrequited love for Dhruv and the dangerous political unrest of the region, this book gives the reader a lot to think about.

This is a story about navigating dangerous political movements while still being yourself, and it is very much worth taking a moment to read it. This book is going to stick with me for a while.