From the moment Vidya sees the dance form known as Kathak, she knows what she was meant to do with her life. She is living in the in Bombay with her father and younger brother, her mother having died. She is expected to run the household, cook, shop and clean but she knows there is more to her life than this. She manages to study hard enough to get a scholarship to a school of engineering.
While she is studying to get her degree, it is her secondary priority. Her first is always Kathak. She practices for hours daily and goes for lessons with a renowned teacher several times a week. The teacher encourages her to devote her life to dance and Vidya is glad to.

But life intervenes. Moving forward, the reader encounters Vidya as a young wife, her husband another artist. His media is photography. He comes from a very wealthy family which has disowned him for marrying Vidya but the couple is happy. When Vidya becomes pregnant, the family is willing to take her in. Vidya wonders which she will put first, her child or her art?

This Swamy's first novel as her first publication was an anthology. The text is poetic and dreamy as Vidya describes her feelings for her art, her friendships, her love for her husband and her child. The message seems to be that each person must find the one thing in life that will bring them the most joy. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.

Vidya grew up with expectations, beginning with the command to care for her younger brother like a mother. When her mother left them, Vidya did become the mother of the house, taking care of her father and sibling. In fact, her father decided that she would study engineering and have a career and take care of him always, to never marry or leave her childhood home.

There was a passion in Vidya, a restlessness. Her grandmother understood. “You should have been a boy,” she said. How could such a girl marry and obey her mother-in-law’s rule?

Vidya was enthralled with the dancers she had glimpsed, the pounding feet and tinkling bells, the precise movements and the rhythm of the music. She wanted to know the secret. When she shared her desire with her mother, Vidya learns she had been named for a dancer. Her mother herself had hoped for another kind of life, and agreed for dancing lessons, if Vidya promised to have discipline and practice. And then, her mother told the story of the boy who wanted to study with a master archer who demanded a harsh price.

In dance, Vidya found her “I”, separate from the roles she played: wife taking care of her father, daughter and student, mother to her brother. Going away to school was an escape from home, but she was chained to her studies. She finds a new dance teacher, and friendship in fellow student Radha who dreams of becoming an astronaut.

Asked to dance the chorus in a play, Vidya creates her own dance, and in performance, is transported into her “I”, finding her anger, and making an indelible impression on her teacher and on a boy who becomes her future husband. Marriage brings new problems, her husband marrying her against his family’s wishes, and expectations that disrupt her chance for a career in dance performance.

The Archer is a marvelous experience, a journey into a girl’s growing awareness of herself as a person in a world that presses to squash her individuality. I loved the portrayal of her girlhood, the transformative experience of one’s body as vehicle for expression, the description of labor and motherhood. Vidya’s story is exotic in locale and specific in time, while universal in theme and story.

The true achievement in life to to make one’s life one’s art, to live one’s truth. It is an empowering message.

I received an ARC from the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased.

This book delivered on its lyricism and the flowing pace of Vidya's life. Shruti Swamy managed to show a glimpse of Bombay through Vidya's point of view. I am glad that I read this book it was definitely and interesting read and not one that I often read in books.
While this book was a solid read I just think that it was a miss for me personally, like dance being important to Vidya I was not able to follow all of the steps of this story with grace, and I know that this was definitely a personal feeling.
I do truly believe that this novel will speak to many people and have many lessons and insights that will stick with its readers for a long time to come.

This coming-of-age story takes place in 1960s and 1970s Bombay (later known as Mumbai). I really loved and enjoyed Shruti Swamy's short story collection, A House Is a Body, and see a lot of the clear and precise prose making its way to this novel as well. She really captures family relationships well.