Out of the heat and ferment of the very southern tip of India come the blue mangoes of Chevathar, fruit ‘so sweet that after you’ve eaten one you cannot taste sugar for three days.’ The mangoes, the river after which they are named, and the similarly eponymous village, are imagined, as are the three castes that David Davidar uses as his vehicles for the great truth of India: everything changes but nothing alters. To carry his story he employs three generations of the same family, the Dorais, who, at the start of the book in 1899, are the main landowners of Chevathar, and Christians in the face of the caste tensions of the time.

Out of the introductory steam of the licking tongue tip set between the coasts of Coromandel and Malabar comes the pacesetter, the rape of a young girl. The crime is a hangover from the infamous Breast Wars of 1859. The women of the lower castes had to leave their breasts uncovered for the pleasure and perusal of their caste superiors. When Christianity and missionary zeal made its mark in the region those who converted were encouraged to cover their breasts. Riots ensued. The flames died down, but the resentment lingered on, like the sweetness of the blue mangoes.

So, a young girl is raped and then commits suicide in the aftermath. Solomon Dorai, the first patriarch of the family that we meet, is killed in the fight that follows. His elder son Daniel turns to medicine, while his golden younger son fails to fulfill his burnish. Aaron Dorai dies in prison serving a life sentence of his involvement with the freedom fighters. Daniel restores the family wealth through his invention, Dr Dorai’s Moonwhite Cream, guaranteed to give the paler complexion yearned for by the women of India as the freedom fighters struggle to get the pale faces off their patch. Daniel Dorai returns to Chevathar to build Doraipuram, a kind of family kibbutz. The House of the Blue Mangoes is at its heart, just as the naming of the house comes in the very heart of the book, carefully picked and placed, like the blue mangoes. Daniel’s son Kannan defies his father for love of an Anglo girl. He tries to re-invents himself as a pukka sahib on a tea estate up in the hills as his marriage fails, and his identity fades. Daniel’s ensuing death is perhaps the finest part of the book. The keenly attended reading of his will promises everything and delivers nothing to those who sit in greedy anticipation. Kannan’s tea career culminates in a curious though beautifully fashioned non sequitur about a man-eating tiger.

If writing is a science then David Davidar has written a great book. If writing is invention then he has studied his craft to the point where the intangible has been almost diluted from the ether. As the head of Penguin India he must have mulled over many great novelists during the ten-year gestation period of this novel. He draws from these to write of people who live by duty and, in the sensual fecundity of the south, they seem sometimes desiccated, as if hammered into their roles as history marches past their lives, sometimes through an open window, sometimes with the sound shut out. The House of Blue Mangoes is a perfect body of work, honed and polished to a high gloss, but at times its soul is wanting.

Bollywood Boy by Justine Hardy is published on 18 April by John Murray

(originally published in The Times March 2002)