The Dakoo

The Dakoo is a South Asian and Chinese immigrant Western set in California in the 1880s, after the railways have been hammered into the land by migrant labourers whose bodies, hopes, and futures have been broken in the process. It is a revenge story, a family story, a love story, and a land story. Its hero is Raju Korwar, known during his brief outlaw career as “the Dakoo,” a word from his own people meaning bandit. The novel’s central question is what the children of exploited workers should fight for: escape, money, revenge, family, or the right to call a place home.

Raju is the son of Old Man Korwar, an Indian railway worker who came west with his wife and children. Raju’s mother died on the ship, sick and vomiting, and was thrown into the sea. His father survived and became one of William Holloway’s most useful men on the Pacific railway. Korwar once saved Holloway’s life during a worksite accident, but the cost was grotesque: the rail crushed Korwar’s hands, and Holloway had them broken to free him. Instead of gratitude, Holloway gave Korwar a compromised promotion. Korwar became overseer, a middleman enforcing white owners’ demands on other brown workers. He kept the Holloways close because he believed obedience might protect his children.

That bargain poisons the Korwar home. Papa trains Raju’s body obsessively: runs before dawn, rope climbs, bethaks, dhands, digging soil with his hands, breath control, silence, endurance. He tells Raju his fists will never run out like guns. Raju becomes huge, a human weapon, but he grows up feeling he has been built for someone else’s use. His sister Rani, who tends their garden and household, receives different cruelties: criticism, expectation, invisibility. The siblings love each other deeply but live under their father’s bitterness and the memory of what the railway took.