“Fiction or truth? I wondered”: A Gothic of/for the Nation-State | Sayantan Lahiri

Review: The Light at the End of the World, by Siddhartha Deb, Context, 2023.

“This was a hungry novel, haunted by other writers, artists, ideas and historical events.”

                                                          -Siddhartha Deb, The Light at the End of the World

This sense of haunting and being haunted influences the novel and its characters. Deb tries to (re)imagine India’s imminent dystopian future through the lanes (and lens) of its violent history of the last two centuries. However, instead of taking the ‘top-down view’ of narrativising the history of the bourgeois, he chooses to paint micro-stories of humanity, struggle and anxieties.  However, the apocalyptic historical milieu looms large in the backdrop, impacting the characters’ lives and their choices. The sense of history Deb portrays in the novel is not one of continuity and poise, but a tale of its ‘apocalyptic ruptures’.

Like the Gothic genre, The Light doesn’t allow the characters to bury their deep-seated anxieties, rather it “offers ways of exposing, and articulating, some of the horrors and fears…” (Wisker 238). Deb’s language is unapologetic, blunt, and precise, deliberately unsettling the readers if they were reading comfortably.

This overt political meta-narrative is beautifully complemented by the delicate touch and care with which Deb carves out the characters and their milieu. The novel is structured in four sections, each a novella on its own, depicting stories of humanity and its quest amidst their dystopian catastrophic worlds, as the characters witness its boundaries and their insides collapse.

The first section, “City of Brume” recounts the story of Bibi, a journalist in Delhi in the near future. The city is described in the traditional Gothic tropes of entrapment, filled with uncanny characters like the anonymous “Monkey-man”, a zombie like figure who has returned after his supposed death to haunt the nation-state with the threat of exposing the secrets of its coercive and ideological state apparatuses.

“Claustropolis: 1984” situates the narrative in the Indian city of Bhopal, the site of India’s worst industrial disaster. The narrative shifts to the first person, an assassin who must hunt down his ‘kill’ before that disaster ‘outbreaks’. The sense of the weird is further developed by the anonymous boss of the assassin, who cannot be defined into traditional identities, and therefore is described in every paragraph using a long name: “That man an operator at a chemical factory on the Kali parade grounds” (Deb 145).

The third section, “Paranoir: 1947” captures the tale of a humble Bengali student, (Das) and his quest for a Vedic aircraft that can repel the impending genocide. Das begins with the stereotypical Romantic images of Bengal and its Gangetic planes. However, they are undercut by the unsettling metaphors that follow, which do not offer any sense of ease: “The leaves of the fossil-like banyan trees rustle. Invisible little ghosts scurry in the grass, stopping occasionally to tickle Das’s ankles” (Deb 221-2). Deb takes another quantum leap in the history of India in the fourth section, “The Line of Faith: 1859” which narrates the story of Colonel Sleeman and his troops who fight a rebellion to secure their alleged “super weapon” that will expel the British from India.

To some readers the novel may feel a slow read, with the subplots taking time to build up. However, this is a novel of moments, where Deb creates an aesthetic of the mundane—the unchanging, routine life of these characters. Their lives seem monotonous, only to be shattered by the apocalyptic ruptures of historical moments. In the third section, for example, the assassin’s comments are repetitive, with the refrain “FOLLOW AND PERFORM” (Deb 145) being repeated several times, that it almost gets instilled in the subconscious of the character as well as the readers.

Another traditional Gothic trope which links these sections together is the narrator’s fascination with insomnia, haunting, and nightmares. Deb mentions, on almost every occasion, in precise details about when the characters sleep (if at all), when they wake up, in which mental state, and their dreams/nightmares while sleeping. In the “City of Brume,” for instance:

THROUGHOUT THESE TURBULENT months, Bibi sleeps…[s]he sleeps like everything…has happened many times before and will happen many times again, an unending cycle of present, a loop to be broken only by some apocalyptic ruptures. (Deb 4)

Although The Light paints images of these “apocalyptic ruptures” of cosmic horror, it is perhaps more encouraging than the typical post-apocalyptic fiction. It defies any easy categorisation and generic expectations. It deliberately pushes boundaries—of genres, histories, and experience. Therefore, it is perhaps befitting that Deb quotes from Frankenstein in the epigraph of the epilogue in the quest for the “eternal light” (Shelley 3). We meet Bibi again in the epilogue in the Andaman Islands as she continues her quest. The choice of a space like the Andamans for the epilogue is telling: a floating island, distanced from the ideological body of India and its “imagined communities” (Anderson 22)—a space which was historically associated with punitive measures for ‘rebels’—provides Deb with the perfect milieu to paint a picture of the life of a rebel in exile; a space where Bibi, in the near future must continue her quest for her sense of the self and the world.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books, 2016.

Deb, Siddhartha. The Light at the End of the World. Context, 2023.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Penguin Classics, 1986.

Wisker, Gina. Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction: Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-30349-3 .

Sayantan Lahiri is currently working as an Institute of Eminence (IoE) funded Research Intern at the University of Hyderabad, India. The research project focuses on establishing decolonial Indian Research Methodologies (IRM) from Sanskrit Texts. After finishing his M.A. in English Literature from the same university, he wishes to pursue research in the areas of Postcolonial Gothic, Indian Writing in English, Ageing Studies, Posthumanism and Cultural Studies.

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