Amitav Ghosh. The Shadow Lines. Ravi Dayal, 2000, pp. 146-53, 228-33.
THE SHADOW LINES Copyright © Amitav Ghosh 1988, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
Image copyright © Penguin India.
More by Amitav Ghosh on IWE Online
The Great Derangement
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Anjaria, Ulka. “Aravind Adiga.” Indian Writing In English Online, 17 April 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/aravind-adiga-ulka-anjaria/ .
Chicago:
Anjaria, Ulka. “Aravind Adiga.” Indian Writing In English Online. April 17, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/aravind-adiga-ulka-anjaria/ .
“What we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings… But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind… We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour’s children in five minutes, and our own in ten.”
—Aravind Adiga, Selection Day (233)
Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Chennai, and completed his schooling and advanced degrees in India, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is best known for his novel The White Tiger, which won the Booker Prize in 2008. He is also the author of several short stories as well as three additional novels: Last Man in Tower (2011), Selection Day (2016), and Amnesty (2020).
The White Tiger broke new ground in Indian English fiction for its move away from some of the genre’s common themes and aesthetics. In contrast to the writings of previous Indian winners of the Booker Prize, The White Tiger noticeably eschews pathos and rejects the sensitive and emphatic portrayal of characters from marginalized sections of society as seen in the writings of Rohinton Mistry, and the righteous sense of injustice or anger against the system as seen in Arundhati Roy. Rather, Balram Halwai, The White Tiger’s protagonist, is a ruthless self-promoter, his frustrations at the obstacles put in the path of his social advancement generating a sense of gritty motivation that leads him to become a social climber at all costs. He uses the language of late capitalism to articulate his own aspirations; he is a self-styled “entrepreneur” (1). He is a member of an underclass that does not seek pity or empathy but faces challenges with a hard-nosed pragmatism that is at once cynical and agentive. If some of the most famous Indian novels in English of the 1980s and 1990s reflect a profound disillusionment with the failures of the Indian nation-state, Adiga’s works mark a newer era in the genre, which we might call post-disillusion, when there is nothing of the illusion left at all and so rather than lament its loss the only thing to do is pick up the pieces and stitch together a livable life from them.
The White Tiger is set in a contemporary India that has been stripped of its moral values. Any symbol or model of moral righteousness – Gandhi, Nehru, literary icons, spiritualism, secularism, socialism – is presented in his works through a cynical gaze, upturning conventional morality so that, at its extreme, right is wrong and wrong is right. For instance when Balram walks into a tea shop for his first day at work, he sees the shopkeeper “sitting under a huge portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, and [he] knew already that [he] was going to be in big trouble” (31); the image of Gandhi, which might have once signaled virtue, now represents its opposite. Balram scoffs at the men working in tea shops in rural India who “do [their] job well – with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt” (43), aware that their hard work will get them nowhere in life. By contrast, Balram claims, “I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience” (43), while this is a humorous inversion of conventional ideas of education and enrichment, it is also a perceptive critique of the limitations on social advancement in contemporary India, where if you’re poor or otherwise marginalized, hard work is futile. Instead, Balram “used [his] time at the tea shop… to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear everything they said. [He] decided that this was how [he] would keep [his] education going forward” (43). Balram presents street smarts and cleverness, rather than belief in the virtue of labor, as the only option for social mobility in a profoundly broken system.
Although The White Tiger advances a social critique, there is no hope of reform; patriarchy, capitalism, casteism, greed and selfishness have so completely taken over that the only “hope” (which is in fact a cynical gloss on hope) is to bend these forces to one’s advantage. Thus, victimhood can become agency, even if that agency involves theft and murder. In The White Tiger, Adiga replaces the bleak/fatalistic attitude of an earlier generation of Indian writers in English with a more cynical/pragmatic perspective that is always on the lookout for an opportunity for breaking out of one’s social circumstances but is not at all interested in reforming the whole system. For this reason, The White Tiger has been criticized by some scholars as being neoliberal –celebrating a rags-to-riches, bootstraps narrative rather than offering a concerted critique of structural inequalities. Certainly, there is very little that is Marxist about The White Tiger; there is no class solidarity and the narrative of advancement is not only individualistic but actively anti-collective. This is less a progressive critique of capitalism than a perceptive recognition of a new world order in which the very possibilities for subaltern advancement have already been tainted by half-a-century of corruption that has saturated the very fibers of Indian society.
Indeed, one wonders if these critiques of The White Tiger had some influence in shaping the direction of Adiga’s subsequent novels. In all three, the cynicism is still there, as are characters who have no moral compass and who, like Balram, reject the language of liberalism and act in extremely self-serving and socially destructive ways. However, in contrast to The White Tiger, at the center of each of the three later novels is a protagonist who has a heart and who does his (they are all men) best to resist the forces of the deeply corrupt world around him. While Balram found criminality as the only path forward in a nation of criminals, the protagonists of the other novels try to remain ethical despite the pressures around them.
Last Man in Tower’s Masterji is a former teacher and elderly resident of a Mumbai apartment building targeted by a builder for redevelopment, providing that all owners agree to the deal. The rest of the residents are gradually convinced, but Masterji remains steadfast in his refusal to sell, partly because of the memories of his deceased wife that still pervade his flat. The other residents get impatient as the deadline comes closer, and in a bid to get the deal through, one of them pushes Masterji to his death, off the building terrace. In this novel, the middle-class society is represented as thoroughly amoral and materialistic. Though Masterji, tries to stay true to the values of learning, family, and morality, he is ultimately a victim to it.
Selection Day is also set in a world,among characters,completely warped by violence and greed. Radha and Manju are brothers and cricket prodigies. They live with their unemployed, controlling, and at times violent father who treats them as his property. Manju, the younger brother, is the novel’s protagonist. Not only does he grow up in the shadow of his older brother and gradually outshine him in cricket, earning both Radha’s and his father’s anger, but he also finds himself sexually attracted to a wealthy boy, Javed, who treats him alternatingly with affection and disdain. Selection Day is a cricket novel – a critique of the business of cricket in contemporary India, from match fixing to corporate sponsorships to the recruiting industry. Manju resembles Balram in that he too must make compromises to succeed. But unlike Balram, who murders his boss and never faces the consequences, Manju’s denial of his sexuality and his abandonment of Javed for the sake of his cricketing career prove ultimately hollow. Manju remains a sympathetic character throughout, from his childhood when he is the victim of emotional and physical abuse by his father, through his adolescence and the eponymous selection day, and beyond, into his listless adulthood. Unlike Balram, the novel focalizes its narration through Manju, allowing us to glimpse his hazy memories of his mother who left when he was a child, his love of the television show CSI, his secret dream to work in a morgue rather than be a cricketer, his fear of his brother and his father, and his unarticulated desire for Javed. In the midst of the ruthless world in which he lives, and despite his own flaws, Manju remains profoundly human.
Danny, the protagonist of Adiga’s most recent novel Amnesty, is also a sympathetic character in an unforgiving world. As an undocumented Tamil Sri Lankan having escaped the Civil War and state repression, Danny lives in Sydney when the novel begins and works as a house cleaner. The novel takes place over the course of a single day that begins with Danny learning that a former client named Radha Thomas has been murdered. In a series of flashbacks, we learn more about Danny’s strange relationship with Radha and her extramarital lover, Dr. Prakash, who were both gambling addicts and highly unlikeable people. Additionally, they knew of Danny’s illegal status and were using it to try to control him. Danny immediately suspects Dr. Prakash as Radha’s murderer, having witnessed violent arguments between them, but realizes that turning Dr. Prakash in to the police would require implicating himself – living in Australia illegally – to the authorities. Danny struggles with the decision over the course of the day, calling the police hotline several times but ultimately hanging up. Finally, having realized that Dr. Prakash is planning to murder Radha’s husband next, Danny does the right thing. The last page of the novel is a press release that reports the tip that resulted in the arrest of Dr. Prakash and in preventing the second murder, but also notes that “the person who tipped police off on the hotline confessed during questioning to being illegally present in Australia and is now being processed for deportation to his home country”(217). Danny’s sacrifice of his own happiness – contrary to his repeated mantra, “I am never going back home” (207) – exposes, once again, the immorality of the outside world through the foil of a character who is able to act morally despite it.
These various male protagonists who struggle to make it for themselves under the ruthless logic of late capitalism also demonstrate the ways in which Adiga links masculinity and class. We see this in the scene in The White Tiger where Balram tries to imitate Mr. Ashok, his employer by hiring a blonde prostitute. Balram is devastated when he discovers that her hair is dyed. The fact that the idiom of Balram’s desire for social and economic mobility is that of sex suggests the deep imbrication of class and sexuality. The portrayal of sexuality is more nuanced in Selection Day, where Manju’s burgeoning understanding of his own queer sexuality makes him the target of homophobic taunts from his father and peers, but – and more importantly – gives him a new perspective on ordinary things that allows him, at times, to detach himself from the world around him. In this novel, queerness is presented not only as a question of desire but also as a kind of secret world of survival that enables Manju to develop a sense of self which is at times magically distant from the crude material needs, both bodily and financial, of everyone else around him. Indeed, it is only when he turns his back on his own queerness does his life relapse into mediocrity.
Adiga’s interest in questions of masculinity does not really extend to women, and across the four novels there are very few notable women characters. The White Tiger’s Pinki Madam is a morally reprehensible, wealthy NRI who drives drunk one night, ends up killing someone sleeping on the street, and forces Balram to take the blame. In Amnesty Danny has a healthy relationship with Sonja (probably the only living healthy relationship across all Adiga’s fiction), but the main female presence is the murdered Radha Thomas who appears in Danny’s flashbacks as domineering,manipulative, and entirely reflective of the privilege of her elite class. Yet, while all the female characters verge on caricatures, most of the male characters do as well – the vast majority of characters in Adiga’s fictional worlds are reflections of the corruption of the late capitalist order and have little redeeming about them at all.
Adiga also inhabits a new “transmedia” arena marked by a more complex relationship between literature and other forms of media. Arundhati Roy refused to authorize a screen adaptation of The God of Small Things, and while there have been adaptations of earlier Indian novels in English (perhaps most famously Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the BBC’s recent miniseries A Suitable Boy), the classic IWE texts of the 1990s have rarely been adapted for the screen. But this changed in the first decades of the 21st century, not only with OTT platforms allowing for a wider distribution of varied types of content, but also because authors started writing with adaptation in mind. This is clear in the works of authors such as Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan, among others, whose fiction reads as somewhat filmi in its characterization, narrative arc, and at times rapid “cuts” between scenes. Both authors’ books have been made into films. Adiga’s novel Selection Day was similarly released as a series by Netflix in 2018, and three years later the film adaptation of The White Tiger was released on the same platform. As Sangita Gopal reminds us, this is not just a question of unidirectionally adapting fiction into film, but of upturning the idea of an original versus an adaptation; a transmedia project means that a film or television series is not a secondary version of an original fiction but that the book too is a version that might find form in another medium. Adiga’s participation in this arena is part of a new moment in Indian literary production in which the sanctity of the book is replaced by a more lateral proliferation of possible forms.[i]
Unlike many contemporary writers, Adiga is a private person who stays largely out of the public domain. He is not active on social media and has never attended the high-profile Jaipur Literary Festival, despite his popularity and the critical acclaim garnered by his works. In this sense he seems to have avoided the pressures that contemporary writers often face to be political commentators as well as practitioners of their craft. But this reclusiveness does not lend his writings a sense of apartness; rather, his stories are marked by their contemporary quality, their grittiness and their refusal of pity or sentiment. For these reasons, his impact on the field of Indian writing in English will continue to grow.
Primary Sources
Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. Atlantic Books, 2008.
—. Between the Assassinations. Picador, 2008.
—. Last Man in Tower, Atlantic Books, 2011.
—. Selection Day. Picador, 2016.
—. Amnesty. Scribner, 2020.
Selected Adiga Criticism
Anjaria, Ulka. Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture. Temple University Press, 2019.
—. “Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 1,2015, pp. 114-137.
Detmers, Ines. “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘Condition-of-India Novel.’” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 5,2011,pp. 535-545.
Mendes, Ana Cristina. “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2010, pp. 275-293.
—. and Lisa Lau. “Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal Liminality.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2022, doi: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099940
Shingavi, Snehal. “Capitalism, Caste, and Con-Games in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 9, no. 3,2014, pp.1-16. https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1837.
Walther, Sundhya. “Fables of the Tiger Economy: Species and Subalternity in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 2014, pp. 579-598.
[i] Sangita Gopal, “‘Coming to a Multiplex Near You’: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema,” in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 359-372.
Edited by: Sreelakshmy M
Cite this Review
MLA:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “Of Journeys and Transformations: The Natural World in Three Novels.” Indian Writing In English Online, 13 March 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/of-journeys-and-transformations-the-natural-world-in-three-novels-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .
Chicago:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “Of Journeys and Transformations: The Natural World in Three Novels.” Indian Writing In English Online. March 13, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/of-journeys-and-transformations-the-natural-world-in-three-novels-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .
Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat, Harper Collins, 2022; Where the Cobbled Path Leads by Avinuo Kire, Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2022; Spirit Nights by Easterine Kire, Barbican Press, 2022.
2022 was a good year for Northeast Indian Writing in English. The year saw the publication of at least three books that capture the changing contours of where the literature is at in the present. Taking after ecological concerns that have occupied the minds of academics, climate change activists and ecologists, Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches (2022), Avinuo Kire’s Where the Cobbled Path Leads (2022) and Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights (2022) explore the mysteries of the natural world through the trope of journeys. Whether it is a journey through time as with Pariat or journeys to the spirit world as with Avinuo and Easterine Kire, the journeys effect change in the lives of the people who take them. I begin my review of the books with Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat.
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Everything the Light Touches is an ambitious book in scope, content and form. The novel spans across four centuries, covering four interconnected narratives: that of Carl Linnaeus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Evie (a botanist) and Shai. Beginning in the twenty-first century with Shai’s story, the novel is about journeys that are three-fold and overlapping—physical journeys, journeys through time and journeys towards self-discovery. Pariat combines these journeys with reflections on historical narrative, indigenous rights, folk practices and environmental concern, creating a truly heteroglossic text.
As with Pariat’s earlier book, Seahorse: A Novel, the protagonists of Everything the Light Touches venture into the unknown in order to find their “place” in the world. There are differences, however, in the way each of the characters approaches her respective journey. Shai is “directionless” and apprehensive about her return to Meghalaya (Pariat 23). Evie is uncertain about where her search for the elusive Diengïeï would take her, an uncertainty that is also compounded by the insecurities she feels about being a particular kind of academic (Pariat 113). But while the characters who are women are beset with these conflicts, the men—Goethe and Linnaeus—suffer no such worries. Goethe and Linnaeus, in Pariat’s novel, represent the white male explorer whose travels around the world leave him in no doubt of his belonging to and mastery of it. Even if mastery over the world is not the intention, as is the case with Goethe, the male characters are self-assured in their pursuit of knowledge. This idea also extends to other white, male characters in the novel such as Mr. Finlay, Evie’s love interest, and the devious Mr. Dossett. It is through such characterisations that Pariat’s research lends validity to the affective lives of her protagonists.
Pariat’s book draws upon a wealth of texts and archival material; among them, Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, Linnaeus’ Journey to Lapland, Pranay Lal’s Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Pariat’s novel has benefitted from her extensive research. The characters, taking after Pariat’s research, reveal their subjectivities accordingly. Pariat uses conversations to communicate the nature of her protagonists to the reader. Goethe is philosophical, Evie speaks like an academic even when she expresses self-doubt in being in a discipline dominated by men, Linnaeus’ poetry (except for the poem “Sestina for the Lost”) is seemingly devoid of feeling and concerned only with classifications and Shai is impressionable and undecided about her “place” in the way that those who have left home (as a fixed place) feel. There is, therefore, historical legitimacy and verisimilitude to Pariat’s characterisation that one does not often find in fiction of this scope. This attention to detail is also observed in Pariat’s description of places. As we travel with Evie from the port of Tilbury in England to Mumbai, for instance, the journey through each port and coastal town is meticulously described as they would have appeared during the nineteenth century. One is reminded, in these instances, of Amitav Ghosh whose research of the trade routes in South and South East Asia formed the backdrop and gave historical legitimacy to places in the Ibis Trilogy. Similarly, Goethe’s journey to Italy is marked by changing topographies and plant life, knowledge of the latter being a central theme in the book.
Everything the Light Touches is, most of all, a meditation on epistemology. It is about the process of knowing and how we acquire knowledge. While knowledge of nature is a central theme in the book, how we choose to know the world around us is equally, if not more, important. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fourth section which details Linnaeus’ journey to northern Finland or Lapland. Linnaeus’ method of documenting and classifying the flora in Lapland extends also to how he relates to the people living in the region. Unlike Evie or Goethe, who immerse themselves in the cultures in which they find themselves, Linnaeus views the Laplanders as little more than specimens. He acknowledges that their ways of relating to nature are different from his own, and yet, he makes no attempt to understand the world from their perspective. He is content with not knowing in spite of knowing – an epistemological blind spot, if there ever was one. Linnaeus’ concept of Enlightenment reason is also reflected in the way Evie and her contemporaries are taught botany. The dominant method of classifying plants, espoused by male professors and Professor Ethel Sargant (Pariat 112), leaves Evie feeling disconnected from the natural world she used to enjoy as a child (Pariat113). It is against such masculinist attempts at classifying the natural world that Pariat evinces a “new” approach to the natural environment couched in Goethe’s phenomenological idea of plants as ever evolving and whose uniqueness is contained in the whole (Pariat 199). Unsurprisingly, it is the women who embody this concept.
At the heart of Pariat’s novel is the Khasi folk narrative of the Diengïeï. An apparent physical manifestation of Goethe’s Urpflanze, an “archetypal plant that carried within it all plants of the past, present, and future” (Pariat 305) and “a tree that holds all trees” (Pariat 394), the Diengïeï marks a journey through time. It is this journey, marked by the quest for the archetypal tree, that causes those who seek it to arrive at some form of self-realisation and acceptance. The search for the Diengïeï links Evie’s story to Goethe’s and Shai’s as well as the historical contexts underlying each narrative. The Diengïeï, therefore, binds the ontological to the epistemological, the personal to the historical and the particular to the universal. Its story also connects the narratives in the book to the “original” nomads. When Evie ventures into the remote parts of Assam (now, Meghalaya), she meets the custodians of the Diengïeï, nomads known as the Nongïaïd loosely translated as the people who roam the earth. Themselves outcasts to Khasi society, the Nongïaïd promise Evie knowledge of what she seeks provided she leaves everything that she knows behind (Pariat 402). Like the Diengïeï which she seeks, Evie’s story ultimately passes into legend. If the quest for the Diengïeï is also representative of the quest for knowledge, then Pariat implies that true knowledge is arrived at through the relinquishing of the self. This is also true of Shai, whose narrative differs slightly from those of Goethe, Linnaeus and Evie.
Unlike the other three protagonists in the book, Shai does not actively seek knowledge; and yet, knowledge finds her. At the start, Shai possesses a shaky sense of self and sticks out like a sore thumb in Mawmalang, a village in West Khasi Hills. Her inability to accept the inevitability of death as a part of life constrains her relationship with Oiñ, her nanny. It is only when she understands the true implications of the Diengïeï that she comes to terms with mortality and the cycle of regeneration couched in Goethe’s statement, “All is leaf.” Like Evie, Shai sheds what she knows of herself in order to become what she truly is—a modern-day nomad. The book ends with Shai reconciling herself to Oiñ’s death and a sapling reaching out into the light. What belongs to the earth returns to the earth, a metaphor for the journey we must all undertake.
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Similar to Everything the Light Touches, Avinuo Kire’s Where the Cobbled Path Leads has a tree as a central motif. Kijübode, “one of last surviving of the first trees”, guards the portal between the human and the spirit realms (Kire 112). It is through his counsel that the protagonist, Vime, learns to free herself from the spirit world and return to the world of the living.
Where the Cobbled Path Leads draws upon folk narrative, particularly, the Zeme folktale of a boy turning into a hornbill following his ill-treatment at the hands of his stepmother. In Kire’s re-telling of the same folktale, however, the protagonist is a girl who, in being mistreated by her stepmother, yearns to fly. The folktale provides a cultural frame to the grief that Vime feels upon the death of her mother and her apprehension at her father’s remarriage to Khrieliezuono (Khrielie, for short). Although Khrielie is reputed to be a good woman— “good” being, in the eyes of the community, a woman who can keep house—Vime is upset lest Khrielie takes the place of her mother. Like the girl in the folktale, Vime yearns for transfiguration and wants to be with her mother where she feels she truly belongs.
Unable to reconcile with her mother’s death, Vime takes a mysterious cobbled path leading to Kijübode and, from there, enters the spirit realm with the help of a mischievous spirit called Tei. Kire successfully weaves the fantastical with the folkloric in describing Vime’s experience in the spirit world. Apart from her mother, Vime meets a former weretiger, a weaver, a caretaker of the underworld and the souls of other people who have passed on. The narrative is almost Gaimanesque in the way that Vime, confronting the “other” world, also contends with the darkness within herself. The spirit world, such as it is, houses memories that living beings have of the dead, including Vime’s own memory of her mother; a Freudian (collective) uncanny. When Vime enters the spirit world, she also confronts the unresolved feelings she has towards her mother. Although melancholy is the dominant emotion, Vime also nurses feelings of anger and abandonment when her mother passes away. When she is tricked by Tei to remain in the spirit realm, however, help comes from an unexpected quarter: Khrielie, too, is lured by Tei into the world of the spirits.
Throughout the course of the novel, Kire highlights Vime’s difference from the women of her community. Using the traditional narrative device of foil characters, Vime’s impulsiveness and non-conforming attitude is a contrast to the gentler, subdued characters of Vime’s sister, Neime, and Khrielie. However, Vime shares with Khrielie the experience of being shunted out by the community to which they belong. Although Khrielie lives peacefully with her mother and grandparents in a small house in comparison to Vime’s, Kire tells us that Khrielie’s mother and her daughter were disowned by the grandparents owing to Khrielie being conceived out of wedlock (Kire 58-59). When Khrielie joins Vime in the spirit world, therefore, she already shares in the sense of alienation that the latter feels. More importantly, the journey through the spirit world allows Vime to put Khrielie’s needs before her own. Upon realising that Khrielie has been unwittingly trapped in the spirit world, Vime determines to forgo her desire to join her mother and fight instead to return to the world of the living for Khrielie’s sake. In forgoing her own selfish interests, Vime comes to terms not only with her loss but also finds the necessary strength to overcome her grief. When Vime narrates her experiences to her family members and relatives, moreover, she performs the role of a proverbial seer who is able to traverse the realms of living and the dead, a living Paichara, the wise women who ascended to heaven from an ancestral tree (Singh unpaginated).
Where the Cobbled Path Leads marks what Jyotirmoy Prodhani terms as an “ontological turn” in the literature of Northeast India (Prodhani 1-8). The novel shows how writers from the region have re-interpreted oral narratives to discover surprising ways to relate to their world. Kire’s book draws upon various legends and folktales of Naga tribes, especially the origin myth associated with the ancestral pear tree at Chitebo from which the Angami, Lotha, Rengma, Chakhesang and Sumi tribes are said to have emerged, migrated and dispersed (Singh unpaginated). In doing so, Kire’s reflections on grief and loss touch upon universal experiences that run through all the Naga lifeworlds and beyond.
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The ontological thread that one finds in Where the Cobbled Path Leads is also present in Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights. Like Avinuo Kire’s book, Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights also dwells on interactions between the human and the spirit world. These interactions re-align the characters’ relationships to each other and the world in which they live. There is, however, a strong anthropological undercurrent to Spirit Nights that sets it apart from the novels that have been reviewed so far.
Written in Easterine Kire’s characteristic prose which is lyrical and lucid, Spirit Nights contains a glossary of indigenous place names and words and an account of the supernatural occurrence that inspired Kire’s main narrative. The novel, therefore, can be considered a work of creative anthropology wherein the ethnographer, in this case Kire, re-imagines a textual universe based on an already created story by the participants in her research. This, however, forms only one strand of Kire’s anthropological and literary endeavour. The second, more discreet strand is seen in the narration of different lores within the main narrative itself. As literary devices in the novel, the lores reflect ancient psychic states that connect the protagonists of the novel to their ancestors and, through them, to the Chang Naga lifeworld. The stories themselves effect transformation in that they serve as the basis for present and future action through numerous re-tellings. Structurally, therefore, the novel reveals a complexity that is belied by Kire’s matter-of-fact style of narration.
The narrative of Spirit Nights follows, at a cursory glance, a traditional story-telling plot: a hero is born in whose time, a crisis occurs which forces the hero to undertake a journey where, after finding himself and conquering his fears, peace and reconciliation are finally restored. But the similarity ends there. The main narrative in Spirit Nights is about a coming-of-age story about a boy, Namu, and his relationship with his grandmother, Tola. Gifted with foresight—their ancestors being seers—Namu and Tola occupy a world where past, present and future collide. In their world of dreams and visions, the path to becoming a seer is marked by visitations from spirits both malevolent and virtuous. The world of spirits sits comfortably alongside the world of the human. The spirit world, Kire reveals, is a repository of human memories pertaining to the past as well as a reflection of what is desired in the future. A journey to the spirit world, such as Namu’s journey into the mouth of the tiger spirit that wreaks havoc on the village, coalesces personal biography (Namu’s desire for biological parents) with the tales and identity of the collective (the memorialisation of Namu’s defeat of the tiger).
The spirit world represents a spiritual journey as much as a physical one. Namu’s and Tola’s journeys into the spirit world are treated by Kire as factual occurrences since the journey itself alters their physical and psychic states (Kire 124-125). A journey into the spirit world also foreshadows self-revelation. After having rescued Namu and the rest of the community from the darkness that envelops their world, Tola accepts her position as a seer; a position which had hitherto been denied because women among her tribe are not usually considered spiritual leaders. This gendered angle in Kire’s novel reflects a growing concern by writers from the Northeast region of India for greater representation of women in the canon. One is reminded, for instance, of Temsüla Ao’s Aosenla’s Story (2017) where the trials of an Ao Naga woman are rigorously explored within the confines of a heterosexual union. But while Ao’s protagonist is powerless to overcome her oppression, Kire’s Tola reveals herself as the ultimate seer by being a source of comfort and light when her community needed her the most. This transformation, however, is effected by the presence of the fictional village of Mvüphri.
It is in the village of Mvüphri that Tola’s real identity as a seer is revealed to the men in her community. Mvüphri is everything that the historical Shumang Laangnyu Sang is not. While Shumang Laangnyu Sang is, for a short period, led by a spurious seer, Mvüphri houses the most powerful seer in all of Nagalim. While the people of Shumang Laangnyu Sang are beset by jealousies and scepticism, the people of Mvüphri are welcoming to strangers even if this would have cost them their lives. The village of Mvüphri, therefore, represents an ideal that, in being constructed through the fictional, reflects the humane end that all literature strives towards. That Kire treats this fictional place as though it were real testifies to the power of her storytelling.
The unique selling point of Kire’s novel is the boundaries that the novel breaks where narrative style is concerned. The anthropological generously spills over into the literary and vice versa such that the boundaries between the factual and the fictional merge. What is achievable in the fictional world is, Kire seems to imply, also achievable in our day-to-day lives. Spirit Nights appears at a time when the world is reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic. The isolation and anguish that the people of Shumang Laangnyu Sang feel upon being separated from each other because of the unimaginable darkness and the losses they suffered because of its curse, feel eerily familiar. But if the Chang Naga community has overcome their moment of darkness, both in fiction and in reality, through the courage they have in telling their tales, then we too are capable of the same. The story is an event – what happens in stories also happens in life.
~
The novels reviewed here reveal the diversity in Northeast Indian Writing in English. Whether the approach to storytelling is historical as is the case with Pariat, ontological as is the case with Avinuo Kire or anthropological in the case of Easterine Kire, they all point towards universal human experiences that transcend their contextual particularities. In each fictional work, the natural world is treated as an entity that harbours its own mysteries but which is not separate from human life. Where Indian Writing in English is concerned, such works offer the possibilities of drawing upon specific cultural heritages while addressing universal challenges.
Works Cited
Ao, Temsüla. Aosenla’s Story. Zubaan Books, 2017.
Prodhani, Jyotirmoy. “The Saga of the A·bri dal·gipa: The Ontological Turn in Northeast Studies.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 4, no. 2, Mar.-Jun. 2022, pp. 1-8.
Singh, Menka. “Mythical Legends and Legendary Myths: A Case Study of Khonoma, Nagaland”. https://www.sahapedia.org/mythical-legends-and-legendary-myths-case-study-of-khonoma-nagaland. 26 December 2022.
Jobeth Ann Warjri is a writer and researcher. She completed her PhD from the Department of English, University of Hyderabad.
Cite this Review
MLA:
Pai, Akshata S. “Of Dreams and Desires in the Anthropocene.” Indian Writing In English Online, 17 Feb 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/the_living_mountain/ .
Chicago:
Pai, Akshata S. “Of Dreams and Desires in the Anthropocene.” Indian Writing In English Online. February 17, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/the_living_mountain/ .
Amitav Ghosh. The Living Mountain: A Fable for our Times. Fourth Estate, 2022.
Amitav Ghosh’s latest work The Living Mountain: A Fable for our Times continues his preoccupation with climate change which has previously produced works of non-fiction such as The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), the novel Gun Island (2019), as well as a work in verse, Jungle Nama (2021). In all these works, Ghosh has been concerned with the question of how to narrate climate change as well as its enmeshment in colonial history. Published in May 2022, The Living Mountain continues Ghosh’s search for a suitable form to narrate climate change, using here the form of the fable. Merely 35 pages long, it is different from Ghosh’s usual fare that has long been characterised by descriptive weight, complex characters, and well-researched attention to the particularities of history. In choosing the fable, Ghosh heads in the opposite direction. The prose as well as the narrative are stripped to their bare bones, and in its broadly sketched action, he attempts to condense colonial history and its dark aftermath which are inseparably entwined with the history of climate change.
Like in The Great Derangement and Gun Island, stories remain at the heart of The Living Mountain. It begins with a framing narrative in which two members of a book club choose the term “Anthropocene” as their theme for the year’s reading. One of the readers, Maansi, a New York-based sales manager, originally from Nepal, begins to read a cli-fi novel, and is so strongly affected by it that it triggers a disturbing dream. What follows is the narration of this dream whose tentacles tentatively reach out to the real world: Maansi suspects that the dream is not really a dream but perhaps a memory of a story told by her grandmother. It is notable that the trigger for this dream is not a news article or a scientific report, but a work of fiction. Even in the dream itself, stories remain of crucial importance as a repository of knowledge and as agents of desire and value.
Maansi dreams that she belongs to a people who live in the shadow of the Mahaparbat, an immense mountain in the Himalayas. They consider the Mahaparbat a living mountain, one that protects and nurtures its people.They revere this sacred mountain through stories, songs, and dances, always performed from a respectful distance. However, their relationship with it does not remain this way for long, as the “Anthropoi” invade the valley in order to access and control the mountain, whose “gifts” now become resources to be dug up and used (16). By naming these colonising forces the “Anthropoi” Ghosh pointedly breaks from the universalist discourses of the Anthropocene while also pointing to the exclusive nature of European humanism: the Anthropoi make themselves out to be a different species of being from the valley people.
Ghosh summarises the process of colonisation in his fable: from the ‘innocent’ gathering and organisation of knowledge to colonial myth-making and violent conquest. The fable notes not only the violence of colonialism but also the ways in which colonialism transformed the colonised people’s sense of what was possible, what desirable, and what futile. Ghosh deftly portrays this shift in an entire cultural worldview. The fable moves beyond the time of colonisation to track its continuities in the postcolonial world. In a haunting and feverish sequence, the text narrates how the desires birthed in colonial regimes turn into monstrous compulsions in postcolonial times. Devangana Dash’s inked sketches, in their economy of lines, perfectly accompany and illustrate this dire tale.
Despite its simplicity, at the end, the fable defies any attempt to draw simple morals from it. A lone surviving custodian of indigenous knowledge chastises the Anthropoi, and by extension, the readers: “Have you understood nothing […]?”, she asks (31).
The story of The Living Mountain was originally written for a trans-disciplinary anthology titled Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right edited by Julia Adeney Thomas and published in March, 2022. This original context helps to put the story in perspective. As a leading postcolonial author, Ghosh succinctly retells the Anthropocene narrative from a postcolonial lens using the form of the fable. As Harold John Blackham has said of the fable, Ghosh’s story runs its “metaphorical traffic on narrative rails” (xii). In its heavy symbolism, the story packs vast times and spaces within its narrow confines and alongside multidisciplinary takes on the Anthropocene, advances a strongly postcolonial and narrative perspective. As a standalone publication, however, the story’s shortness becomes more starkly perceptible.
At his best, Ghosh has been able to evoke the boisterous, complex, diverse worlds of colonial and postcolonial times in all their material and sensory details as well as their moral ambiguities. In fact, in many of his novels, he has told stories of the ways in which colonisation was ecological as well as political, whether in his descriptions of the systematic felling of ancient forests for timber or in the flooding of fields with opium or rubber. In some ways then, the fable summarises not only colonial history but also Ghosh’s own body of work while missing out on some of its best and most enjoyable parts. However, as one tracks the trajectory of Ghosh’s work, one senses in this short fable the urgency that now drives his oeuvre. This is no time for leisurely storytelling or immersive worlds, Ghosh seems to be saying. His fable is shaped by the powerful tides of climate change.
Works Cited
Blackham, Harold John. The Fable as Literature. Athlone Press, 1985.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times. Fourth Estate, 2022.
—. “The Ascent of the Anthropoi: A Story”. Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right. Edited by Julia Adeney Thomas. Cambridge UP, 2022.
—. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Penguin, 2021.
—. Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sunderban. Fourth Estate, 2021.
—. Gun Island: A Novel. Penguin, 2019.
—. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin, 2016.
Header image: Cover of The Living Mountain © HarperCollins India
Akshata S. Pai is a PhD student at the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. For her PhD project, she is working on contemporary environmental fiction.
Read Amitav Ghosh on IWE Online
The Great Derangement
Published on 23 May 2022.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Bhattacharya, Somdatta. “Amit Chaudhuri.” Indian Writing In English Online, 23 May 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/amit-chaudhuri-somdatta-bhattacharya/.
Chicago:
Bhattacharya, Somdatta. “Amit Chaudhuri.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 23, 2022. www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/amit-chaudhuri-somdatta-bhattacharya/.
Amit Chaudhuri is an acclaimed Indian author of novels, short stories, poetry and essays. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), England, held the title of Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia in England and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University in India. Chaudhuri is also an accomplished Hindustani classical vocalist, and a composer and performer in a project that brings together the eclectic strands of raga, blues, and jazz, with a variety of other musical traditions. In 2017 he received the Sangeet Samman from the government of West Bengal for his contribution to Indian classical music. Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta/Kolkata in 1962 and grew up in Bombay/ Mumbai, in India. In Bombay, he attended the Elphinstone College and then moved to England for his undergraduate education. He first studied at the University College, London and for his graduate studies went to the Balliol College, Oxford. His doctoral dissertation was on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry. He was later Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and received the Harper Wood Studentship for English Literature and Poetry from St. John’s College, Cambridge. He has been a regular contributor of poetry, fiction and reviews to prestigious publications such as The Guardian, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and the Granta magazine. He is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, Friend of My Youth (2017). Among his other published works are collections of short stories, poetry, and essays, as well as the nonfiction work Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013), a critical study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, called D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (with a preface by Tom Paulin, in 2003), and a unique work that combines elements of memoir and practical and cultural criticism of Indian classical music, Finding the Raga (2021). He has also been the well-appreciated editor of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001), which offers a rich selection of works both originally in English and translated to English. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He has also been a judge of the Man Booker International Prize. His music has been regularly featured on radio and television.
FICTION
Chaudhuri’s longer fictional prose, he himself agrees, is influenced by poetry. He began as a poet, and confesses to only “by accident” stepping into the shoes of a novelist, in an interview with Fernando Galván (1999). Alice Truax, in a review, says about Chaudhuri’s novels, that he is “less interested in one particular story than in all the bits and pieces of ordinary life” (The New York Times ). Chaudhuri believes that, “the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer . . . would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives and the life of a city, rather than a good story. . . The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist” (A Strange and Sublime Address 48-9). Real Time: Stories and Reminiscences (2002), his collection of short stories, explores fictional meditations on the artistic process, and his characters are often poets, writers and artists. The short stories are marked by a terseness of style and bring out the master miniaturist in him.
Chaudhuri’s first novel A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) has a ten-year-old boy protagonist, Sandeep, at the centre. The novel describes his two visits to Calcutta, to his Chhotomama’s (maternal uncle) house, from Bombay, where he lives with his parents. His next novel, Afternoon Raag (1993) is about a young English Literature student at Oxford, torn between two women and two spaces of home (Bombay/Calcutta) and exile (Oxford). Chaudhuri’s third novel, Freedom Song (1998) concerns two related households in Calcutta in 1993, against a backdrop of social, religious and economic unrest. A New World (2000) is the story of Jayojit Chatterjee, an American-Indian academic with a son and a broken marriage. His fifth novel, The Immortals (2009) is a poignant portrayal of the relationship between Shyamji, a classical music teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student, Nirmalya. Odysseus Abroad (2014), more a mood piece than a novel, follows the course of a single day in the life of Ananda, an undergraduate student in London and his uncle. Amit Chaudhuri’s seventh novel, Friend of My Youth (2017) is an account of the narrator (also a novelist) Amit Chaudhuri’s visit to Bombay, the city where he grew up.
James Wood, in his The New Yorker review of Odysseus Abroad, talks about the “measured, subtle, light-footed fiction” of Chaudhuri (2021). According to Wood, one of the pleasures of reading Chaudhuri comes from how little he forces on his readers – “there is no obvious plot, no determined design, no faked ‘conflict’ or other drama” (n.p.). It is, as if, his novels can be placed within the tradition of the lyrical novel, with notable predecessors such as Herman Hesse, Andre Gide and Virginia Woolf. Traditional novels are usually associated with storytelling, and a reader expects characters to be involved in action and dialogue in such a genre. On the other hand, lyrical poetry is plotless and suggests the expression of feelings or themes in musical or pictorial pattern. The lyrical novel is a hybrid form, combining essential features from both these genres. Ralph Freedman, in his study of lyrical novels, talks about how it “transcends the causal and temporal movement of narrative within the framework of fiction” (1). In so doing, it often frustrates a reader habituated to more traditional standards of a novel with a plot and character development. The symbolic patterns, borrowed from the lyric, seem “antithetical to the very method on which narrative is built” (Freedman 1). Unlike conventional novels, where the “experiencing self” is separated from the “world the experiences are about” (Freedman 1), Chaudhuri’s protagonists often abandon their traditional roles, substituting perception for action, and self-portrait for an external reality. His novels, thus, have always had the abstract beauty of a lyric novel, a rare combination of narrative and imagery. The narrator of Afternoon Raag is typical of the genre, his mind reacting to the colours in his teacher’s room, the “furniture browns and wallpaper purples and magnolias and greys, the colours that create, in afternoon light or evening shadow, the abidingness of an English interior” (182). His other novels also celebrate the beautiful ordinariness of everyday life and refuse to be tied down by a plotline and a causal/temporal structure. A Strange and Sublime Address has Sandeep, a boy-narrator with a keen eye for the quotidian who describes what he sees and hears on his visits to Calcutta. Chhotomama takes the children out for a walk in the Calcutta lanes, lined by houses giving out “smells of fish and boiled rice” (48). When the family drives through the city, past the bridge in Dhakuria, past Gol Park, past Gariahat, past Rashbehari Avenue, into Chowringhee, and finally to Park Street, Sandeep equates himself with a bird or a fish. Just as a bird or fish could “float in their chosen element”, Sandeep thought driving was the “only human equivalent of floating, of letting one’s legs rest and setting one’s body adrift” (15). The book is the winner of the 1991 Betty Trask Award. Sandeep, the narrator, is perpetually delighted with what Alice Truax in the NYT calls “the enduring allure of everyday” (n.p.). The encounters of the Bombay boy with Calcutta and the Bengali language are symptomatic of contested issues of identity, exile and home that the novel grapples with. But instead of locating these questions in a magic realist framework of a mythical India as Rushdie had earlier done, Chaudhuri places them within the domestic and the familial spaces. The city of Calcutta and his uncle’s home serve as sites of comfort and refuge for Sandeep, with their healing, therapeutic powers. Whereas in Bombay, “alone in the big apartment on the twenty-third floor, he was like Adam in charge of paradise . . . he was too much in the foreground. He hated being in the foreground” (A Strange and Sublime Address 27), in Calcutta, his experiences are cushioned by an extended middle-class family’s presence, with Chhotomama, Shonamama, Chhordimoni and the elderly couple providing a circle of protection. His father is depicted as a busy executive in corporate Bombay, who “never had the time to go anywhere”, while his uncle had more “ordinary” problems of everyday life (7). And yet, Sandeep “deserts” his more affluent parents “shamelessly” to the comforts of the Grand Hotel in Calcutta and spends the “days and nights at the old house with his cousins” (83). Purvi Shah writes about the novelist’s trait of documenting the tensions between the upper middle class and the lower middle class in a city that is witnessing significant economic changes:
Thus, while Chaudhuri examines South Asian history and post-Independence India, he does so not by charting the Independence Movement or by looking directly at partition but rather by presenting contemporary issues stemming from changes in everyday life as a result of economic liberalization and cultural transformation. (33)
In Afternoon Raag, where the rich psychological life and the romantic dilemmas of an international Bengali student at Oxford are explored, the changing landscapes of both Bombay and Calcutta are again captured by the author. While in the lane the narrator lived in, time was measured by “the conclusions and beginnings of phases of domestic routine”, on the main road, “which was only one among a family of such main roads that had joined hands to create Bombay—not the Bombay people lived in, but the one into which people emerged every day from their houses—there were cake-shops, video ‘parlours’, ‘burger-inns’ (221). Where the oldest cottages used to be, apartment buildings with “matchbox-like flats” came up, and Sindhi Hindus moved into predominantly Christian neighbourhoods. Chaudhuri compares the “floating” migrant labour community who worked at these new construction sites of the city with the Oxford student community, bringing along with them “the quality of a faraway time and place in the area” (Afternoon Raag 242). He gently stresses on the multiculturalism and the hybridity of a post-globalised world. Oxford becomes a representative composite city, and is seen through the eyes of an “outsider” Indian student, but Bombay too. On Cowley Road, in East London, the student-narrator encounters pockets of Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants. In this world of movement and flux, music has a significant role in rooting individuals, in creating a sense of identity, in preserving and transferring cultural memory and in producing a sensuous geography. When the narrator remembers his guru and Sohanlal, in the distant land of Oxford, he claims:
But when a Rajasthani sings Maand, or a Punjabi sings Sindhi Bhairavi, he returns to his homeland, which for him is a certain landscape influenced by seasons, a certain style of dressing and speaking, a web of interrelationships and festive occasions. (Afternoon Raag 258) (emphasis added)
These tensions between home and exile, belonging and non-belonging, come out in Chaudhuri’s fiction in an imagistic, impressionistic Modernist manner. He states though in an interview that he is not interested in “the disintegration of self” common to the modernists, but in the “dispersal of culture from the self into the various sides” (Galván 45). Chaudhuri sees himself as somewhat of an anthropologist, keenly observing the “drift and flow of street life” (Galván 45). In doing so, he presents snapshots of the common rituals and rhythms of daily life in his lean, elegant prose.
And though Chaudhuri is well-known to readers across South Asia, the UK and the United States, reviewers such as Barbara Liss have complained about how difficult it is to relate to his characters who seem to have “drifted into a coma”, and wander through his stories, much like “J. Alfred Prufrocks”. Though “the charms of a plotless book” have little appeal to her, she sees why the exhausting, middle class life in Calcutta may find a representation in the “lethargy” that seems a “permanent condition in Chaudhuri’s fiction”. Liss also points out the absence of detailed female characters in Chaudhuri’s novels, stating that in A New World, “We hear little of Amala, which is too bad because, despite her marital perfidy, she is Chaudhuri’s most likable character” ((Houston (TX) Chronicle). Jenny Offill, too, agrees this to be Chadhuri’s weakness, with Jayojit’s mother so self-effacing, that she is almost rendered invisible. Offill also suggests in her review that Chaudhuri lacks any semblance of drama or narrative tension in his “strangely static” novels. And though notable predecessors such as Proust, Woolf or Beckett have foregrounded the interior lives of their characters above conventional plots, she is disparaging of Chaudhuri’s plotlessness: “Chaudhuri, however, has done something much more peculiar; he has stripped his book of emotion as well as incident, leaving behind nothing but mechanical gestures and surface pleasantries. The result is a carefully written novel strangely devoid of life” (The Washington Post).
In a Guardian interview with Sophie Harrison, Chaudhuri speaks of how he fits into a tradition, “of giving a great deal of importance to space, of looking at time”, a trait which he thinks is not too valued by most of the contemporary middle class readers of India, who are “obsessed with getting things done, with making things happen” and are far from the daydreaming quality of the poetics of space and time one encounters often in him (Harrison, n.p.). Sumana Roy, in her Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Chaudhuri’s novels, tries to understand the reasons why he is not a popular anthologised novelist:
Eng-Lit pedagogy, historically grounded in seriousness, beginning as it did in England by borrowing professors from departments of divinity and law, continues to be in the service of the nation, the race, the marginalized. Chaudhuri’s writing, on the other hand, is grounded in explorations of the sensuous, the emotional, the affective—it refuses to give any of the old professorial subjects center stage or speak about them in a stentorian voice. (“The Deeply Unserious, Important Work of Amit Chaudhuri”)
And despite this, he retains in his fictional oeuvre a disbelief in the overtly political, and revels in the mundane, the intimate and the slow:
I believe that the arts, and art, and writing, are basically forms of addiction – you go to them again, and you read it again, re-reading. And you’re not re-reading for what the story tells you, for the plot, or illumination. This is not the addiction of what happens next. (Interview with Harrison, 2009)
NON-FICTION
The tenor of Chaudhuri’s non-fiction is less abstruse than that of his fiction. And while his fiction refuses to be easily categorised, because as Sumana Roy puts it in her Mint essay, “he has refused to be subsumed by the postcolonial machine or be an apologist for the state-of-the-nation novel” (“Amit Chaudhuri: The Writer’s Writer”), his non-fiction has a more urgent function of literary activism. It constantly engages with the force of the literary, interrogating the roles of both academia and the publishing industry at a particular moment in history. His doctoral dissertation on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry was published as a monograph titled D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, by Clarendon Press in 2003. The work sees Lawrence as an “outsider” figure, removed from other Modernists and Romantic ancestors, and shows how his poetry interrogates even traditional notions of “Englishness”. The book, for its purposes, uses theoretical paradigms from Derrida and Foucault. Terry Eagleton called the work “genuinely groundbreaking and exciting”, and claimed it to be “probably the single best study of Lawrence’s poetry” (“Anti-Humanism”). It is also one of the first times that a post-colonial writer of Chaudhuri’s generation takes up a major canonical writer such as Lawrence, and scrutinises his difference. Chaudhuri’s first major volume of essays Clearing a Space (2008) brought together essays published earlier in LRB and the Times Literary Supplement. In these essays, his major preoccupation is with the state of (Indian) literature in a post-globalised world. He offers his insights about issues ranging from the post-Rushdie novel to the politics of global publishing, from readership to the language of Indian vernacular writing. In the 2001 anthology The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Chaudhuri expresses his worries about the global hype about Rushdie’s writing style, which likely obscures much that is interesting in vernacular and English writing from India. The anthology has writings from Tagore to C.S. Lakshmi, from Urdu to Kannada, and brings to fore a literary activism that marks much of Chaudhuri’s non-fictional canon. In 2014, Chaudhuri began a series of symposiums on “literary activism” to claim a space for the literary that is neglected both by academic conferences and lit-fests. Unlike writers’ retreats which are oasis-like spaces, these symposia are characterised by interaction and dialogue. In a free-market driven world, where the value of literature has radically changed, and which has been affected by the global publishing industry, Chaudhuri and his collaborators seek to discover a robust new critical discourse, outside exhausted paradigms of celebrity authors and book signings. Ashoka University, India has been supporting these annual symposiums since 2018, giving it a fresh visibility. A collection of essays titled Literary Activism, with contributions from the participants of the first symposium was published in 2017, which grappled with these issues. Also, a website www.literaryactivism.com, edited by Chaudhuri came into existence in 2020. A section of this website is titled “Magazine”, in which new writings and art from new authors and practitioners are uploaded, with the express aim of finding fresh voices from unorthodox locations. The Origins of Dislike (2019) is another book that explores similar concerns, where Chaudhuri dismantles figures of the author, the publisher and the reader and bursts some popular myths connected with the writing and reading of literature at the present moment. Chaudhuri discusses how the literary prize such as the Booker has changed from being judged by a panel of well-known novelists to now by politicians and entertainers. The reckoning force that the market is, has come to define what people read and the how and the why of it. His insights into how global capitalism has come to dictate literary tastes and humanistic values are rooted in a Marxist understanding of the publishing market economy. Chaudhuri has also carried forward his activist strain into architectural and urban conservationist campaigns, bringing to attention the need to extend the idea of “heritage” and to preserve the unique urban houses of Calcutta.
Works Cited
Primary Texts:
Chaudhuri, Amit. Three Novels: A Strange and Sublime Address. Heinemann, 1991.
—. Afternoon Raag. Heinemann, 1993.
—. Freedom Song. Picador, 1998.
Secondary Texts:
Chaudhuri, Amit. “Life Sentences.” Interview by Sophie Harrison. The Guardian, 14 Mar. 2009. www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/14/fiction. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Eagleton, Terry. “Anti-Humanism.” London Review of Books, 5 Feb. 2004, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n03/terry-eagleton/anti-humanism. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Freedman, Ralph. The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Herman Hesse, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf. 1963. Princeton UP, 1971.
Galván, Fernando. “On Belonging and Not Belonging: A Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri.” Wasafiri: Caribbean, Africa, Asian, and Associated Literatures in English, vol. 30, Autumn 1999, pp. 42-50.
Liss, Barbara. “Chaudhuri Excels at Nonadventure.” Houston (TX) Chronicle, 26 Nov. 2000. www.chron.com/life/article/A-New-World-by-Amit-Chaudhuri-2032148.php. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Offill, Jenny. “Life at a Standstill.” The Washington Post, 4 Jan. 2001. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/01/04/life-at-a-standstill/8ea28fa0-3ec3-49fb-9d4c-f9fb56918f33. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Roy, Sumana. “The Deeply Unserious, Important Work of Amit Chaudhuri.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 Feb. 2017. www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/amit-chaudhuri. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
—. “Amit Chaudhuri: The Writer’s Writer.” Mint, 17 Sept. 2016. www.livemint.com/Leisure/pbUc5VKjpS8MglzjF9ADIK/Amit-Chaudhuri-The-writers-writer.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Shah, Purvi. “Amit Chaudhuri.” South Asian Novelists in English: An A to Z Guide. Ed. Jaina C Sanga. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003.
Truax, Alice. “The Allure of the Everyday.” The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1999. www.archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/reviews/990328.28truaxt.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Wood, James. “Circling The Subject.” The New Yorker. 27 Apr. 2015. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/circling-the-subject. Accessed 10 Oct. 2021.
Further Readings:
Reviews
Day, John. “Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri Review—Autofiction Examined”. The Guardian, 30 Aug. 2017. www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/friend-of-my-youth-amit-chaudhuri-review. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Eder, Richard. “A Life Like Old Postcards.” The New York Times Book Review. 22 Oct. 2000. www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/22/reviews/001022.22ederlt.html. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Haas, Felix. “Amit Chaudhuri’s Autofictive Bombay”. World Literature Today, 24 Jul. 2019. www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/book-reviews/amit-chaudhuris-autofictive-bombay-felix-haas. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Interviews
Chaudhuri, Amit. Interview by Anita Sethi. The White Review, March 2013. www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-amit-chaudhuri. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. Interview by Lakshmi Krishnan. The Oxonian Review, 27 Apr. 2009. http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-quiet-rebel/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. Interview by Sophie Harrison. The Guardian, 14 Mar. 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/14/fiction. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. “Twenty Questions with Amit Chaudhuri.” Interview. The Times Literary Supplement. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/twenty-questions-amit-chaudhuri/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.