Reviews, Vol I, Issue II
Shortlisted for
Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others, being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
2014, like his Vodafone Crossword Award 2008 winning debut novel A Life Apart (initially published under
the title – Past Continuous),
continues the Calcutta (now Kolkata) connections, but this time with a
different time frame and in a more ‘focalized’ way. Unlike the Bengal (most
particularly, Calcutta) of 1990s in his first novel, his second novel, though
offers some significant snapshots from the city’s history (like, the 1943
Bengal famine, the partition and the riots between Muslims and Hindus just
before and after it, and the rise to power of the Left Front) focusing
particularly on the period from 1966 to 1970 , a turmoil period blistered with
events destabilizing the natural rhythm of the middle-class Bengali life – the
Naxalite movement, small-scale farmer insurgencies, state atrocity,
police-terrorism, violence, under-cover killings, naked blood-shedding,
president’s rule and trade unionism. These glimpses into Bengal’s history are
achieved through the unfurling of events centered around the family drama of a
certain Ghosh family, once at the helm of its prosperity but now its glory being
on the wane, on a continuous downward slope.
The
novel begins with a harrowing event of May, 1966, giving readers a jolt: Netai
Das, a destitute landless framer, not being able to cope with the difficult
times; three years of continuous draught has ditched his family and many others
like his into, decapitates his wife and eldest son, strangles his two daughters
in quick succession and then kills himself before the spur of remaining energy
in his skeletal frame gets deflated. The relevance of this Prologue (yes,
Mukherjee has captioned it this way) becomes clear only when one goes through
the family scion, Supratik’s epistolary memoirs of his revolutionary days in
the hinterlands of south-west part of Medinipur district, and finds him
contextualizing it in the larger framework of years-long exploitation of the
people occupying the lowest rung of the society by the Zamindars and their
consolidating ancillary agencies, and also in the contexts of the dialectics of
Naxalite insurgency, of armed revolution. However, this gory sight of the
Prologue is set in contrast, in the following chapter, with the petty concerns
in the lives of the Ghosh’s, a well-off family living in a four-storey house in
Bhowanipur, South Calcutta. After a few chapters, it becomes obvious that the
novel consists of two contrasting but intersecting narratives, producing
sometimes dramatic convergences.
One
strand presents the regular opera of/in the lives of the Ghoshes – their
aspirations, botched-up dreams, tragedies, hypocrisies, cruelties, viciousness,
philistinism, acquisitiveness, perversion and familial fall-outs. Headed by
Prafullanath and Charubala, the family has made a good fortune in their paper
manufacturing business, acquired enough capital to branch out their business in
other areas like publishing sector and owns personal cars. The heads of the
family with their sons, daughter, daughter-in-laws, grandchildren and faithful
servants ‘seem’ to lead a comfortable middle-class life with its middle-class
moralities and mentalities. But as the narrative moves forward with its
occasional flash-backs, it emerges that behind the veneer of comfortable life,
something reeking really exists which starts surfacing very unpleasantly at the
strained, depressed hours in the lives of both the state and this particular
family. The exploitative hierarchy of the ‘outside world’ appears to be very
much present inside the house in its unequal distribution of shares of the
house, of the business, and most prominently when, after the ‘tragic’ death of
Somnath, the youngest son of Prafullanath and Charubala, his wife, Purba, with
her son and daughter, is forced to live in a dingy room of the ground floor and
is treated almost as a servant. Under the joint weight of the changing
political scenario and their own dysfunctions coupled with internecine problems
and suspicion, the vast Ghosh empire starts dwindling, crumpling and
disintegrating. The paper mills are shut down; and the Ghoshes face
unimaginable situations. Prafullanath and his sons, Adinath and Priyonath start
blaming each other for such a financially strained situation. A dense cloud of
gloom, tragedy and mishap seems to hang over the family: Prafullanath gets
heart-attack for the second time that almost renders him an invalid; Sandhya,
Adinath’s wife, who has been the cohesive force in the family, is left
heart-broken and takes to bed once Supratik, their eldest son, leaves the house
to join the Naxalite revolutionaries and Suranjan, their youngest, takes to
addiction; Chhaya, Prafullanath and Charubala’s unmarried daughter remains
involved in an interminable fall-out with her sister-in-law, Purnima,
Priyonath’s wife; Priya and Purnima’s daughter Baishakhi brings shame to the
family when caught red-handed in a romantic liaison with the neighboring
Dutta-lad; Bholanath, Prafullanath’s third son, incurs huge loss in the
publishing sector . No longer can the centre hold; the Ghosh Family seems to
fall apart. The only sunshine in this suffocating gloom is Sona, Purba’s genius
son who is whisked away by Standford University for his sheer skill in
mathematics and who ultimately wins the Fields Medal and rescues his mother
from her pitiful situation.
The
other strand relates the various strands of experiences Supratik gathers as a
revolutionary soldier. In 1967 when Naxalite insurgency starts, Supratik, like
many other middle-class educated students, feels for the ‘others’, for the
exploited section of peasants and sharecroppers, and leaves his houses and
college to join the revolutionary band and mobilize the people into armed
revolution in the hope of better world. He moves to the rural Medinipur, stays
there for two and a half years, ‘staging’ the party-laid-down tasks and
remaining an incognito to his family for all these years. But during these days,
he composes a series of letters to an unidentified addressee who, it is
revealed later on, is none other than his ‘chhoto-kaki’, widowed aunt, Purba
with whom he is in love. Of course, these letters never get sent to their
addressee. But it is through these letters only that we come to know about
their activities and the lives of the ‘others’. It is important to note how
Supratik problematizes the concept by altering the location of the self in
respect to shifting ‘other’. However, his return to the family, when it has
been in a critical condition, on the verge of breaking-down almost, does not
ameliorate the situation; rather his activities bring tragedy in the life of
the old, faithful household servant, Madan, and destroy his own life too. The
graphic details with which Mukherjee has described the sheer brutality
inflicted on Supratik by the state-police reminds me of Animesh in Samares
Majumdar’s Kalbela. Of course, there
Animesh never dies.
Mukherjee has
maintained a sense of detachment on his part. Probably this detachment on his
part has provided him the much-needed vantage position to lodge criticism
against the violence, killings, meaningless blood-shedding by both the
revolutionaries and the state-sponsored agencies. He never forgets to show that
these ideology-fed revolutionaries like Supratik and his comrades leave behind
them unmistakable trails of ruin, ruin of the very people they think they are
working for. And regarding detachment, it must be mentioned that this
detachment does not mean any dearth of imagination in Mukherjee. Rather he
possesses a queer sort of capability of imagination, of delving deep into other
people’s consciousness, to present evenly the points-of-view of both the sides.
Probably this has become instrumental for Mukherjee to create a ‘heteroglossic’
world. The graphic detailing of everything, undulating between harshness and
pictorial poeticism of things, keeps a reader glued to the text. And, the
continual deferment for a certain period, then revelation of ‘links’ one by one
and the continual shifting of narrative voice in the narration engage the
reader more intensely.
Another thing to
be noted, the gruesome event of the Prologue is balanced by the horrendous
possibility of an impending large-scale mass-killing when, in the epilogue, a
band of Maoist, in the breachless dark, removes the fishplate and slips into
darkness again with the full knowledge that an express train is going to hurtle
down the track shortly. When I read it, a sense of terror seized me because it
was exactly the way, later it was found out, that a horrible accident –
Gyaneshari Train Accident – happened in May, 2010 between Jhargram Railway
Station and Kharagpur Jn.. And the Maoists were said to be involved in it. I
freezed at the thought of what horrible kind of purchase it would have.
However, before I conclude, I must add that when I came across the names of the
places like Jhargram, Belpahari, Gopiballavpur – all those places very much
familiar to me since I hail from a rural place in that very Jhargram
subdivision – I got seized with mischievousness to verify the accuracy of those
places and conditions. When Mukhejee is successful in depicting the places and
its natural fecundities and barrenness, its economic slackness, he succumbs to
the habit of stereotyping, in some places, of their inhabitants. The
stereotypical images of Santhal men and women are sure to remind one of Sunil
Gangopadhyay’s Aranyer Din Ratri.
Barring all such trivial shortcomings, this book by Mukherjee is engaging
throughout and remains true to what Amitav Ghosh, in his review of the novel,
has to say of it – “The Lives of Other
is searing, savage and deeply moving: an unforgettably vivid picture of a time
of turmoil.”
Reviewed
by Soumen Jana
Research Scholar, Department of English,
Vidyasagar University, Paschim Medinipur, West Bengal, India
