Neel Mukherjee: A Bengal bloodline
ONE of the characters in Neel Mukherjee’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, The Lives of Others, has been left on the shelf. Her name is Chhaya and she’s the only daughter of the Ghosh family, whose grip on the upper rungs of the social ladder in late-1960s Calcutta is loosening dramatically.
At first, Chhaya’s parents are optimistic of finding her a good match, but as the number of suitors begin to dwindle with each passing year — from 10 a year, to four and finally to one every two or three years — they begin to set the bar lower, especially as 30, “the point of no return”, looms.
At first, only doctors or engineers will do. This gives way to an acceptance of lawyers, lecturers and businessmen, and then down to schoolteachers and bank tellers, and finally at the point of desperation, clerks.
Sometimes, a match would be close to completion when the prospective groom’s family would pull out, suddenly asking the question “And do you cook?” or the demand that she not work once married “would have the effect of a ghost entering the room, chilling everyone to silence”.
Chhaya’s parents have to give way, too, on their side. The dowry money begins to climb by a factor of 1.5 with every rejection. Concessions are given on age and looks — their newspaper ads in the matrimonial pages lose the words “fair”, “young” and “handsome” as qualifying criteria.
Generous quantities of make-up and “snow” are applied to her face for accompanying press photographs to lighten her too-dark complexion, but nothing, alas, can address the fact that she is cross-eyed.
Gossiping neighbours revel in her misfortune in the marriage stakes, which makes her a spiteful presence in the family home: “if the first face you saw after waking up was hers,” they surmise, “your day was certain to be ruined.”
The family drama at the heart of Mukherjee’s novel — full of rivalries, odd fetishes and daily “small defeats” — is offset by the political idealism of Supratik, the family’s eldest grandchild, who runs off to incite peasant rebellion at 21 years of age with the Maoist Naxalite guerrillas.
Supratik’s decision to abandon his family — who only receive two short messages by postcard to account for his absence — leaves his mother in the horrors. She takes to her bed, fasts three days a week in a vain attempt to appease the gods, and despairs that he has broken “the rule of the world”, which she believes is to look after one’s family before all else.
“Someone told me,” says Mukherjee, “that deep down Supratik is rebelling against the hierarchical structure of his own family and the injustices that obtain in his own family. In some ways, that private aspect finds a flowering in the public domain. Or vice versa because he is inculcated in Maoist philosophy he brings that to bear on the inequalities at home in the private domain.”
Mukherjee grew up in Calcutta, but moved to England for his university years at both Oxford and Cambridge and now lives in London.
He writes vividly about Supratik’s revolutionary adventures, having chewed on Communist guerrilla group stories as a kid, and especially the injustices that drive Supratik to become a terrorist. He drew on original sources, mined private papers, diaries and old magazines, and went back to India to interview activists from the time, for inspiration.
“South India also saw a Naxalite uprising,” he says. “I was reading in a history book somewhere when the Naxalites were rounded up by the police they tortured them and slayed their skin in the shape of the hammer and sickle. I thought this is a novelistic detail. It has to be used so I used it in my book.”
MAHATMA Gandhi, India’s most famous idealist from the twentieth century, is referenced in the novel. He is a divisive figure in Indian culture, and revisionist historians are starting to question parts of his life story, says Mukherjee.
“Where I grew up in Bengal, he’s not much liked because Bengalis always thought that he was a total hypocrite and a compromiser. I grew up with very contentious stories about Gandhi. He drank sugared lemonade throughout these fasts – these fasts and non-violent action that he did to get the British to leave India – so they were not real fasts.
“During the Indian Freedom Movement, Bengalis had their own freedom fighter who dissented radically from Gandhi and wanted to indulge in direct military action. His name was Subhas Chandra Bose. He fetched up in Germany and he wanted to align India with the Axis Powers – with Nazi Germany and Japan – to drive the British out of India. He is a big hero in Bengal, and Gandhi not so.
“History has a weird way of turning. The man who is prime minister of India now, Narendra Modi, was a member of the RSS, his grassroots party, who assassinated Gandhi.
“Also things are now emerging, you know [about] Gandhi’s years in South Africa. Apparently he didn’t much care about black South Africans. There was a recent biography of Gandhi by Joseph Lelyveld which India banned because Lelyveld had said unpalatable things about Gandhi, and of course no Indian will have it. It’s a strange culture. Indians are very black and white about their thinking. They like saints or sinners, and not complicated people as we all are.”
Mukherjee, who is on the bill on Thursday at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry, visited Ireland several times during the 1990s, as part of the research for his PhD studies into the English colonist planters like Edmund Spenser, who came to settle the land after the Earl of Munster rebellion in the late sixteenth century. He credits Oxford University’s Professor Richard McCabe, an Irish scholar who taught him when he was an undergraduate, for changing his life and pointed out the Irish angle to Spenser’s life.
“I came to Kilcolman where Spenser used to have his home. There is nothing there now. It is empty. It is levelled land because the castle burned down and he returned to England and died there.”
Mukherjee doffs his hat towards James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
“The two greatest writers are Irish. Both took writing to point zero – one in the maximum way, Joyce, and one in the minimal way, Beckett. They are the two great pillars, holding everyone up.”
www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie
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