HUMAN URGES, EXISTENTIAL FEARS AND

EVASIVE SILENCE IN THE FICTION OF

UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE

M.J.P. ROHILKHAND UNIVERSITY, BAREILLY

THESIS
Submitted to
M.J.P. Rohilkhand University, Bareilly
FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF
DOCTER OF PHILOSOPHY
IN
ENGLISH
2010

Supervisor : Research Scholar:

DR.SUNIL KUMAR AGARWAL DUSHYANT KUMAR
Associate professor
P.G. Department of English
Vardhman college,Bijnor
Dr. SUNIL KUMAR AGRAWAL
Associate Professor,
P.G. Department of English
Vardhman College, Bijnor.

CERTIFICATE

Certified that the thesis entitled “Human Urges, Existential Fears and
Evasive Silence in the Fiction of Upamanyu Chatterjee” by Dushyant Kumar
for Ph. D. in English from M.J.P. Rohilkhand University, Bareilly is a
bonafide research work and to the best of my knowledge the thesis has not
formed the basis for the award previously of any degree, diploma or any other
fellowship.
Dushyant Kumar has worked under my direct supervision and guidance
and he fulfills all the requirements for the award of the degree.

(Dr. Sunil Kumar Agrawal)

 PREFACE

At the time of preparing my synopsis I was a bit confused

whether Upamanyu Chatterjee is worth researching or not, later on,
after the approval of my synopsis I had gone through the four novels
written by Chatterjee in detail and I reached to a certain conclusion
that, after all, writing a thesis on Upamanyu Chatterjee is not at all
an easy task as I thought it to be. Neither his writing is shallow, nor
can he be rejected simply by saying that he only focuses on the
grotesquery of governance and distortion in the novels. A serious
reader will find it very hard to unfurl Chatterjee unless he goes
through each and every page of his novels. His novels may be seen as a
sequel in the sense that it develops a complete vision of the writer.
Indeed, the design in the carpet is evolved from the very first novel
‘English, August’ and is completed with the ‘Weight Loss’ which is an
Illiad of woes. However, in each and every novel, emerges the human
urges in the form of ‘life’s little ironies’ and through the characters like
Agastya, Dhrubo, Jamun and Bhola. Similarly, existential fear is
discerned when we peep into the characters in detail and lastly
everything ends with silence as it is the ultimate outcome for a man in
a work-a-day universe. I think the successive chapters in my thesis
will open up the window, rather the illuminated window of the
random flux of thought visioned by Upamanyu Chatterjee. I have
tried my best to give my thought as well as the thought of the novelist
a concrete shape. I hope, it will serve for the better cause of research
and help the budding scholars. In my way of preparing the thesis I
have had help galore from various corners. First of all, I should name
my supervisor Dr. Sunil Kumar Agrawal, Associate Professor, P. G.
Department of English, Vardhman College, Bijnor, without whose
unfailing moral support and help the work may not see the light of
day. So also my family remained a great source of inspiration
throughout the project, especially my father who helped me and
inspired me in spite of his severe illness and hostile conditions. My
mother, sister and brother also bore with me and stood beside me to
complete this Herculean project.

DUSHYANT KUMAR
(RESEARCH SCHOLAR)

Date :-

ii
 CONTENTS

PAGE
NO.

PREFACE i-ii

Chapter –I : THE BACK GROUND 1-29

Chapter –II : THE SPIRIT OF QUEST AND SURVIVAL 30-53

Chapter –III : HUMAN URGES, EXISTENTIAL FEARS 54-92

AND EVASIVE SILENCE

Chapter –IV : A STUDY OF HIS IMAGE AND 93-132

SYMBOLS

Chapter –V : THE REALISTIC NATURE OF 133-161

UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE’S NOVELS

Chapter –VI : THE FINAL ESTIMATE 162-176

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 177-193

 Chapter -I

THE BACKGROUND
 The colourful journey of the Indian fiction in English
may be dated back from Raja Rammohan Roy and Jawaharlal
Nehru. Mahatma Gandhi may also be included in the list.
Though, the mid-nineteenth century was very much famous
for its poetry, especially written in English by Indian poets,
yet the prose works of these three writers had the germs of
fiction. Whether it was Raja Rammohan Roy’s reflective
prose works or Nehru’s ‘Discovery’ or to say Gandhi’s
‘Autobiography’. All of them presented the ethos around them
in a rather fictional framework. Everything in them seemed
real, yet the element of fact-laden fiction attracts our attention.
However, in the nineteen thirties a number of Indian
novelists began to write in English – genuine novelists, that is,
for whom the art of fiction was an end in itself and not just a
mean for communicating other kinds of truth. Fifty years later
it is clear that this was a form peculiarly suited to the Indian
sensibility and one to which Indian writers have made a
distinct and significant contribution. We shall discuss rather
deal with three writers especially in this chapter who are
distinguished not only for their own work but as the
inaugurators of the form itself since it was they who defined
the area in which the Indian novel in English was to operate,
drew the first models of its characters and themes and
elaborated its particular logic. The mere description of the
history of the beginners would look tiresome in the chapter,
that is why, we will discuss first the three stalwarts who
started the fiction writing in English and established it as a
popular genre in India; in the second section the rich heritage
of the women writers of the Indian fiction would be discussed
and last but not the least the turn around from the nineties and
the recent novels would be given priority at the end of this
particular section.
Now, returning back to the great three Mulk Raj Anand,
Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan, we should start first with Mulk
Raj Anand who was born in Peshawar in 1905. He was
educated at Punjoot University and University College
London, with a final year at Trinity College, Cambridge. In
her essay ‘Mulk Raj Anand and the Thirties Movement in
England’ Gillian Packham writes:– “Mulk Raj Anand was not
the typically well-heeled young Indian sent to complete his
education in London. His love of study and his poor
relationship with his father had led him to escape his father’s
‘petit bourgeois’ conditions. With the encouragement and the
material support of the poet Iqbal, his college principal and his
mother, he arrived in London in 1924,a poor student forced to
earn his living by working in Indian restaurants...”1
2
 He completed a doctoral thesis on ‘Bertrand Russell and
the English Empiricists’ in 1928 and he lived in England for
twenty-one years. As Gillian Packham’s perceptive essay
demonstrates, Mulk Raj Anand became an essentially thirties
man in thought and sensibility, politically committed to
Marxism if not to Soviet communism. He even wrote plays in
which, says Gillian Packham, “two characters would talk out
an issue for five hours, regardless of time or act division”.2
Mulk Raj Anand regarded himself as a rational humanist
rather than a Marxist but his ideas on art – he is clearly not a
thinker, let alone an original one–are almost comically
reminiscent of the Left-Book Club at its most ingeniously
youthful. “All art is propaganda. The art of Ajanta is a
propaganda for Buddhism. The art of Ellora is a propaganda
for Hinduism. The art of the western novel is propaganda for
humanity against the bourgeois. Gorky as a humanist dared to
speak of man, man’s condition, not to say how awful it is, but
he also suggested what man could be. And then he did
propaganda for man.”3
In a perceptive note on Anand’s fiction, Anna Rutherford
writes:–“Anand’s characters invariably fall into three classes:
the victims who are usually the protagonists, the oppressors,
those who oppose change and progress, and the good men,
3
under the last category fall the social workers, the labour
leaders, all those who believe in progress and can see how
modern science can improve the lot of the sufferers and help
bring about the equality of all men”.4 While this shrewd
observation is an accurate account of some of the more
Marxist protest fiction, it is hardly adequate for the novels,
like ‘Across the Black Waters’ or ‘The Private Life of an
Indian Prince’ (1953), in which there is a subtler distribution
of forces and a more complicated division of sympathies.
‘Across the Black Waters’ is the middle part of a trilogy
published between 1940 and 1942, the other volumes being
‘The Village’ and ‘The Sword and the Sickle’, in which the
peasant boy Lal Singh is taken from his North Indian village
and a life stifled by suffocating layers of custom and religion
into the ferocity of the Great War in Europe and then back to
India and a new political stance.
One of this group is certainly ‘The Private Life of an
Indian Prince’ published in 1953 and revised in 1970. It
described a depraved and neurotic monarch, a corrupt court,
an impoverished and mutinous people and a tense and critical
period of Indian history. Like other writers impelled by social
motives, however worthy, whose attitude to life is all too
patently dominated by theory, he has the habit of preaching at
4
the reader and trapping him into sharing his unexamined
motives. But when his imagination burns, and the dross of
propaganda is consumed, as in ‘Untouchable’, ‘Coolie’, and
‘The Big Heart’ (1945), there is no doubt that he is a novelist
of considerable power. In ‘Coolie’ he shows himself to be one
of the first of Indian writers to look of the savagely neglected,
despised, and maltreated Indian labourer with an angry look of
resignation.
Anand also has his share of the Victorian gift for creating
a gallery of minor figures, each of which has its particular
flicker of life. The women, for example, are remarkably well
done: the illiterate prostitute mistress, Ganga Dasi, with whom
the Prince is hopelessly infatuated, who exists only solely on
the plane of instinct and animal cunning and whose musky
presence can almost be smelt. However, Anand does not have
the profound commonsense of Narayan which enhances both
actuality and myth, the fact and the poetry of life. He does not
have the sense of the metaphysical nature of man we find in
Raja Rao. But he has a deep feeling for the depraved, a grasp
of the social structure of his society and the clearest vision of
its injustices and malformations. When his imagination burns
and the propagandist is forgotten, he is a novelist of
considerable power.
5
 Raja Rao is an Indian and a novelist; but these
generalities apart, he is as a novelist as different from Mulk
Raj Anand as it is possible to be. It would be hard to conceive
of two writers more different from one another than Mulk Raj
Anand and Raja Rao: the former a man of the future
committed to science and Marxist humanism who sees the
past as a brutal drag on progress and enlightenment, the latter
with a profound sense of the richness and creativity of the
past, metaphysical, poetic, traditional. And yet there is more
than one significant similarity. In his first novel ‘Kanthapura’
(1938) Raja Rao remarks in the introduction which was
written, he tells us, at the instance of his publishers–on those
very qualities of volubility and pace. “The tempo of Indian life
must be infused into one English expression...we, in India,
think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move, we move
quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that
makes us rush and tumble and run on”. Anand met this
requirement, as M.K. Naik shows in his acute and patient
study of the short-stories, with a whole battery of devices.
Indian location, idioms, and images are rendered directly into
English. Even the Indian vernacular is translated immediately
into English. Anand’s English, says, Naik, shows its Indian
origin in its “oriental opulence, its passion for adjectives, its
6
tendency to use more words than are absolutely necessary and
its fast, galloping tempo”.5
As one would expect of a temperament like Raja Rao’s,
his method of realizing an Indian sensibility in the English
language is subtler than Mulk Raj Anand’s. His technique is
much less extractable from the text, and is more incorporated
into the body of the fables. His writing is closer to speech, and
he is able to use the rhythms of speech – and particularly the
intimate sharing rhythm of folk speech–to indicate character,
feeling and a vast tissue of assumptions and beliefs. It is a
method which works beautifully in a story like ‘Kanthapura’
concerned with the intensity of village life, with its physical
immediacy, its traditional swaddling, and its religious
murmurations. The central character, Moorthy is a pauline
conversion of Gandhiism, lives so vividly in the minds of the
Kanthapurians. E.M. Forster thought ‘Kanthapura’ the best
Indian novel written in English, and this is one of his many
judgments for which a case could still be argued. Later critics
have assigned this equivocal laurel to Raja Rao’s second
novel, ‘The Serpent and the Rope’, published in 1960. It is a
rich and complex creation. Its defects are a tendency to slip
too easily into formlessness or into the ineffable. There are
also attempts, which fail, to employ Sanskrit rhythm in
7
English. And if there is sometimes too tenuous a connection
between the novel’s highest flights and the humble details of
ordinary existence, it still clears the work of a writer of
exemplary integrity and of an artist with a pure and impressive
talent. A fine and delicate vehicle for that talent is ‘The Cat
and Shakespeare’ (1965) which is much free from the
somewhat inhuman unattachment of ‘The Serpent and the
Rope’. It is a novella of 117 pages, marked by a patterned
complexity and a subdued sardonic poetry.
In this story Raja Rao shows a gift for designless evident
in the mere diffuse and sometimes theoretical ‘The Serpent
and the Rope’ and conspicuously absent in one of his final
works, ‘Comrade Kirilov’ (1976), which presents in rather
essay-type form the opposing attractions of cerebral Soviet
Marxism and historical Brahminical wisdom in the mind of a
South-Indian Brahmin, though without ever making a living
union out of the two elements. But in ‘The Cat and
Shakespeare’ both the major themes and the smallest details
fit vitally together. There is no separate conceptual could
hovering over the story: no vague disconnected wash of
feeling around its edges. The racial and poetic wisdom which
is every where implicit, the evidence of Brahminical thought,
the profoundly philosophical vision are all absorbed in, and
8
sustained by, the particulars of the fable. The characters
Ramakrishna Pai, Govindan Nair, Horaham, John, Saroja and
Shantha are both psychologically convincing and lucid and
effective symbols: each is in Henry James’ term, ‘a strikingly
figured symbol’ because each is also ‘a thoroughly pictured
creature’, And this is also true in its degree of the other details
of the story, the Ration Office, the Ration Books, the cat, the
rats, the work. They are also symbols which work, symbols
with bite. Moreover the innumerable literary and philosophical
hints and suggestions, the analogies, the muted quotations, the
remote, insinuated connection which echo and re-echo
throughout are used with that musical propriety, wholly
different from merely explicit or pedagogic pointing, which is
the infallible evidence of on authentic art.
R.K. Narayan is the author of a substantial body of
fiction, some dozen or more novels, all of them remarkably
even in the quality of their achievement. The world
established in these novels impresses the reader with its
coherence, its personal stamp and idiom. The action is centred
in the small town of Malgudi in Mysore–small by Indian
Standards, that is–and although the physical geography is
never dealt with as a set piece but allowed to reveal itself
beneath and between the events, one comes to have a strong
9
feeling for the place’s identity. The details suggest, surely and
economically, the special flavour of Malgudi, a blend of
oriental and pre-1914 British, like an Edwardian mixture of
sweet mangoes and malt vinegar: a wedding with its
horoscope and gold edged, elegantly printed invitation cards:
tiny shops with the shopkeeper hunched on the counter selling
plantains, betel leaves, snuff, and English biscuits, the
Casuarina and the post office savings Bank, the brass pots and
the volumes of Milton and Carlyle, the shaved head and ochre
robes of the ‘Sanyasi’ and ‘Messrs Binns’ Catalogue of cricket
bats. Especially this is true of the details of public life, of the
shabby, swarming streets and the stifling by-lanes, the cobbles
of Market Road and the sands on Sarayu bank, the banyan tree
outside the Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank (built
in 1914), the glare of Kitson lamps and the open drain down
Vinayaka Mudali Street. Even the names strengthen this
double quality: Nallapp’s Grove and Albert College, Mill
street and Bombay Ananda Bhavan (a restaurant), Kabir Street
and Lawley Extension, the Mempi hills and the Board School,
white Malgudi station is both Western and the Eastern and the
Krishna Medical Hall both ancient and modern.
But although these novels convey so full and intimate
sense of place, they are not in any limiting way regional. They
10
send out long, sensitive feelers to the villages where the
inhabitants are ‘innocent and unsophisticated in most matters
excepting their factions and fights’, and to the cities where
they are ‘so mechanical and impersonal’. They concern
themselves too with such varied spheres of interest as
business, education, journalism film-making, money lending.
One must not, of course, exaggerate this matter of the scope of
reference. Narayan does work by focusing his attention
sharply. Past of his strength is never to ignore his instinct for
limitation. But he has the serious artist’s gift for achieving
representatives by connection. His preoccupation is with the
middle class, a relatively small part of an agricultural
civilization and the most conscious and anxious part of the
population. Its members are neither too well off not to know
the rub of financial worry nor too indigent to be brutalized by
want and hunger. They may take their religion more easily
than the passionately credulous poor, but even in those with a
tendency towards modernity one is always aware under the
educated speech of the profound murmur of older voices, of
‘Lakshmi’, the goddess of wealth, the spouse of God Vishnu,
who was the protector of creatures’.
Narayan chooses for his heroes–modest, unself-confident
heroes, it is true–members of the middle class who are
11
psychologically more active, and in whom consciousness is
more vivid and harrowing. They have some room for
independent, critical existence: but there is always a tension
between this and that deep source of power, the family where
the women rather than the old represent ‘custom and reason’
and know ‘what is and what is not proper’. The family,
indeed, is the immediate context in which the novelist’s
sensibility operates, and his novels are remarkable for the
subtlety and conviction with which family relationships are
treated–those of son and parents, and brother in ‘The Bachelor
of Arts’ (1937); of husband and wife, and father and daughter
in ‘The English Teacher’ (1945); of father and son in ‘The
Financial Expert’ (1952); of grandmother and grandson in
‘Waiting for the Mahatma’ (1955).
However it is quite inappropriate to end our
consideration of the senior Indian novelists in English, the
founding fathers of the ‘genre’, without a note on G.V.
Desani, a writer of the same generation as Mulk Raj Anand,
Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan and the author of one
extraordinary book. He has an unusual background. He was
born in Nairobi in 1909. He was a Reuters correspondent, a
lecturer for the British Ministry of Information during the
second world war, a BBC broadcaster and then for some
12
twenty years the inmate of monasteries in India, Burma and
Japan. From 1960 to 1968 he was a newspaper columnist in
India and since 1969 he has been a professor of Philosophy in
the University of Texus. The extraordinary book is ‘All About
H. Hatterr’ published in 1948 and revised in 1970. ‘All About
H. Hatterr’ is a turbulent, deflationary, bawling, magnificently
irregular account of the weird self-education of the fantastic
H. Hatterr. It is written “in what may be termed”, says
Anthony Burgess in his enthusiastic and cogent introduction
“whole language, in which philosophical term, the
colloquialisms of Calcutta and London, Shakespearean
archaisms, whining, quack spiels, references to the Hindu
pantheon, the jargon of Indian litigation, and irritability see
the together”6. To this catalogue we should also add as
influences Rabelais, Chaucer, Kipling, Wilde, Joyce and P.G.
Woodhouse. This tumult of sound and semi-sense–in which an
organizing principle is associated, frank, oblique or hidden–is
subject, as Anthony Burgess also makes clear, to the control of
an intricate pattern: seven meetings with seven sages in seven
cities: seven lengthy lessons and seven energetic bouts of
learning seven superbly comic discussions of seven aspects of
living with his friend Benneroji, seven efforts to teach the
lesson to others it is worthy of a wild-eyed Indian Joyce but
13
one whose humorous sanity, however disillusioned, is never
cynical.
There would seem to be very little in common between
G.V. Desani, the master of the absurd, and Mulk Raj Anand,
the novelist as social reformer, Raja Rao, the novelist as
metaphysical poet and R.K. Narayan, the novelist as moral
analyst. They would certainly find his whole manner and
approach relentlessly bantering and self-mocking, and his
choice of narrator, an enlightened clown, the son of a
European seaman and an Indian woman from Malaysia,
utterly alien. And yet threading their way through the comic
rhetoric and the welter of quips and literary allusions are
themes all these novelists are concerned with: the nature of
individuality, the development of the person in a society
weighed down by inherited assumptions, the relationship of
appearance and reality, the cogency of the ancient Indian
myths, the cyclical swirl of existence. But most pointedly they
all share a debt to the English language and to English
literature and to its power to serve and to express
distinguished talent of such various kinds. Each has his own
way of acknowledging this debt.
However, the entire discussion may seem tedious, yet it
is necessary to point the significance of these three major
14
writers and thereby to establish the solid beginning of the
Indian English novels. At this these three stalwarts, a flux of
novelists both male and female, came into the literary scene
with their varied stance and themes. Before going to the
importance of the women novelists writing English fiction in
India, we should at least go through the remaining major
novelists after those great lyras. First of all the name of
Khushwant Singh cannot be avoided altogether. He has
written just a handful of short-stories and a couple of the
novels, ‘Train to Pakistan’ (1956) and ‘I Shall Not Hear the
Nightingale’ (1959). ‘Train to Pakistan’ explores the
communal massacres which followed partition in 1947. This is
his best fictional work in English. Quite another tradition of
English writing, non-linguistic and certainly minor, is
represented by the novels of Manohar Malgonkar, born in
1913. His novel ‘The Distant Drum’ (1960) is a racy,
informed and rather admiring account of the Indian army from
an officer’s point of view. ‘A Bend in the Ganges’ (1964) is
set against the horrors of the partition in India but is much less
effective than ‘Train to Pakistan’. ‘The Princes’ (1963) which
tells, with a rare sympathy and some of the understanding of
E.M. Forster, of the withering away of the princely states. A
wholly different narrative technique and idioms are employed
15
by Bhavani Bhattacharya, born in 1906. His ‘So Many
Hungers’ (1947) and ‘He Who Rides the Tiger’ (1954)
concentrate on big subjects–famine and caste – evoke a
genuine flow of feeling, even if it is too generalized and apt to
swamp character and event. The next generation of novelists is
more effective and significant than the previous because
Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arun Joshi, etc. changed
altogether the traditional set-up in Indian English fiction and
incorporates various thoughts that are startling. The
introduction of the ‘magic realism’, to which we will discuss
later, the global experiences in Indian novels, the foreign set
up and the encounter of Orientalism and Occidentalism–these
are the major achievements of these novelists.
‘Grimus’ (1975), Salman Rushdie’s first novel, is a
mishmash of a novel which applies the manner of the fairy-
tale–marvels inconsequentially succeeding one another–to
material appropriate to the contemporary and by now
conventional taste for the grotesque and mythical, laced with
a measure of sexual sophistication and a pinch of science
fiction. Modern versions of mythical figures–named with self-
conscious and calculated peculiarity–are represented by Virgil
Jones, ‘a man devoid of friends and with a tongue rather too
large for his mouth’, his mistress, the lapsed Catholic
16
hunchback Crone Dolores o’ Toole who stimulated herself
with church candles: Flapping Eagle, a Red Indian afflicted
with the gift of immortality. However, the second ‘Midnight’s
Children’ (1981) dramatizes the beginning of independent
India in the life of the beak-nosed wildly extravagant Muslim,
Saleem Aziz, who was born on the stroke of the midnight
bringing in India independence. After the triumph of
‘Midnight’s Children’ it is impossible not to feel a pang of
disappointment at ‘Shame’, a novel we are told in the
acknowledgements was ‘written with the financial assistance
of the Arts Council of Great Britain’. So also Vikram Seth’s
‘A Suitable Boy’, ‘An Equal Music’, Amitav Ghosh’s
‘Calcutta Cromozome’ etc. contributed heavily to the
development of the English novel.
When one looks back on the more than fifty years of the
Indian novel in English, several distinct impressions remain.
The first–again in this context as in others–is the extraordinary
plasticity and adaptability of the English language which
proved itself capable of expressing the innermost, as well as
the strongest and subtlest, feelings of members of a culture
immensely remote in history and distance. If the use of the
English language was to be attributed in the first place to the
presence of the British and the Raj, its persistence, its
17
increasing strength and expanding influence–long after the
British had departed and in spite of a natural national hostility
and the effort to develop in Hindi a universal national
language – owed nothing to the British and everything to the
Capacities, the resources and the usefulness, national and
international, of the English language itself. Again, the
English novel in India has its roots in the nineteenth-century
English literature and, as R.K. Narayan reminds us, in Jane
Austen, Kipling, and Woodhouse, authors who influenced
him. Its beginnings were also affected by French literature and
by Marx and the socialist writers of the thirties, as is seen in
the work of Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand. But as important
as the language is the talent of so many practitioners over the
last sixty years who have created a body of work of
remarkable standard and variety which has engaged at every
turn and every level with a civilization of manifold richness
and complexity and which has brought into modern
consciousness both the Indian experience of changing social
structure, permanence and transition, individual struggle,
tradition and morality, aspiration, injustice, tragedy and
comedy as well as the pattern and detail, both exotic and
commonplace, of daily living. The language and idiom in
which all this has been expressed has, on the whole, been
18
British rather than American, as no doubt–would be expected.
Nor has the Indian novel in English been much affected by
developments in the technique of fiction of the experimental
kind. The novelists have rather elected to preserve, or perhaps
have naturally felt comfortable in, the ancient Indian tradition
of story-telling in which even realistic descriptive narrative
has its undertones of poetry and myth.
However, now a little bit discussion on the women
novelists in India would make the scene complete. From the
time immemorial, Indian women, the embodiment of love and
affection, hope and patience, have been showing their worth in
each and every discipline of knowledge. Indian women
novelists in English and in other vernaculars try their best to
deal with, apart from many other things, the pathetic plight of
forsaken women, who are fated to suffer from birth to death.
After the second world war the history of Indian women
novelists gets a new track, a new vision. In this period,
Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are
unquestionably the most outstanding personalities in the field
of social and artistic novels. Her ‘Nectar in a Sieve’, ‘Some
Inner Fury’, ‘A Silence of Desire’, ‘The Coffer Dams’, ‘The
Nowhere Man’, etc. made her a successful novelist. Ruth
Prawer Jhabvala’s ‘To Whom She Will’, ‘The Nature of
19
Passion’, ‘A Backward Place’, etc. bring her to fame;
Nayantara Sahgal, niece of Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, is a novelist
of politics. Her ‘A Time to be Happy’, ‘Storm In Chandigarh’,
‘A Situation in New Delhi’, etc. record the story of political
situations in India. So also Anita Desai, who deals with the
mind and soul of a character produces ‘The Voices in the
City’, ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, ‘Fire on the Mountain’, etc. which
earn for her great reputation in India and abroad as well.
Shashi Deshpande’s novel ‘The Dark Holds no Terror’, deals
with an unusual character Sarita, who dared to challenge the
age old traditions, to marry a man of outside of her caste. ‘The
Binding Vine’ is a feminine novel, ‘That Long Silence’ shows
her aesthetic taste. Shobha De’s ‘Socialite Evening’, which is
Lawrencian in expression, ‘Starry Nights’, ‘Sisters’, ‘Sultry
Days’, ‘Strange Obsessions’, etc. hold up the life of sex in
men and women. Manju Kapur, the author of ‘Difficult
Daughters’ is an excellent example of mother- daughter
relationship in a cosmopolitan city. Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God
of Small Things’ is autobiographical in nature.
Thus, this brief survey of Indian women novelists in
English clearly shows that women have their permanent work
in the field of English fictions. They are being conferred on
not only national but international awards also. In most of
20
their writings they have tried their best to free the female
mentality from the age long control of male domination. In
short, in their novels, the protagonists are mostly women
characters, desolated and isolated by an entirely sapless,
hypocritical and insensitive male domination. They are still
getting step-motherly treatment by the parents in both
education and nourishment. So, the thing that most urgently
needed today is a reciprocal and friendly relation between
both the sexes–a relation which must be tinged with the colour
of both modernity and conventionality, antiquity and
spirituality.
Indeed, such a description will prove that Indian English
novels especially written by the women writers very much
contribute to the general growth of the English fiction in India.
Now, the thing which should be reckoned is the
metamorphosis which occurs in the nineties of the twentieth
century. A flux of ideas came rapidly into the domain of
English fiction, especially in India. Salman Rushdie was the
first novelist to introduce magic realism in its real sense in his
novels. Before Salman the tradition of the fiction rotates round
the pathos of the women, the political massacre, the riots, the
sensibilities of the Indian people. But Salman Rushdie first
introduced the idea of magic realism into Indian fiction, later
21
on Vikram Seth to Manju Kapur, Amitav Ghosh to Upamanyu
Chatterjee–everyone inserted this technique into their
respective novels.
Magic Realism (or magical realism) is an artistic genre
in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an
otherwise realistic or even normal setting. As used today the
term is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous. The
term was initially used by German art critic Franz Roh to
describe painting which demonstrated an altered reality, but
was later used by Venezuelan Arturo Usler Pietri to describe
the work of certain Latin American writers. The Cuban writer
Alejo Carpentier (a friend of Usler Pietri) used the term ‘to
real maravilloso’ (roughly ‘marvellous reality’) in the
prologue to his novel ‘The Kingdom of This World’ (1949).
Carpentier’s conception was of a kind of heightened reality in
which elements of the miraculous could appear while seeming
natural and unforced. Carpentier’s work was a key influence
on the writers of the Latin American “boom” that emerged in
the 1960’s. From ‘The Satanic Verses’ (1988) down to the
‘Enchantress of Florence’ (2008) Rushdie employed this
technique to minimize the overburdened world of thought in
his novels. It is a sort of a tragic relief or the heightened state
of imagination for him. In his ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’
22
(1990), ‘East, West’ (1994), ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’ (1995),
‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ (1999), ‘Fury’(2001),
‘Shalimar, the Clown’ (2005), The Enchantress of Florence’
(2008), etc. Rushdie employed the technique to give a special
effect to his novels. Later on Vikram Seth in his ‘An Equal
Music’ (2002) used the technique in his fiction also. In the last
ten years almost all the novelists in India exploited the term in
its real sense to embellish, rather structure their novels.
Another development which is seen from the nineties is
the presentation of the western world to the Indian readers.
The western world is presented in the novels of almost all the
Indian writers whether it is Salman Rushdie or Vikram Seth;
Amitav Ghosh or Upamanyu. The main focus of the novels
after the nineties is to show Indian born people, rather the
expatriate in different countries of the globe and how they
reacts against or for the society of that particular country. In
this way Indian novelists open up the door of the western
world to the Indians and the vice-versa. In Vikram Seth’s ‘An
Equal Music’, Upamanyu’s ‘English, August’, Amitav
Ghosh’s ‘Calcutta Cromozome’, Salman Rushdie’s ‘Ground
Beneath Her Feet’ and ‘Enchantress of Florence’, etc. the
western influence, rather the global journey is very much
evident. Now, the question which automatically arises before
23
us that whether the exposure of the western world or the East-
West relationship in the novels after nineties a bane or a boon
for the Indian writing in English Naturally it has its positive as
well as the negative aspects. The global journey, in the one
side gives us the scope to roam without physical journey to
see the world through the black letters of the novels and to
think and evaluate the cultures of the different countries with
our culture and habits on the other way, critics are also of
opinion that such a journey mars the intrinsic merit of the
novels because the novels based on journeys on a foreign land
seem more a travelogue or itinerary rather than a compact
work of fiction. The problem of unity and disunity in
structures, themes and content appears from the very issue as
we are discussing in the previous section that whether the
global journey a boon or a bane for the Indian English novels.
Critics like M.K. Naik are of opinion that “such an excessive
journey as is evident in the recent novels down from Anita
Desai or Shashi Deshpande will create disorder, chaos and
frustration in a particular fiction”.7 The problem of unity and
disunity should be understood in its detail because it is the
core of essential good writing whether it is fiction or poetry;
prose or short-stories. The particular problem rises due to the
rapid growth of ideas as ‘globalization’, ‘hybridity’ and
24
‘diaspora’. For all its revolutionary and therapeutic benefits
there are, as Fanon has written, many pitfalls to national
consciousness. Foremost among these are uncritical assertions
and constructions of cultural essentialism and distinctiveness.
Fanon, as Bhabha points out, “is far too aware of the dangers
of the fixity and fetishism of identities within the calcification
of colonial culture to recommend that “roots” be struck in the
celebratory romance of the past or by homogenizing the
history of the present”8. The entrenched discourse of cultural
essentialism merely reiterates and gives legitimacy to the
insidious racialization of thought which attends the violent
logic of colonial rationality. Accordingly, the unconditional
affirmation of Indian culture reinstates the prejudices
embodied in the unconditional affirmation of European
culture.
Clearly, the nationalist work of psychological and
cultural rehabilitation is a crucial and historically expedient
phase in the liberation of a people consigned, as Fanon puts it,
to barbarism, degradation and bestiality by the harsh rhetoric
of the colonial civilizing mission. Nonetheless, aggressive
assertions of cultural identity frequently come in the way of
wider international solidarities. Ideally, national consciousness
ought to pave the way for the emergence of an ethically and
25
politically enlightened global community. National
consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that
will give us an international dimension. The samething is
evident in the neo-novelists of the Indian diaspora. The fake
nationalism inspires disunity within the structure and theme of
a particular fiction but according to Salman Rushdie, “the
unity can be achieved through the management of themes into
a particular framework so that the effect of globalization
would not affect the unity”9.
However, the problem of unity and disunity is a complex
problem to comprehend for a layman who doesn’t have
enough literary nourishment. But it is a serious problem and
that is why, we discussed it in a comprehensive way. The
recent novelists of Indian origin and the European novelists of
the twenty-first century concentrate also on this particular
problem and it is also the Ulysses’ bow of criticism among
erudite personalities.
Now, the last section of the chapter will briefly discuss
Chatterjee’s reactionary nature especially of the novels he
wrote from ‘English, August’ to ‘Weight Loss’, whereas the
very first novel ‘English, August’ is itself revolutionary in
nature, the other novels also follow the same trend. In
‘English, August’ Agastya Sen is a young Indian civil servant
26
whose imagination is dominated by women, literature and soft
drugs which is quite blasphemous in the Indian scene. To
discuss a personality belonging to the highest administrative
post in a vociferous manner is not an easy task for any writer
but Chatterjee has showed it time and again in the particular
novel. So also ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’ is comic
and Kafkaesque. It is a master work of satire by a major writer
at the height of his powers. The reactionary nature is revealed
when we find the fiction a searing, savage passage through
bureaucratic India. It is a book of laughter and disgust, a four-
letter rejoinder to the grotesquery of governance. The wit,
satire, lampoonery, piquancy and plain ridicule pervade the
pages of this novel which make the novel quite an off-track
one. It is also raunchy and tough, smooth and almost facile. It
shares with all good satire its power to simultaneously shock
and amuse. ‘The Last Burden’ is a novel which flits back and
forth in time and space, and is written in a language of
unsurpassed richness and power.
Upamanyu Chatterjee presents a funny, bitterly accurate
and vivid portrait of the awesome burden of family ties.
Chatterjee is a mercilessly gifted observer as is evident in the
fiction. Last but not the least ‘Weight Loss’ is a dark-comedy,
a masterpiece of satire. It is also self-doubling and humane, a
27
nightmare shot through with tenderness. These anti-thetical
lines itself prove the reactionary nature of Upamanyu
Chatterjee’s novels. In the introductory chapter we have tried
to present a brief picture of Indian fiction and how it is
metamorphosed gradually in the last decade of the century.
The detailed analysis and hair-splitting research will be
pursued in the next chapters to show the essential merit of
Chatterjee.

***********

28
 NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Packham, Gillian, ‘Mulk Raj Anand and the Thirties Movement in

England’, essay published in ‘Perspectives on Mulk Raj Anand,’
(ed.) K.K. Sharma, Amar Publication, Ghaziabad, P.–52.
2. Op. Cit. P.–54.
3. Op. Cit. P, –xiv.
4. Rutherford, Anna, ‘Anand’s Fictions’, published in
‘Commonwealth Literature’; (ed.) James Vinson, Macmillan,
London, 1979, P. –22.
5. Naik, M.K. ‘Perspectives on Mulk Raj Anand’, Sterling Publishers,
New Delhi, 1991, P. –50.
6. Burgess, Anthony, ‘Reviewing ‘All About H. Hatterr’; Macmillan,
London, 1970, P. –10.
7. Naik, M.K. ‘Indian English Fiction – An Overview’; Sterling
Publishers, Delhi, 1995, P. –21.
8. Bhabha, P. Literature, Politics and theory,’ Methuen, London, 1994,
P. –09.
9. Rushdie, Salman, ‘Seminal Lectures at Harvard’, (ed.) E. Simpson,
Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1999, P.– 24.

29
 Chapter -II

T H E S P IR IT
OF
Q U E S T A N D S U R V I VA L
 The acceptance of the term ‘hero’ in order to designate
the protagonists of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s fictions inevitably
requires a reconsideration of what heroism actually implies.
Whenever we feel reluctant to undertake a serious study of the
heroic ramifications of a centrally located character in a play
or fiction we resort comfortably to a complaisant use of the
term ‘protagonist’. It saves us from the uncomfortable sense of
uncertainty with regard to identifying the heroic traits in the
central character. On one level such a gesture betrays the
incapacity or refusal to break way from the traditional concept
of hero. Unconsciously or consciously we tend to keep our
image of the classical hero intact. The notion of the ‘vanishing
hero’ when looked at from this angle is a euphemistic attempt
at safeguarding the rigid borders of conventional heroism in
literature. Only a studied extension of these margins which
‘ipsofacto’ involves a redifining of the concept of hero, would
lead to our liberation from the hesitancies in applying the term
heroes of modern and post- modern literature, more so in the
fictions of Upamanyu Chatterjee.
Literary scholarship has traditionally invested superiority
in the tragic hero over the hero of a comedy. Such an
assumption, even when it concedes not to conform fully to the
Aristotelian precepts of tragedy, is founded crucially on one
factor : that conflict is the making of the hero whose mission
is ultimately to resolve it. The resolution connotes the triumph
of the hero. But this triumph is a moral survival that looks
beyond the inevitable physical or physiological extinction of
the hero. Comedy insists on the survival of the hero in
physical terms at the end of a work. The tangible nature of the
conflict in the comedy justifies such an ending. Bonamee
Dobree in his essay on Thomas Hardy, had asserted:–“the
great tragic writer says yea to life in every fibre of his being,
however, terrible, grim or ghostly it may appear.”1 It is
perhaps to debunk such simplistic assertions about tragic
vision that Eugene O’ Neill gave the subtitle ‘A Comedy of
Ancient and Modern Times’ to his essentially tragic ‘The
Hairy Ape’.
So, how shall we surmount the difficulties in identifying
the hero in the fictions of Chatterjee. In all the fictions, the
central characters have local habitations and names. Inspite of
their tangibility and substantial existence and their structural
centrality within the fictions why do we struggle to recognize
the hero in them? Can we classify them into a genre with
predictable features and traditional roots? Actually, they are
caged within masks that lead the critic and the spectator

31
astray. A specialized body of parametres is needed to decode
the ‘hero-complex’ or ‘hero-system’ in Chatterjee’s fictions.
But before we structure the tools to unlock the ‘hero-
syndrome’ in Chatterjee, certain notional aspects of the hero
need to be clarified.
The hero is bound to act out of his commitment to a
system of values. His value-system may be political, moral,
religious, social or all these together ; but what is important is
his courage of conviction. When his value system is an
entirely private and arbitrary one which is usually in conflict
with that of his society, he is labelled as an anti-hero. Thus an
aesthetic polarity emerges between two ethical codes, one
public or social and the other personal or anit-public. The
religio - ethical representation that a hero enacts makes him an
“establishment figure”.2 As Roger B. Rolin points out, “A
hero’s acts are sanctified by his society, an anti-hero’s by
himself.”3 The hero that conforms to the code of the
establishment is more easily intelligible and acceptable to
society. The anti-hero’s personal value scheme stands in the
way of his acceptibility by a society that insists on public
sanction of its standards. It is perhaps too presumptuous at this
stage to identify Upamanyu’s heroes as anti-heroes although

32
one cannot miss the elements of the anti-hero in them. Yet it is
significant to recognize the validity of a personal codes of
values in the evaluation of the heroes of Chatterjee’s fictions.
It is equally important to be wary of misreading this personal
code as arbitrary or motivated by self-interest. The value
system of Chatterjee’s heroes is essentially attached to a
universal system of values that transcends not only those of
the establishment but also of the worldly and the fleshly. But
this point shall be elaborated in a later part of this chapter.
Northrop Frye in his ‘Anatomy of Criticism’ has
classified heroes into five broad groups namely, the Super
Man, Supreme Man, Leader Hero, Common Man Hero and
Lowly Man Hero. This classification is based on the power of
action of the heroes so far represented in literature. His
classification does not take into account the moral stature of
the heroes but only their potency to control the natural and
human worlds in which they function. The Super Man is
superior to and greater than mortals whereas the Supreme Man
is human yet more powerful than the mortals. There is a
Godlike aura about him like Beowulf although he is physically
vulnerable and ultimately mortal. The Leader-heroes are
unmistakably human, prone to error and even sin. They are

33
worldly, subject to the laws of the world, yet are the best that
the world can create. The ‘Common Man hero’ is just an
ordinary person who is capable of mustering his natural
resources when the occasion demands, and can then evolve
into the extraordinary. The ‘Lowly Man hero’ is a disreputable
figure with an everlasting naivete, who except in his climactic
moments of transcendence, fails to inspire us. But he has an
innate virtue that triumphs over the seemingly virtuous and
sophisticated.
In which group shall we place Upamanyu Chatterjee’s
heroes? No category of heroes in Northrop Frye’s
comprehensive classification can wholly accommodate them,
precisely because the criteria for the evaluation of their heroic
content are primarily and solely related to spiritual values. In
terms of the power of action, their heroism ranges from the
super human powers of superman heroes to the powerlessness
and naivete of the ‘Lowly Man’. The hero in general is a
traveller on a grand scale, scaling miles sometimes physically
or at other times, undertaking an inner journey to the
outermost reaches of his mind. As Rollin rightly observes,
“Every hero has his quest, his vital mission. Whatever his
goal, the hero must be a seeker. To decline the quest is to lose

34
his opportunity as a hero. To decline the quest is to be less
than himself.”4 The purpose of the quest, the destination of the
journey of each hero, determines the quality of his heroism.
Whether he triumphs in his quest or not, the seeking is
significant and the goal he envisions testifies to his tether.
Honour, Glory, Victory, Social Order, and Love are the
commonly professed goals of heroes. The end of the journey
is marked by one indispensable experience on the part of the
hero. It is the experience of self-discovery. The outward
progression in the career of the hero is also counter balanced
by this inward seeking. The process of self-discovery also
inevitably involves the process of self-creation. “Whether
hero, non-hero, or anti-hero every individual becomes what he
experiences.”5
Now, to classify comprehensively, the heroes in
Upamanyu Chatterjee we can, first of all, only say that the
heroes of Chatterjee fall in no definite category as is discussed
at length in the previous pages. If we look at the heroes in all
his fictions we can at least say that they are common men,
sharing the common views and visions in an uncommon way
hitherto unexperienced by us. The very first novel, ‘English,
August’–follows Agastya Sen–a young westernized Indian

35
civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women,
literature and soft drugs. This vivid account of ‘real India’ by
the young officer posted to the small provincial town of
Madna is , “funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen’s
year in the sticks,”6 as described by a reviewer in the observer.
However, Chatterjee’s heroes are mainly the average men
seeking the earth for their favour. If we start seeking examples
from the very first novel it will be more crystal clear. At the
very second page of the novel, the ambiguity or the split-
personality of Agastya is evident. As the novel starts with an
ominous beginning Agastya is discussing in an intoxicated
condition about the whereabouts of Dhrubo. At that time when
the discussion comes to the childhood days, it is said of him:–
“That was a ten-year-old joke from their
school-days in Darjeeling, when they had been
envious of some of the Anglo-Indian boys who
spoke and behaved differently, and did alarmingly
badly in exams and didn’t seem to mind, they were
the ones who were always with the Tibetan girls
and claimed to know all about sex... And like most
names, they had paled with the passage of time
and place, all but August, but they yet retained

36
 with them the knack of bobbing up out of some
abyss on the unexpected occasion, and nudging a
chunk or two of his past”.7
These lines altogether symbolize the hesitancies as well
as the shrinking character of Agastya in his childhood days. At
the same time, the omniscient narration focuses the erotic
nature or at least the eroticism in him. In the succeeding pages
we find his longing, remembrances, pain and compulsion
when at the guest house in Madna he read the poem written on
the wall by R. Tamse, the Deputy Engineer, P.W.D.:–
“Away from my old life and my spouse,
So many days at this circuit House,
Away from Goa, my dear home,
On office work I have to roam”.8
These lines also symbolize Agastya’s captivated
condition at Madna and he finds no pleasure in the
administrative service, rather it seems, that the world has been
closed to him, no outlet is there to tame his feelings. The
frustration of Agastya, his ambiguity finds a brilliant exposure
when he asked to himself:–
“I don’t look like a bureaucrat, what am I
doing here. I should have been a photographer, or

37
 a maker of ad films, something like that, shallow
and urban”9.
These lines also show the futility of administrative
service especially for Agastya. Upmanyu Chatterjee has finely
expressed the views of Agastya at Madna through several
word-pictures and symbols. The pent up feeling of Agastya is
further revealed when Mr. Srivastav reminded him the
conditions and ambience of Madna:–
“‘Oh, mosquitoes, yes, I can see that from
your face’. A quick side- glance at him. ‘I tell you,
Madna must be one of the unhealthiest places in
India. Hot, humid, disease, everything. Are you
boiling your water? I told the naib tehsildar to tell
you’ ”.10
What better picture of the dismal condition of Madna as
well as of Agastya can we get? Indeed, the problem of
mosquito biting, the problem of water, the dust ridden roads,
meagre foods and the shabby guest house add more to the
existing frustration of Agastya. He has been actually trapped
between ‘to be or not to be’. The dilemma in him leads to
more dismal situations as is expressly hinted in every line of
the novel. To Agastya–known to his friends as August, or

38
sometimes English–he has been sentenced to the back of
beyond. Seemingly overwhelmed by the heat, this slow -
moving novel goes on to describe Madna’s petty officials, the
pretensions and day-dreams of its citizens, endless
governmental meetings, hilarious dinner parties, much
drunkenness and boredom and bureaucracy. To amuse
himself, at times, Agastya makes up stories about his past: He
confides to the District Inspector of Land Records that his
(non-existent) wife is a Norwegian Muslim and that his
“parents were in Antarctica, members of the first Indian
expedition. Yes, even his mother, she had a Ph.D. in
Oceanography from the Sorbonne.” To the Superintendent of
Police he casually lets slip that last summer he climbed Mount
Everest. Even the food everywhere seems inedible. At one
meeting at Gandhi-Hall he is handed a plate: –
“On it were laddus, samosas and green
chutney. He could almost hear the chutney say,
‘Hi, my name is cholera, what’s yours?”
Refusing the food, he explains to the waiter: –
“ ‘I can’t eat anything today. My mother died
today’. The man looked puzzled again. ‘I mean,
this is the anniversary of my mother’s death, and I

39
 fast’. For a moment he contemplated adding, ‘In
penance, because I killed her’. ”
All these things adds to the grotesque kind of humour
which Agastya enjoys during his stay at Madna. These are a
sort of a comic relief from the dry, drab life of the town where
restlessness, purposelessness, cyclic journey hover him
throughout the day and night. He finds no respite even at the
guest house or in the collectorate. However, Agastya’s
character, as evident in the novel seems to be more ambiguous
and round than the other persons in the fiction. He has had a
kind of an ‘incalculability of life about’ as E.M. Forster rightly
asserted in his book ‘Aspects of Novel’. His heroism is not at
all a journey of valour rather he inculcates in him the
compulsions of the post-modern man. His heroism can not be
compared with the heroism we find in Tom Jones or in Pip in
‘Great Expectations’, rather he is, as already said, a common
man eyeing to have the material world at the best.
Similarly, the second novel ‘The Last Burden’ is a
fascinating portrayal of life in an Indian middle-class family.
Jamun, the central character, is a young man, unmarried, adrift.
He stays away from his family, which comprises his parents,
Urmila and Shyamanand, his elder brother Burfi, his sister-in-

40
law, Joyce, his two nephews (Doom and Pista) and the
children’s aya. Jamun returns to the family when his mother is
hospitalized. Once there he decides to stay on until one of his
ailing parents dies. He barely admits to himself that there is
another, probably stronger reason for his extended stay in the
family home–an old friend Kasturi, now married and pregnant,
who has returned to the city. The ordeal of Jamun starts from
the very beginning of the novel: –
“In the four days Jamun emerges at twilight
for cigarettes and potatoes, milk etcetera.
Otherwise in the white rooms of his flat he reads
the Gandhi life and hears the rain. In the
afternoons the waters slip away under the
cauterizing sun. Then the white rooms glut with
the exhalations of mud-of fish and sea, the beach
and the wet. In the early mornings, from his
verandah he observes the cream crabs in the ooze
on which the block of flats has been erected. Later
in the month, the river will ballon and Hegiste on
the ground floor will share his flat with it. At night
he hears the polite tap-tap beyond the windows, in
the swelter, in the rain”.11

41
 So the extended paragraph of the novel, or to say, the
very beginning gives us the dismal picture of struggle and
wisdom and the way through which he combats with life in all
sorts of activities. The lines also focus the point of Jamun’s
initiation of a journey, the end of which is bottomless or
eternal. He starts a journey from ignorance to knowledge
without knowing the path in which he walks. So also these
lines altogether symbolise the iron determination as well as
the frisky nature of the protagonist. Chatterjee tries to give the
hint of the ambiguity of the character in the present paragraph.
He never tires from the ongoing difficulties or the
impediments that fall in between the journey of the
protagonist. The way in which the character is presented is
well noticed by the readers because the beginning gives us the
shock, the way in which the character gives his vent to the
outer world, captures the attention of the readers as well of the
critics. The critics are of opinion that the opening paragraph
categorically foretold the story of the rest of the novel. Not
only that the opening paragraph also comprehensively
discusses the way in which a quasi- hero is developed. As we
had a prolonged discussion at the beginning of the chapter that
how should we categorize the heroes in Chatterjee; especially

42
at a time when he wrote, the time was ripe to portray the
waywardness or the purposelessness of a person. The post-
modern thinkers are also of the opinion that the character of
Jamun unfurls the historic vision as well as the ambiguity or
the multi-faceted characteristics of the particular protagonist.
In a way we can say, that the character of Jamun summarily
follows the way of a post-modern man. Some more examples
from the text would suffice the point:–
“In his excitation Jamun reckons that it is his
mother’s self-pity that cries out for him. Yet time
and time again, he himself, with a child’s raw
sentience, has itched to be there. He can’t situate
her in hospital but when he at last contemplates
her in Intensive Care–gunmetal skull on green
pillow, stertorous, terrorized exhalations, brow
rutted with veiled agony–he recognizes anew her
method of living: a bullheaded and dreary conflict
because she discerns no choice, in the main with
head down and neck steeled, but botching and
ebbing decade after decade, the point of the
struggle progressively disputable, never taking
stock because her mind could unplug, and after it

43
 does, what endures is this gentler submerged
strife amongst the shards of her life”.12
The important as well as comprehensive verse-paragraph
(as we must say verse because of its language larded with
symbol), shows again the minute observation as well as the
lived experience of the novelist. How finely Chatterjee builds
up the structure and also the superstructure of his novel
through these sharp, vivid, minute and poignant observation.
In this case the illness of the mother was highlighted with
utmost attention as well as with passion. Jamun never intends
to fall in such a condition or in the midst of such a chaos, or to
say, in a ‘hurly-burly’ condition. But as life has no definite
way of maintaining its pattern rather as life is patternless or
designless, so also the life of Jamun and his surroundings. He
never feels kinship with this particular world as well as with
his family but the given situation, the incidents or episodes in
his life compel him to think, his thinking enables him to
undergo the journey of frustration, of anger and pain, of ordeal
and anguish. All these make the character of Jamun more
unpredictable as well as undecidable as post-modern
critics as well as the deconstructionists always emphasize in
their treatises.

44
 Moreover, the sharp-edged description reminds us of the
undecisive qualities of the heroes in T.S. Eliot. As we know,
T.S. Eliot was the progenitor of the new sort of writing in the
modern age. All sorts of literature, whatever genre, written
after Eliot follows the same ‘aesthetic of indeterminacy’.
Upamanyu Chatterjee also follows the foot steps of Eliot in
the sense that all his heroes or rather characters follow the
same dynamics, the dynamics of indeterminacy. Whether
‘English, August’ or ‘The Last Burden’ or the fiction ‘Weight
Loss’ we always find the same tensions and ‘aporias’ as it is
the characteristic method of the novelist. Some more textual
input would suffice the tale of struggle and pain:–
“At fifteen, and at twenty-eight, Jamun
recognized the disparity in what money denotes to
him, and to Burfi-rather, at fifteen, he was
witheringly certain; at twenty-eight, he fancied
that a difference in their attitudes might exist, but
also that it might no matter. He himself gauges
money to be wily. If he has the money, he’ll buy
chewing gum, or condoms, or a refrigerator. If the
doesn’t, he will muzzle himself to do without; the
self-discipline becomes in itself quite piquant. But

45
 for Burfi, deprivation is failure, a cudgel to his
self-esteem.”13
In this decisive paragraph also the story of deprivation
and failure looms large and Chatterjee presents both the
characters larger than life. They, as it seems, are the stalwarts
of attaining the life and its meaning at any cost. The problem
and meaning of life becomes very relevant here, so also the
piquancy of the situation. Both the characters having their way
to tell the world the shortcomings of their own as well as their
perceived emotions and passions. They never fight out or
ruled out the given situation in which they are in, rather they
wished away all the hindrances of life, though ambiguous in
their own way. Now, the question of ethical purgation that
comes into mind should be sorted out. In few sentences, we
should try to summarize the point. Ethical purgation is the
summum bonum of all human beings whether of a man
belongs before modern period or of a story of a person of the
post- modern age. The purgation or the biological release as
we were hearing from the days of Aristotle still having its
relevance in the novels of Chatterjee. Whether Agastya or
Jamun or Burfi–all tends to be purgational, or to say, all are
having their release through different sorts of activities. The

46
activities may be in the form of taking drugs or marijuana or
having condoms in the pocket or through uttering strange like
‘hazzar fucked’ at the very first novel. Their frustration finds
its release through these obscene, rather adulterous activities.
In this sense, we can compare the heroes of Chatterjee with
the heroes of Henry Fielding, especially with Tom in ‘Tom
Jones’. In both the novels ‘Tom Jones’ or to say in
Chatterjee’s ‘English, August’, or ‘The Last Burden’ we find a
series of adventure. Though the adventure was not well
organized in ‘Tom Jones’, it was episodic and having no
brevity of expression. But in Chatterjee’s novels the
adventures are not grand in scale, these are more, naive
adventures of life in which the heroes plunge deep into the sea
of life as well as in the world but ultimately ends with
dissatisfaction and frustration. Only journey remains, the
works or the naive deeds remain in the pages, in black words,
not the essence. This is the way the world ends, and this is
also the way the heroes of Chatterjee ultimately reach to their
ultimate destination or to say more specially, to the ‘doom’.
‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’, though it is a
sequel to ‘English, August’, finely delineates the grotesquery
of governance and worthlessness of the administrative posts in

47
India. The boon of civil services becomes a bane in the
twentieth centuary India.
The pangs, agony and the pressure through which an
administrative officer works in the present day scenario are
hinted out in the novel. Furthermore, the political interference in
decision–making the undue pressures from the political parties
and pressure-groups on an administrative officer–has been
emphatically shown in this particular novel. An example from
the text would suffice the routine-work as well as the arid
condition of an administrative officer:–
“Early one June morning, the Municipal
Corporation showed up at his door. It had
decided that week to clean up his part of
Bhayankar–a routinue exercise that it undertakes
every month in different parts of the city, to tear
down the shacks of those without clout, harass all
who do not bribe to devastate the property of the
unprepared. Under the noses of the police and the
demolition squad, however, Bhootnath Gaitonde
waved a stay order from the court. The worm had
turned–and moved like lightning.”14

48
 The passage aptly shows the monotony and the hectic
life-style of the officers as well as their works. Moreover, the
monotonous activities mar the intrinsic as well as the
innermost life of the officers. The problem of delivering the
act of development to the general public also comes to the
forefront because, at times, the work, especially in the public
departments, suffers from the complexity of red-ribbons. And
the officers have of undergo these trails and tribulations in
their journey to the administrative reforms. In this context, the
words of Khushwant Singh are apt to notice. He asserted that
“most of the services done by the administrative officers are
forgotten, but the lacuna in them highlighted in the print as
well as in the electronic media”.15
This is the other-way of looking to the life of those
officers and their lives. Here also Agastya finds no respite as
in ‘English, August’. His restlessness looms large in the
periphery of the novel. He becomes a tiny-tot in the hands of
fate, or to say, in the chain of norms, rules and regulations.
The entire novel, indeed, is a commentary and a saga of the
dismantled predicament and condition of the administrative
reforms in India. Through a particular instance, the novelist
tries to hint out or focus on the general scenario of the nation.

49
 Now, coming to the last but not the least fiction of
Chatterjee’s ‘Weight Loss’, we can unhesitatingly say that
novel also focuses on the discrepancies of the society. It is
also searing passage through bureaucratic India laughter and
disgust, grotesquery and astonishment looms large in the
novel. The lines that follow would prove the point:–
“Something seemed to fit into place in
Bhola’s head accompanied by the click made by
the safety catch of a gun in a slick gangster film
soundtrack. In a dozen assignations, he had seen
Moti naked in the back room of Mrs.
Manchanda’s flat, shy and happy at being
desired, yet with his face suffused with blood,
crimson with mortification at his own eternally
flaccid state. ‘He can’t get it up, so that’s it.’
Bhola blurted out the revelation, and then tensed
as he wondered whether Borkar would be puzzled
by how Bhoola knew.”16
So the paragraph is sufficient enough to comprehend the
hectic schedule of Bhola in the midst of pressure as well as the
difficult circumstances. Chatterjee, very minutely discusses

50
the day to day activities here to create a sort of a poignancy in
the novel.
However, the discussion of the four succeeding novels of
Chatterjee make it clear that the crazy clamour of voices does
revolve round the every nook and corner of his novels. The
actions and interactions along with the ‘life’s little ironies’
make the situation more complex for the characters in the
novels. But Chatterjee’s busy eyes and brilliant observation
made it possible to delve deep or peep through into the
characters and show their ‘aching joys’ and dizzy raptures.

***********

51
 NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Dobree, Bonamee, ‘Thomas Hardy’ in ‘English Critical

Essays’ (ed.) Phyllis M. Jones, First Series (1933);
reptd. Oxford University Press, London, (1964), P.–
329.
2. Rollin, B. Roger, (ed.), ‘Hero/Anti-Hero’ Webster
Division Mc Graw-Hill Book Company, New York,
(1973),P.–xvi.
3. Ibid. P.– xx-xi.
4. Ibid. P.– 04.
5. Ibid. P.– 23.
6. Stein Allen, ‘Westernized Agastya’, observer, Vol. II,
No.126, 1989, P.– 06.
7. Chaterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August’ Faber &
Faber, London, 1988, P.– 02.
8. Ibid. P.–09.
9. Ibid. P.–13.
10. Ibid. P.–15.
11. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Last Burden’, Penguin
Books, London, 1993, P.–03.
12. Ibid. P.–08.
13. Ibid. P.–69-70.
52
14. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Mammaries of the
Welfare State’, Penguin, London, 2000, P.– 13.
15. Singh, Khushwant, ‘Administrative Reforms in
India’, article published in ‘Times of India’, dated 31 st
Oct, 2008.
16. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘Weight Loss,’ Penguin,
London, 2006, P.–151.

53
 Chapter -III

HU M A N U RGES,
E X IS T E N T IA L F E A R S
A N D E VA S I V E S I L E N C E
 In this chapter we will try to show the heart of the
matter of Chatterjee’s fictions. The crux of the problem in his
succeeding fictions lies in the title topic of the thesis. Indeed,
if we look at the novels of Upamanyu Chatterjee, we find that
crisis-consciousness is writ large in every nook and corner in
the novels. Crisis-consciousness is not a new phenomenon,
rather the term was generated in the first decade of the
twentieth century. The most random of the term was done by
the modern writers, poets, and essayists. The term was gaining
its momentum in the hands of Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell,
Rupert Brooke, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and
even H.G. Wells. The particular phrase is largely related to
Freud’s ‘interpretations of dream and Jung’s theory of the
unconscious.’ The on growing industrial revolution in the
twentieth century Europe especially England resulted in a sort
of a vacuum in the society. The break-down of values down
from the Victorian era was also responsible for the sort of
purposelessness which looms large in modern man. From
1900 until the First World War literature especially poetry in
England wavered between two worlds not sure of its path. The
loss of belief, the restlessness, the cyclic journey, the
aimlessness in modern man were depicted in a literature also.
Crisis-consciousness is a dilemma which runs into the heart of
a modern man. The finest portrayal of the predicament of
modern men is seen in the magnum opus of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The
Waste Land’. The poem is monumental in the sense that it
recollects the consciousness of the modern civilization as well
as of the modern man. The aphoristic lines like “April is the
cruelest month / breeding lilacs out of the dead land” or the
line like “in my beginning is my end” capture the heart of the
people as well as show the ambience of death, decay and
destruction. Likewise, in the works of Virginia Woolf,
whether it is ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ or ‘To the Lighthouse’, the
same moribund atmosphere persists, whether it is septimus or
Rezia the problem continues. In the same manner James
Joyce’s, Stephin Dedalus is also suffering from the same
question ‘to be or not to be.’ The dichotomy continues even
more poignantly in the post-modern writers. Whether it is
literary theory or literature itself the problem never ends.
Actually, the Second World War also created a great havoc in
the mind of the minds and naturally the aftermath is dismal as
a result of that the advent of absurd drama, dark comedy is
seen. Samuel Becket’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, or Eugene
Ionesco’s dramas are the representatives of that grotesque
thought.

55
 In the field of fiction the same trend continues. Kafka’s
‘The Trial’ or Camus’ ‘The Out-Sider’ emphatically shows the
naturalism and the existential perspectives. Coming to the
Indian canvas right from the novels of Anita Desai, Kamala
Markandaya, Arun Joshi, Shashi Deshpande, Shashi Tharoor,
Gita Mehta, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy,
Manju Kapur, Amitav Ghosh, Sunita Narayan, and even
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novels have had the glimpses of the
same world discussed in the earlier paragraph.
Chatterjee, likewise, shows the routlessness,
purposelessness and the crisis-consciousness in his novels. The
existentialism is very much present in his novels. The narratives are
blended with the fine stylistic motif of the writer. The most
prominent example of existential fear and crisis-consciousness
is evident in the very first novel ‘English, August’. The novel
begins with ominous note and the quotation from ‘Macbeth’,
especially the sayings of the bitches in Macbeth symbolise the
bleak atmosphere at the beginning. The detailed description of
Madna emphatically points out the weather beaten people of
the town. The stale description altogether points out the sense
of homelessness which the novelist also emphasises in this
novel. Everything is rotten here in Madna–the streets, the
houses, the ambience and even the men. The particular lines of
56
R. Tamse, the Deputy Engineer, Public Works Division easily
remind us of the scream of the people lived in that particular
city:–
“Away from my old life and my spouse,
So many days at this Circuit House,
Away from Goa, my dear home,
On office work I have to roam.”1
These lines aptly show the longing, the remembrances,
pain and compassion of R. Tamse. The man is suffocated in
heinous condition. He finds no relief, the doors of
entertainment are closed to him, no respite is there, no job-
satisfaction is there. Only the cruel nature of the city haunts
him. He may be said a replica of Agastya. Agastya finds
himself through the character of R. Tamse. In a sense, R.
Tamse is the extrovert exteriorization of the protagonist
Agastya. Everyone is suffered in the city and likewise,
Agastya is also suffering. The poignant speeches of Agastya
symbolise the story of death, decay and destruction in the city
of Madna. The pent up feelings of the hero find no outlet and
the life becomes meaningless to him. He is doing each and
every activities monotonously, no respite is there in the city of
Madna, only the dark horror holds the rule of the town. The

57
passage in the novel shows very accurately the struggle of the
self:–
“Sitting with the three men, he was again
assailed by a sense of the unreal. I don’t look like
a bureaucrat, what am I doing here. I should have
been a photographer, or a maker of ad films,
something like that, shallow and urban.
‘How old are you, sir?’
‘Twenty-eight.’ Agastya was twenty-four, but
he was in a lying mood. He also disliked their
faces.
‘Are you married, sir?’Again that demand
that he classify himself. Ahmed leaned forward for
each question, neck tensed and head angled with
politness.
‘Yes’. He wondered for a second whether he
should add ‘twice’. ”2
These lines show with accuracy the dichotomy of the
character. In the same way in the opening scene, Agastya’s
friend and fellow marijuana smoker Dhrubo has had the same
feeling : “I’ve a feeling, August, you’re going to get hazaar
fucked in Madna”,3 which sets much of the tone of the novel.
Agastya is restless and he does consider escape from Madna
58
and a career in the IAS. He flees, briefly, back to the big city,
and considers taking a job in publishing. But he does return to
stick it out in Madna. There Agastya finds:– “Reading was
impossible, with his mind in its state of quiet tumult.” Marcus
Aurelius’ Meditations, “turned out to be (very incongruously,
he thought) his only reading.” The choice is not so
incongruous after all, the self-deluding emperor a proper
example for Agastya: –
“He lied, but he lied so well, this sad Roman
who had also looked for happiness in living more
than one life, and had failed, but with such
grace”.4
Actually, Agastya finds happiness in the midst of ill
doings but he also knows that happiness is not the destination
to which he tries to arrive at. Happiness is the process which
comes intermittently in life with all its shadows. There are
numerous smaller and larger episodes and encounters, the
bizarre demands and malfunctions of bureaucracy, the people
one has to deal with. Agastya is basically still drifting,
unwilling–and unable–to commit himself fully to anything.
Chatterjee presents this sympathetically; the weltschmerz is
not annoying, and Agastya fortunately does not take himself

59
too seriously. One of the finest critic of Chatterjee Prof. Shiv
K. Kumar succinctly points out:–
“Agastya is an uneven hero, drifting like a
pendulam and hangs in the ‘limbo’ just as Dante’s
character, hung aloft the corner.”5
Agastya is still a youth, trying to find meaning and
direction:–
“I’ve become your American, taking a year
off after college to discover himself,”6
Agastya writes to Dhrubo at the end of his year in
Madna, and the training year is, indeed, very much like that.
There are moments of discovery; Agastya begins to have some
sense of what is important and what is of interest to him.
There are no absolutes, no certainties, but perhaps an outline
that grows more distinct. So, for example:–
“Eventually, he knew, he would marry,
perhaps not out of passion, but out of convention,
which was probably a safer thing. And then, in
either case, in a few months or years they would
tire of disagreeing with each other, or what was
more or less the same thing, would be inured to
each other’s odd and perhaps disgusting ways, the
way she squeezed the tube of toothpaste and the
60
 way he drank from a glass and didn’t rinse it and
they would slide into a placid and comfortable
unhappiness, and may be unseeingly watch TV
every day, each still a cocoon.”7
Agastya is restless, and he does consider escape from
Madna and a career in IAS. Indeed, the career of Agastya is
not running smooth as it is the nature of life itself. Agastya
finds no consolation in the day to day hectic activity and
drearer and dry job making more uncomfortable in that
smaller town in Madna. Even the hero finds no pleasure in
spiritual activity or religion as it is cleared through the
authorial voice:–
“But Agastya was not conscious of any
blasphemy. Religion was with him a remote
concern, and with his father it had never
descended from the metaphysical. One can not
prove the intrinsic superiority of any one religion,
his father had loftily said to his brothers and
sisters when they had asked him, Conspiratorially,
to get his wife to convert–I remain Hindu and she
Catholic because we were born such and see no
reason for change. Yet he had wanted his son to
be a Hindu, for which his arguments had seemed
61
 sophistic. He had said that it would make the least
demands on his time. ‘You can think and do what
you like and still remain a Hindu.’ Consequently
Agastya had rarely been to a temple, and when he
had stood in front of any idol, it had only been
Durga, and the occasion always the autumn Puja–
a boy, and later an adolescent, in the tow of his
aunts in Calcutta, with everyone in new clothes,
inhaling an air heavy more with festival than with
religion, ready for magic shows and all-night
open-air movies.”8
So, religion as we have seen is not becoming fruitful or
to give solace to Agastya. He finds no pleasure where people
usually do find. Actually, the purposelessness of life
surrounded over Agastya’s thinking. Consciously or
unconsciously he never thought that his life would become
meaningless and aimless. The following lines would prove
further the futility of Agastya’s life and his drinking habit:–
“He was an honoured, though unexpected,
guest, so later, around a huge fire near the jeep,
the tribals danced for him. The men drank some
kind of tari. ‘They used to drink all day’, breathed
Rao hotly into his ear, ‘before we came. Their
62
 children began drinking it at six months. They
didn’t know’, Agastya drank too, it was extremely
potent, and he was soon uncontrollably high. The
women danced, arm in arm in one row, a slow
monotonous shuffle to a single arhythmic drum,
one step forward, two steps back, always one step
forward, two steps back.”9
In this context Akash Kapur finely asserted that:–
“Agastya’s story is convincing, entertaining,
moving and timeless. It merits an accolade that’s
far harder to earn than authentic. Agastya is the
slacker view of modern India. He is the hollow
man head fulfilled with straw.”10
So, it can unhesitatingly be said that human urges are
there in Agastya’s pent up feelings, so also existential fear in
life’s run is even more silent and incalculable.
The second novel of Upamanyu Chatterjee ‘The Last
Burden’ (1993) emphatically shows the three generations that
Upamanyu Chatterjee draws under one roof in this
uncomfortable portrait of an urban Indian household, seem to
be bound to each other “as much by bile as by blood.”11 The
only silence is that of a sulk. Perhaps that is why there is a rare
glimmer of tenderness, even of affection. Despite the author’s
63
wit and humorous prose, the nastiness of it all soon begins to
wear. The reader may close the book with the same sense of
relief as slamming the door “behind a house full of
quarrelsome, rowdy acquaintances”.12 The theme of the novel
can be perceived at the very beginning when Chatterjee finely
voices his voice:–
“In his excitation Jamun reckons that it is his
mother’s self-pity that cries out for him. Yet time
and time again, he himself, with a child’s raw
sentience, has itched to be there. He can’t situate
her in hospital but when he at last contemplates
her in Intensive Care–gunmetal skull on green
pillow, stertorous, terrorized exhalations, brow
rutted with veiled agony – he recognizes anew her
method of living: a bullheaded and dreary conflict
because she discerns no choice, in the main with
head down and neck steeled, but botching and
ebbing decade after decade, the point of the
struggle progressively disputable, never taking
stock because her mind could unplug, and after it
does, what endures is this gentler submerged
strife amongst the shards of her self. But you
unhoused me, he tells the fluttering eyelids. Yet I
64
 shouldn’t’ ve slipped away. They say death crops
up for all. They say all things must pass. Yet here
you breathe, out in the cold, excluded as ever.
But life will always ambush with its
burlesque, won’t it. For Hegiste’s child indicates
and fishes for immediate enlightenment on four
donkeys (mules?) fucking in the dead centre of the
road. Two overloaded sand trucks have stopped,
perhaps to clock them. A liver- coloured Fiat
honks petulantly. Jamun is positive that he has
never spotted two pairs before, in parallel
cadence, and particularly in the evening.”13
It is the story of the unaccountability of life. Jamun in the
same way finds no solace in the post-modern ethos. He is also
purposeless just like Agastya in the very first novel. He is
hung up in between the familial knots and its aftermath. He
thinks that filial relationship is significant yet at the same time
his philosophical moorings ultimately find no definite
destinations nor give the concrete idea of his reasons. This
family speaks to each other in a crazy and impossible
language, something between a parody of Indian English and a
parody of Chatterjee’s own inflamed prose. How one responds
to this speech will determine what one thinks of the novel:–
65
 “At fifteen, and at twenty-eight, Jamun
recognized the disparity in what money denotes to
him, and to Burfi–rahter, at fifteen, he was
witheringly certain; at twenty-eight, he fancied
that a difference in their attitudes might exist, but
also that it might not matter. He himself gauges
money to be wily. If he has the money, he’ll buy
chewing gum, or condoms, or a refrigerator. If he
doesn’t, he will muzzle himself to do without; the
self-discipline becomes in itself quite piquant. But
for Burfi, deprivation is failure, a cudgel to his
self-esteem.” 14
Often, it is unbearable. Chatterjee’s prose is a mad
powder of different registers, too often, his sentences flake
into nothing. We want to feel for sick Urmila, for the lost and
rebellious Jamun, but Chatterjee sinks them so deeply in his
language that they die. It is a sombre book, smaller in ambit,
different in its ambitions.
Although the first chapter is entitled ‘AUGUST’, the
reference is only to the month, not Agastya’s nickname. It is a
different cast of characters, a contemporary Indian family.
Urmila, the mother has been taken ill; she is, as the novel
begins, perhaps on her death-bed. The family comes to see
66
her in these days, lingering then as she slowly recovers.
Jamun, the son at the centre of the novel, takes a few days to
arrive. Already there are his elder brother Burfi with foreign
wife Joyce and their sons, Doom and Pista and his father,
Shyamanand. It is not a happy ‘family reunion’. It is, in fact,
not a happy family. Even Urmila recognizes that she and
Shyamanand were so inconsonant, nevertheless they got
married. Shyamanand is also crippled emotionally and, after a
stroke that limits his movements physically. Burfi is
somewhat happy-go-lucky type fellow, and neither he nor
Jamun has lived upto their parents’ expectations. Burfi’s
marriage is no longer a particularly happy one. Jamun has yet
to really settled down. Even as a teenager Jamun feels for his
parents a love that is only the tenderness of remorse, just a
sorrow, a shame at their unhappiness. The family gets by, but
much that is familial and warm is missing. As Jamun
eventually learns, there are also things about his parents that
he was unaware of. Cultures clash too. The children have
moved away. Modern India, with loose and ties of obligation
and family, causes additional strains. There is also Joyce’s
insistence on raising their sons Catholic. And money problems
are brought to the medical bills. The novel focusses on the
family’s time together dealing with Urmila’s illness, with
67
Jamun’s memories of the past, childhood and youth, rounding
out the picture. He dreams and hallucinates–“he has visioned a
good many hideous things”15–but most of what he sees is
starkly real.
Among the memories dealt with at length are those
concerning a secondary figure, Jamun’s Aya, who took care of
him when he was young. Much loved, he quickly outgrew her,
but she remained in the household, eventually getting ill and
becoming a burden which the family seeks to unload. While
there are scenes of some humanity in how they deal with her,
the family does simply want to discard her–and eventually
manages to do so. Urmila does tend to her for a while, but is
looked down upon for doing so. As elsewhere in the
household, one finds some compassion, and a little love, but
most simply a sense of duty–stronger for members of the
family, weaker for mere servants. The following description
from the novel more poignantly shows it :–
“In the further room Urmila has become a
wizened, slack bag, professionally declared out of
danger, because of which, the visits of the final
five days are noticeably more genial. For Pista
and Doom, their grandmother all at once grows
measurelessly more interesting; formerly the
68
unassertive, unwilling fulcrum of the household,
of whom none is seriously heedful, she is now the
tousled drift of bedclothes in a chilled, sombre
room, near whom they are shushed nonstop, and
hindered from pawing unfamiliar objects, but who
is still as delighted to see them, even though she
appears ashen and unfocused. The incongruity
between the two generations is hideous. Pista’ll
be maroon and sweaty from the football game
from which he’s been plucked en route to the
hospital; Doom will be like a meaty peach, in the
way of everyone’s knees, trailing strangers into
other rooms.
Doom, nose caulked with muck, breathing
restfully and audibly through his mouth, the
bridge of his inter-digitated hands shouldering his
chins, resting plump and caked elbows on the
stool beside the bed, sallow rotund calves–with
the scarlet streaks and stipples of nicks, stings,
spills, scuffles–intersected at the ankles,
drivellingly, to Urmila: ‘Thakuma, Pista says you
died, Thakuda whammed your chest and you came

69
 back to life. Now like other aunties you’re going
to TV.”16
There is little true communication in the household.
Urmila and Shyamanand seem to have lived with only a few
pat expressions that they would exchange; beyond these
‘squats the silence’. They have long not slept together, indeed
there is little intimacy between them. As a child Jamun had no
idea that it was unusual that parents should not share a bed.
Jamun has not found a truely happy relationship. His early
love Kasturi remains a friend– occasionally a very close one
indeed, but is married. Burfi’s marriage barely holds together.
Throughout the novel there is a surprising amount of divorce,
adultery, and similar failures. The novel is written in the
family structure and is a more domestic novel than existential.
It is also a book about parents–about coming to terms with
them. Urmila tells Jamun:–
“The anger of parents is never anger”.17
He understands, but he does not make it easier to deal
with them. The book suggests that there is some growth here,
that Jamun does begin to come to terms with his parents and
also begins to find his own place in the world, but the novel is
not meant as an uplifting novel or tale. Chatterjee remains a
realist and occasionally the realism can appear brutal. The
70
writing is very solid throughout the book. There is some
humour, but little of the lightness found in much of ‘English,
August’. But Chatterjee strikes the proper tone throughout, it
is both assured and accomplished, novels and with a more
solid narrative frame to it as well. Throughout, the scenes and
memories, the fights about trivial matters, and the descriptions
of the characters, even down to the mimicry of the young
children, the pompous doctors, and the servants– are all very
well done, fitting together to make the whole greater even than
the fine parts:–
“Chhana and her manservant-fiftyish, bald,
obese, Bihari, bad tempered, flatulent-inhabit the
first floor of a drab house in Baliganj. She
manages quite nicely with the rent from UCO
Bank for the ground floor. She began to smoke
after her mother died. When the flunkey fetches
the milk in the morning, he also picks up for her a
packet of Four Square Twenties. Because she
smoked Burfi conluded, when he was sixteen, that
Chhana was panting for it.
‘Bets that she’d note on SM, a pounding with
a leather belt,’ he offers Jamun, who’s startled

71
 and titillated by the Idea. ‘But she nursed you,
Burfi !’ he demurs involuntarily.
Burfi pauses, as though granting this image of
the other Chhana enough time to flick open–in
Jamun’s brain–a shutter, to unveil to him the
tortuous wine dark tunnels of adulthood. ‘She
brushes against me all the damn time. And why’s
she always hanging around while I’m exercising?’
He shrugs his shoulders, a Not-even-God-can-
help-my-sexiness shrug, and simpers. ‘Someone
must be regularly mounting her–may be that fuck
face slave of hers–these Bong spinsters can be
desperately horny, and entwining with her
menial’ll spice it with extra kink – you know,
caste’n all. And she’s wombless, remember totally
hasslefree.’ ”18
The characters especially Jamun and his parents are also
particularly well presented. They are not particularly
sympathetic, but the reader comes to understand and feel for
them. But the portrayal overall is too dark and too real, not at
all how family life should be. It has more depth and solidity
but the existential fear and thereby evasive silence is oozed

72
out in this novel. The following paragraph would show the
trauma and the anxiousness lie in the family:–
“Jamun is startled by these minor, yet
revealing, instances that establish that Urmila’s
senses are finely attuned to the world beyond her
mind, her person, her room; in those balmy,
early-November afternoons, she’s the only one
who misses the everyday sounds that don’t reach
her, and correctly reads its import. But Jamun is
also certain that in the weeks of rest after her
heart failure, she’s been bewitched by inactivity.
Her relish for the agreeable activities of her past
shrivels, then vanishes. She does potter about in
the kitchen to make tea, slowly forage, through
her trunk for the bric-a-brac that yanks up some
slivers of her past, compose in comprehensible
letters of grievance to the Municipal Corporation
against the scavengers of the locality–but not with
her previous, or any, vim. Ludicrous, but true, for
instance, that her tea, once an occult, heady
blend, brewed with almost Japanese attentiveness,
now has lost its savour. Her inertia is eerie, and
darkishly suggests to Jamun that stir, the flurry of
73
 the lives of Burfi and Joyce, is vital only to burry
the vanity of the hours, that existence can be rated
a gift only when the impotence lurking beneath all
action is accepted.”19
Overall, Chatterjee has portrayed the life of an average
Indian family at the end of the twentieth century. The plot
revolves round Jamun’s story who is the central character of
the novel. His return to the home under compulsion shows the
bond among the family members, rather between children and
parents yet the home-coming unfurls also a series of thoughts.
Tolerance, fellow-feeling, sympathy, hatred and all the primal
human emotions have been given shape through this particular
narrative. It also exposes the sensibility of an Indian family
struggling with diseases both mental and physical. Indeed, the
novel finely shows man’s urges, the fears hidden within him.
‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’ is a sequel as well
as an extension of Chatterjee’s first novel ‘English, August’. It
is not for the saint hearted, for those who like their real and
fictional worlds sanitised and deodarised. Though a bit
repetitive, it is a novel which demands and keeps one’s
attention not only by its sarcastic asides and inside jokes, but
also because it dares to voice “a moral outrage that very rarely
finds its way into fiction, especially recent Indian English
74
fiction. Read it if you can.”20 The novel begins particularly
with the first chapter ‘HOUSING- PROBLEM’,which shows
the little details and the stark reality around the life of an
administrative officer:–
“Agastya was elated at the prospect of
meeting Daya again. If her spectacles are off,
that’s a sign that God too thinks that I should
sleep with her this month. By this weekend.
Tonight. He returned to the Guest House to find
his room empty and an eviction notice taped to his
pillow. It declared that the Executive Engineer
(State Housing) hereby gave the legal occupant of
Bed No.1 in Room No. 1206 five days’ notice to
vacate the said bed and to remove his/her
belongings from the said room, failing which
action as deemed fit under Section 63c (ii) sub-
clause 41 d of the state Immovable properties
(Maintenance, Protection and Preservation) Act
would be initiated against the illegal occupant
(‘So help me, God’, murmured Agastya). Details
of that action as deemed fit had presumably been
too ghastly for the cyclostyling machine to bear,
for the rest of the notice was a muddle of lines
75
 wandering off in unexpected directions, lurching
over one another, often ambling back on
themselves.”21
Compared to ‘English, August’ ‘The Mammaries of the
Welfare State’ has a greater breadth, a broader sweep, a far
bigger collage of unforgetable characters. It is also often dark,
brooding, even scary. “The humour is sometimes all black.
Nonetheless, it is unputdownably funny.”22 So Agastya Sen,
whose first year in the Indian Administrative Service is
recounted in ‘English, August’, did indeed stick it out in the
government bureaucracy. Like author Chatterjee, he has
become a veteran of the IAS, a servant of the great Welfare
State, that is India. ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’
picks up some seven or eight years after the time of ‘English,
August’. Agastya has not found happiness. Indeed, in the
opening passage of the novel we learn that:–
“Agastya was so enervated by his life in the
city that ever so often, when he was alone, he
found himself leaning back in his desk chair or
resting his head against the armrest of the lumpy
sofa in his office that served as his bed, shutting
his eyes and weeping silently. The cry generally
made him feel better.
76
 His office was his home, so hard-working a
civil servant was he. Just a week ago, he’d been
placidly content in his position of a Joint
Commissioner; Rehabilitation (on Leave Not
Granted and Without Pay), snugly afloat on the
unplumbed murk of the Prajapati Aflatoon
Welfare State Public Servants’ Housing Complex
Transit Hostel in the country’s capital. As an
illegal occupant of flat A-214, he had felt in those
days cocooned and distanced from the swirl
around him. Marathon power cuts in summer, a
cleanish Municipal swimming pool a minute’s
cycle ride away, great dope, no sex through-all in
all his life on leave had been okay- minus. Then
out of the blue-Personnel always moved like
lighting when it wanted to fuck somebody’s
happiness-he’d received his transfer orders to this
fifteen-by-fifteen boarded-up section of veranda
on the fourteenth floor of the New Secretariat in
the western province’s capital city.”23
Somewhat beaten down, Agastya is not entirely broken.
Indeed, in outlook and approach he is much like his younger
self. Sure, some things have changed:–
77
 “As for dope, though governance couldn’t
wean it him off it, it did manage to influence his
mode of intake.”24
Agastya now brews cannabis in his morning tea and
stuffs “pellets of hashish into his post-lunch paans”25 in order
to help him float through the day. He is constantly confronted
and assaulted by the absurdities of bureaucratic life around
him. Most seem to have adjusted to the situation better than
Agastya has:–
“He could find an example of lunacy
wherever he looked in the Welfare State, but no
one else seemed to bother, most found it funny or
pleasantly incomprehensible.”26
Nutsyanyaya, he calls it an example abounds throughout
the book. Indeed, it is a book about Nutsyanyaya, the
essentially impenetrable monolith of omnipresent bureaucracy
that has taken on a life of its own and does more bad than
good. From the trivial Agastya reminds his subordinates, for
example, of the correct method of reusing envelopes to the
largest scale, the Welfare State functions in mysterious wasys.
Agastya hasn’t completely given up. He closes a circular with
the reminder:–

78
 “There is always room for improvement even
when one doesn’t want it.”27
Still, it does not look good. Day to day life is frustrating,
even for someone ensconced within the administration of the
Welfare State such as Agastya:–
“ I’m a girder of the Steel Frame, okay?”28
Agastya reminds others by way of explanation why he
shouldn’t get the usual run around. But it is hopeless, the
Welfare State is a mystery within and without and getting
things done is pretty much last on the list of everyone’s
priorities. As he is reminded:–
“Self-interest is the only commandment–
naturally–of the Welfare State, the rest is
waffle.”29.
The following passage would sufficiently prove the point:–
“Horrible, endless rain, he’d been in
extremely slippery white keds (and goggles!–
because of damned conjunctivitis), approaching a
village in the middle of nowhere to take stock of a
landslide, six dead, the ground like watery halwa,
an office peon, turbaned and all, hopping and
bobbing behind him with an umbrella for his head,
the umbrella along with his dark glasses making
79
him feel like an Aflatoon on a Let-me-meet-the-
Great-Unwashed-for-their-votes tour, he
concentrating on every step, but he must’ve been
distracted by a body–a bum or torso, whether male
or female he couldn’t now remember–but when he,
dazed from his tumble, had looked up at the
muddle above him of outstretched hands and
embarrassed faces, he’d first noticed, surrounding
the askew turban of the peon, the maroon triangle
of Family Welfare and alongside it, its neuter
child. My God, the State is everywhere; it grapples
even with the vastness of a leaden monsoon sky. In
those few breaths, moreover, its obtuseness had
humbled him anew; here, with no habitation in
sight, a hoarding the size of a building, on it an
inapt slogan, that too in English in a region
wherein seventy-five percent of the inhabitants
were unlettered in their own tongue. Upright once
more, while the diffident hands had spruced him
down, he’d shoved the umbrella aside to gaze
again at the distant trees and the immense,
unending sky, to sense afresh the gooseflesh-caress
of infinity, of the heavens belittling the concerns
80
 that move the earth. Later that week, to remind
everybody that the earth simply couldn’t get away
with that sort of thing, he’d transferred the peon
(the bobber, with turban) to an office two hundred
kilometres away his family”.30
Life in the city is not good. ‘The Mammaries of the
Welfare State’ begins with Agastya finding himself with a
housing problem. He does manage to get himself assigned a
room in the official Guest House, with a view of the garbage
dump and the slum but he finds himself sharing these quarters
with six strangers. While the two who use his bed in his
absence do vacate it when Agastya is there, it is a less than
ideal arrangement. Agastya happens to have worked with
Menon, the Deputy Secretary eight years earlier in Madna, but
given that despite his position it took Menon three years
before he could allot himself his own flat, things don’t look
promising for Agastya. In fact, the housing situation gets
considerably worse. At least Agastya finds some female
company to keep, he becomes involved with Daya, who runs
the softsell ad agency. Daya even offers him a position, but
Agastya remains devoted to bureaucracy. The housing
problems are finally solved when Agastya is appointed
Collector for Madna, his old haunt and training ground,
81
currently plagued by nothing less than the actual plague.
Madna-ghastly, insignificant Madna, 1400 kilometres from
Delhi, familiar to the readers of ‘English, August’, is
representative of ten thousand of small towns and five
hundred other districts in a land of billion people. It is more
provincial than the big city, and the goings on perhaps ever
wilder.
In Madna, in particular, but also throughout the novel
Chatterjee indulges in local and national politics, adding to his
Indian tableau. The Welfare State’s first family, the Aflatoons,
in particular, are prominent figures. Agastya escapes Madna
and gets sent around elsewhere to pretend to do his duties. He
even manages to get sent in a training course in France, a huge
but much underappreciated perk. As Madame Europe Olympia
says disappointedly to Agastya:–
“Over the years, your country’s record, its
performance, at the Institute has been abysmal.”31
But Agastya is not surprised and does nothing to
improve the Welfare State’s reputation. Agastya only survives
his job because he carefully balances work with as much leave
as he can afford to get away with. But even here the Welfare
State makes life complicated for him. Other complications in
his life include his love life. A number of fathers are interested
82
in marraying their daughters off to him, despite his best efforts
to ward them off. And then there is Daya:–
“They were both by nature composed, self-
centered and unhappy.”32
It does not seem like a promising romance and even the
sex isn’t completely satisfying. Still his ambiguous feelings
towards Daya don’t prevent Agastya from making a
spectacularly ill-fated marriage proposal. The novel is more a
collection of loose episodes than a carefully structured one.
There is lots of drifting, as it seems and characters fade in and
out of view. Still, Chatterjee’s satire is sharp, and his lingering
over various politicians’ sagas and descriptions of futile
attempts at getting anything done are enjoyable. He picks at
all parts of the Welfare State, and he does so well. He has a
sharp eye regarding character as has been stated at length in
the previous chapter, getting the various bureaucrats, peons,
politicians, and businessmen just right. Even the asides and
casual observations are nicely done and spot on:–
“Neither father nor son had retained his
original caste-revealing surname for the obvious
reason that for the legerdemain of politics, one
travels light.”33

83
 The Welfare State–contemporary India offers many
targets and Chatterjee goes after what seems like most of
them. Far more often than not he is on target. The critique is
not angry or dry; there is frustration, but also humour
throughout.
Agastya is no pure do-gooder, but he at least is a voice
against the madness. Frustrated, for example, that various
signs in government buildings as well as on roads are put up
by illiterates, he notes:–
“We won’t make it, you know, as a nation
until-to take only one instance- the people who put
up our road signs and the people who need to use
them, to decipher them from their cars, are the
same.”34
A solid critique and occasionally searing is made in the
book which is enjoyable and also a sort of a broad
entertainment. The book is a specimen of Chatterjee’s own
inner experiences rather than experiences of bureaucracy. The
character of Agastya simultaneously attracts our attention
because Agastya self is divided into dispersed thoughts and at
the same time his negative appraisal of the governance. The
protagonist never finds solace in the course of the novel and
his adventures turn to misadventures, his patience to visual
84
situation and frustration. The novel may be seen from the
existential perspectives also. There is no scarcity in the life of
Agastya, no physical wants are out of touch to him yet he
suffers and struggles in the entire course of the novel. He finds
no satisfaction in the arid job which is doing presently.
Everything becomes ill omen to him. The theme of suffering
is writ large in each and every chapter of the novel. The
purposelessness of the hero is due to the lack of his own
concrete vision. Solitariness of the modern man is also the
major theme of the novel. This world is lacking human values.
Fears and sterile sex are seen in this novel. The stony rubbish,
spiritual apathy, broken images, remind us of the English poet
T.S. Eliot. The disillusionment of the post war generation and
the sterility of the post-modern man are continuing and having
a great impact on this great novel. The vision of desolation
and spiritual drought, the plights of the whole generation, a
sigh for vanished glory, the living death of the man, the life of
complete inactivity, leastlessness and apathy have been
highlighted in this novel. At the same sexual perversion, loss
of faith and moral values, lack of human relationship,
commercialization of life, mental tension, politics and war
have been seen at the outset of the novel. Hypocrisy is at a
premium. Flattery is more important than merit. Degeneration
85
and disease are everywhere, in every nook and corner of the
novel. Chatterjee presents a twisted civilization and also
interprets the post modern man in his own way. Life has
become akin to knife. Romanticism is a bygone thing. Not
only ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’ but all the novels
of Upamanyu Chatterjee deal with the ‘post modern inferno’.
Perversion of man ultimately leads to pity and fear which
Chatterjee tries to show in this particular novel. Indeed, it is a
narrative with multi-dimentional meaning and ends with a
note of dissatisfaction and dreary desolation.
Bhola, the central character of the novel ‘Weight Loss’,
finely demonstrates Chatterjee’s notions of the self. He is
throughout a post-modern man and the novelist has very finely
showed the curve of vicissitudes of the mind of Bhola. The
waywardness of the character compels us to think that he is
somewhat insane in the sense that his activities are without
any logical reasoning. He is homosexual and at the same time
has had the desire to have a female company which is a
paradox in itself in the novel. The journey of Bhola from the
very beginning of the novel startles us and at the same time
indulges in us a sort of a curiosity, and that is why the reader
is compelled to brood over the novel. Chatterjee shows the
bad habits of Bhola, even when he masterbates lonely in a
86
dark corner of a room. All these shows the post modern traits
as well as the absurdity of the character. Indeed, we have no
hesitation in saying that it is a dark comedy to the core.
Chatterjee’s wry tone and the searing passages establish firmly
the dismal situation in the novel. The use of lampoonery and
piquancy as a major tool in the novel also shows the
craftsmanship of the novelist. Bhola like his predecessor
Agastya or Jamun finds no respite in this terra firma and the
pent up feelings which are simultaneously frustrating, find its
expression in this novel. It is a novel of no hope neither any
positive output is seen at the end of the novel. Even the plot
structure, as usual, is loose and episodic in its nature like all
the previous novels of Chatterjee. The stream of
consciousness technique along with the magical realism is
applied to a small extent in this novel. Bhola’s story is the
story of a conflict between his conscious and sub conscious
self. Consciously he thinks one thing and sub consciously the
other. It is also a collage of different perceptions, senses and
sensibilities of Bhola in the novel. A searing passage from the
text proves the point:–
“Bhola felt tired and extremely sleepy. He
wanted to go home and back in time and try and
win back his old life with his wife and daughter.
87
 He arose dispiritedly. Matthew Arnold touched
his forearm and with his habitual simper and a
jerk of the head, indicated Anin, with her back to
the room, standing before a table in a corner,
busy laying out before her what looked like a set
of surgical instruments. Somewhere in the back of
his head, Bhola noted that Matthew Arnold too in
the interim had donned the yellowish contact
lenses that were evidently the totem of some inner
cabal.”35
In this passage the longing lingering of Bhola, his
remembrances and the melancholic temperament has been
depicted with deft and symbolic overtones. Indeed, there is a
sea-change in the life of Bhola and his expressions, his
glances and the traumic experiences also change with the
change of time. Another significant passage would
significantly and emphatically show the condition:–
“Abased, Bhola wished obscurely to atone for
what he felt was his final conquest of desire. He
rolled up the sleeves of his kurta and unsheathed
the knife. Since ambidexterity had been for years
one of the objectives of his retarded life, he chose
to cut open first his right wrist. It was odd that the
88
 knife unlocked no memories in him. You can do it,
just me and you, with a little luck, he sang to
himself in encouragement and involuntarily
pulling in his testicles and tensing his abdomen,
pushed down hard with his left hand. He gasped
with the pain. He watched the blood well up and
dribble over into his purplish kurta and wondered
what on earth he was up to. Before he could
change his mind fully, he transferred the knife to
his right hand, placed its blade against the artery
in his left wrist and pressed down. He felt that he
hadn’t thrust hard enough but didn’t have the
courage to try again. The two red wrists in his
lap, limp, palms wrinkled, fingers curled up,
looked like someone else’s, sacrificial offerings
before an object of worship. He lay down, careful
to keep his wrists on his kurta. He shut his eyes,
opened them and, unsure even of which of the two
he preferred, shut them again.”36
Indeed, Bhola’s story is very much picaresque in nature
because he undergoes a series of journey in the course of the
novel. His growth and maturity have been showed with
minutae in the novel. It is a novel of the metamorphosis of the
89
character of Bhola. Basically, in all the novels of Chatterjee
we find the ‘life’s little ironies’ and the human urges, the
existential fears and all these things grew out of silence. All
the characters in the novels are going through the process of
transformation and their urges make them live their life in a
meaningful way. Indeed, the novelist is successful in
portraying the panoramic vision in his novels.

***********

90
 NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August’, Faber and Faber,

London, 1988, P.– 09.
2. Ibid. P.–13.
3. Ibid. P.–01.
4. Ibid. P.–12.
5. Kumar, Shiv K. ‘Agastya and His English Tradition’, Atlantic
Review, Vol. II, No. I, May 2007, P.– 23.
6. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August’, Faber and Faber,
London, 1988, P.–36.
7. Ibid. P.–38.
8. Ibid. P.–128-129.
9. Ibid. P.–263.
10. Kapur Akash, ‘The New York Times Book Review’,
New York, 1994, P.–11.
11. Boston Review, Vol. I, No. II, 1996, P.–19.
12. Theresa, Munford, ‘Far Eastern Economic Review,’ Vol.
II, No. II, 1994, P.–37.
13. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Last Burden’, Penguin Books,
London, 1993, P.–08-09.
14. Ibid. P.–69-70.
15. Ibid. P.–74.
16. Ibid. P.–101-102.

91
17. Ibid. P.–77.
18. Ibid. P.–107-108.
19. Ibid. P.–142-143.
20. Sharma, Anjana, ‘The Hindu’ 21st Jan. 2001.
21. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare
State’, Penguin Books, London, 2000, P.–11-12.
22. Bhattacharya, Soumya ‘The Hindustan Times’, 14th Jan. 2001.
23. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’,
Penguin Books, London, 2000, P.–03.
24. Ibid. P.–12.
25. Ibid. P.–12.
26. Ibid. P.–17.
27. Ibid. P.–21.
28. Ibid. P.–22.
29. Ibid. P.–14.
30. Ibid. P.–67.
31. Ibid. P.–151.
32. Ibid. P.–163.
33. Ibid. P.–172.
34. Ibid. P.–184.
35. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘Weight Loss’, Penguin India, 2006,
P.– 410.
36. Ibid. P.–415.

92
 Chapter -IV

A ST U DY
OF
HIS IM AG E A ND SYM BOL S
 There is no doubt in the dictum what French critic
Buffon asserted long ago ‘l style est l home meme’ (‘style is
the man himself ’). Though the dictum became a cliche in the
arena of twenty-first century English studies, yet the dictum
has its resonance in Upamanyu Chatterjee. Generally the
students of literature begin their respective English studies at
the graduate and post-graduate levels with Francis Bacon who
happens to be the most economical writer till now (in respect
of word-placement and syntactical pattern) in English
literature. Time passes and trends also change with the
changing of time, still some basics never change. Image and
symbols are the basic tenets, rather the primary pillars of
stylistic motif of a writer whether he/she is writing in English
or in other vernacular. As man becomes civilized through a
gradual process of adaptations and evolutions, so also the case
with the history of creative literature. It changes its colour and
shape according to the visions and voices of a particular
author. There is a distinguishing method, rather a stylistic
motif of all writers, everyone is special in their own way.
‘English, August’, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s first novel
shows the author’s unique way of handling images and
symbols. The very first paragraph is ominous for Chaterjee
starts with a quotation from Macbeth where the witches’
words prove to be supernatural. In the very third line of the
novel Dhrubo’s query, “So when shall we meet again?” finally
records the uneasiness as well as the dreary world of Agastya.
In the same way the use of Indianized English words like
‘hazaar fucked’, ‘horny women’ etc. prove to be very
symbolical as the novel advances forward. In the second page
Chatterjee employs the symbol of eroticism when he, at
length, describes his own childhood experiences at Darjeeling
with Tibetan girls:–
“That was a ten-year-old joke from their
school-days in Darjeeling, when they had been
envious of some of the Anglo-Indian boys who
spoke and behaved differently, and did alarmingly
badly in exams and didn’t seem to mind, they were
the ones who were always with the Tibetan girls
and claimed to know all about sex. On an early
summer afternoon, in the small football field
among the hills, with an immaculate sky and the
cakelike white-and-brownness of Kanchanjanga,
Agastya and Prashant had been watching
(Agastya disliked football and Prashant disliked
games) the usual showing off with the ball. Shouts
in the air from the Anglos (which increased
94
 whenever any Tibetan female groups passed the
field, echoing like a distant memory, “Pass it
here, men!’ ‘This way, men!’ ‘You can’t shoot,
your foot’s made of turd or what men!’ (Agastya
had never heard any Anglo say ‘man’).”1
Then again the detailed description of Madna and the
references of Ramayana and Mahabharata symbolise the kinky
rural atmosphere where Agastya was bound to stay. The
allusion of ‘the fallen Adam’ in the seventh page shows his
acquaintances with English literature and Christian mythology
as well as holds up the mirror of Agastya’s terrible feeling and
disgust at Madna. Similarly, R. Tamse’s poem influences him
a lot because it symbolises longing, remembrances, pain and
compulsion:–
“Away from my old life and my spouse,
So many days at this Circuit House,
Away from Goa, my dear home,
On office work I have to roam.”2
This rhymed verse, though seems ridiculous and odd yet,
symbolises isolation and the pent up feelings which are the
characteristics of a post modern man. Chatterjee is also a fine
critic when we find his sharp criticism on the grotesquery of
governance:–
95
 “In Madna, as in all of India, one’s
importance as an official could be gauged by how
long one could keep a concert (to which one was
invited) waiting. The organizers never minded this
of the officials they invited. Perhaps they expected
it of them, which was sickening, or perhaps they
were humouring them, which was some how
worse .”3
The sense of purposelessness is writ large in the novel:–
“Sitting with the three men, he was again
assailed by a sense of the unreal. I don’t look like
a bureaucrat, what am I doing here. I should have
been a photographer, or a maker of ad films,
something like that, shallow and urban.”4
It symbolises the bordem of Agastya at Madna. As the
novel advances forward we find thousands of some images
that symbolise Agastya’s negation and anxiety. In the
Glasgow Herald Review Prof. Mike Peterson comments,
“Each and every line of English, August is a symbol in its
own way. The novel is a jazzy, baggy, hyperbolic, comic,
wryly observed account of Indian bureaucracy and its dismal
state of affairs as well as Agastya’s myriad minded nature.”5

96
 Chatterjee further traces the point that Agastya is in a
dismal condition and the story of Agastya is further revealed
in the statement that follows:–
“Over dessert, Agastya encountered Rajan,
the Collector of Paal. He was stunned to discover
that Rajan was as lethal as his wife (and they
recalled Madan, ‘I feel quite happy when two
really fucked people marry each other-the world
begins to look organized.’). Rajan was aggressive
and open, and given to continual self-revelation in
the conviction that he fascinated his listeners. He
had taught Physics, somewhere in America, ‘with
some Nobel laureate Physicists,’ pronounced
fissicists. From a twenty-minute monologue
Agastya learnt that Physics had led him to Kant
who had led him to the Indian Administrative
Service. ‘Even among those fissicists there were
petty jealousies. I was getting nowhere, I felt. I
was restless’– Et tu, Rajan, smiled Agastya.
‘Why are you smiling?’ ”6
The passage categorically symbolises the aggressive yet the
humanistic nature of Agastya in the sense that he was in a
dilemma how to resolve the encounter with Rajan. Rajan is the
97
colleague of ‘Paal’ and happens also to be the Collector of
Paal. But the personal life of Rajan shocked Agastya rather
mesmerized Agastya that how should Rajan live in a hostile
condition. The entire passage is full of symbolical fabric not
only for the omniscient narrative but the liveliness and the
graphic images such as dessert, aggressive and open really
fucked etc.–all these symbolise the morbid state of Agastya as
well as Rajan.
Similarly, at the end of the novel Agastya was not sure
whether Kumar had been unnecessarily generous or incredibly
base. Agastya’s attachment with Kumar can not be looked
aside and Kumar’s statement is also very symbolical in the
course of the novel. Kumar’s statement with Agastya is crucial
at the climactic point of the novel:–
“Kumar would have sent a police menial to
buy those tickets, and given his style of
functioning, would not have paid the menial any
money in advance. And after buying the tickets the
menial would not have had the guts to ask
someone like Kumar for the money. If he was
going to pay the menial 900 for two train tickets,
he would hardly pay more than 300 for Agastya’s
ticket out of his own pocket. Perhaps Kumar
98
 would repay the menial with a favour (a desired
posting, or the stoppage of a transfer), and had
smoothly pocketed for himself Agastya’s 100. In
his place, smiled Agastya, I’ d’ ve taken much
more. May be it was a sort of deposit towards
future blue films, and he smiled again,
anarchistically, this was certainly a scoop for the
Dainik, especially since it was all conjecture; he
thought about this for a while, but there was no
way of getting the story to the Danik without
getting himself into a mess.”7
The statement altogether symbolises the idiosyncrasies of the
administration. The entire passage seems to be more
naturalistic through the symbols because Chatterjee has been
delineated the Characters in such a way that all are bragging in
the way as administrate does.
At the very end of the novel Agastya’s oddful feelings
find no fine way and the embalming gloom is also all
pervading in the novel:–
“He would have to get up, sooner or later, for
something or the other. He joined his palms
together and looked at them, mounds and lines,
long thin fingers. He wished that he had believed
99
 in palmistry, believed in anything beyond himself.
He tautened his fingers and let them collapse,
again and again. Through them he could glimpse,
darkly, fragments of two sunsets, and boatmen in
Japanese conical hats.
He had met so many people in Madna, but not
Tamse. But, then, he hadn’t really wanted to meet
him, just as he hadn’t wanted to meet Baba
Ramanna, they might have proved
disappointments. He had liked this Tamse of 1962,
but how ridiculous the later Tamse had become,
the government artist, who created statues and Rest
Houses for people whose idea of art could be found
in the drains. Tamse had to learn, he thought, that
to be lonely was not enough.”8
This is actually the catastrophic ending of this novel and
Upamanyu Chatterjee finally sums up the dismal state of
affairs and the inferno in which modern man lives. The
commentary as well as the authorative moorings in the novel
show the calibre of Chatterjee in the sense that he is a master
craftsman dealing with images and symbols. The images are
very much curt, graphic, hostile and at times it seems to be
more morbid in the sense that the author’s own sense-
100
perception is also involved in the novel. Chatterjee never
thought of an absurd ending as the novel very much discloses
but it becomes more a black comedy in the sense that it has no
cathartic effect, which is why, the novel becomes very
melodramatic and bleak. ‘English, August’ is the very first
novel of Upamanyu Chatterjee and he was very much
successful in portraying the ‘botched civilization’ in the sense
of a pure writer. Being an administrative officer (IAS) such a
language which is juxtaposed in the novel looked very much
out of the way and estrangement.
The novel next ‘The Last Burden’ similarly projects the
same symbolic fabric. The very beginning of the novel is
paradoxical in the sense that Jamun reads the life of Mahatma
Gandhi and his idiology whereas he hesitates himself to open
up his mind. The lines that follow will clarify the points:–
“For four slow and secret days Jamun reads
Robert Payne’s life of Mahatma Gandhi, while
outside August slips into a closed and equally
febrile September. The on-off rains are warm,
troubled, and touch off a dreary ache in the small
of the back and a flame beneath the skin. When he
gets the telegram calling him home because of his
mother’s heart attack, it has been raining
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 immoderately and the electricity has gone off.
‘The sky’s an old old kidney’ Hegiste has said,
leaning as far back from his ledger as equilibrium
permits, arms snarled yoglike over his head, neck
angled, eyes half-closed, dreamily sniffing his own
armpit.”9
Jamun lives in such an ambit that the surroundings
become very much indiffirent and his own family life and the
relationship are very much cold which are hinted in the
conversation between Jamun and his parents:–
“When Jamun had last seen his
valetudinarian mother, he had said, ‘I returned
because I was afraid that I would not see you
again’, but his father had not been touched. Yet
his father himself has often murmured, with a kind
of distaste, while his mother naps on the sofa in
front of the TV. ‘She will not live long.’ She
herself has contended the some for the last twenty-
two years. She has also said, fitfully, ‘I want to go
and stay with you, Jamun.’ But he has
circumvented. Rectal cancer. If she endures, she
will trail around with a polythene bag affixed-
something like that.”10
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The impatience of Jamun and his life style is also hinted in the
particular paragraph:–
“Daybreak, the tint of ashes. The impatient
honking of lorries at the liquor joint-truck drivers
topping up and laying in for their stretched day’s
journey into the shadows of the next dive-disturbs
Jamun’s frightful nightmare, the rubble of which
nevertheless rattles him all day. Nothing in his
perception connects with it, yet its matter seems
intimate, and so more frightening.”11
The stray images in this particular paragraph hint out the
morbid as well as purposeless world of Jamun. The particular
images like the honking of lorries, tint of ashes, liquor joint
show the frightful nightmare as well as the disappointment of
Jamun at the very beginning of the novel.
Similarly in the second-chapter entitled ‘A MAROON
CINEMA HALL, AND AYA’s PASSING’ the symbols
become more grave in nature.
Jamun is also a symbol in this novel. He is the central
character but he symbolises the adrift nature of a young man.
Through the character of Jamun, Upamanyu Chatterjee tries to
hint up the very purposelessness and the waywardness of the
angry young man. His family also lives in a conundrum which
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can never be understood if you don’t go through the novel in
detail. His love for Kasturi and his association with Kasturi
compels him to stay to his own house with the family. In his
imagination he associates himself in a forlorn way with
Kasturi and the poignancy of the imagination is increased
because of Kasturi’s coming into the city. Kasturi’s pregnancy
is very much symbolic in the life of Jamun because he has
having the opportunity to become close with Kasturi. His
concern is showed in the following lines:–
“Shall we drive straight to the nursing home?
She’s on the mend. She floated up out of coma last
evening. She recognized me. She couldn’t speak,
though. Her eyelids shuddered. Your father’s at
the hospital too, though I urged him not to exhaust
himself. She in fact croaked! Her heart knuckled
under. Your father’s catnap was disturbed by the
tinkling of Pista entertaining himself with her bell.
How long was she dead? A minute? Ten minutes?
One hour? May be she’d been kaput an entire
hour and nobody realized. Wonder how this’ll
affect her. I picked up some where that the brain
can be choked for keeps if we don’t provide it
oxygen for a minute. She should never have
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 undergone that piles surgery. That ghoul Haldia–
doctors will slay for money– steadily tittering and
fibbing, their forefingers and thumbs moist and
expectant, itching for notes. The sight of her is
grisly. All the time she has globules of some fluid
on her temple. I imagined water from swabbing.
But they were perspiration- swollen pellets of
cold, cold sweat.”12
The third chapter begins with the title ‘CLOSENESS
DIES’ and unfurls the story of the same family tugged up in
the same coweb. Burfi and Jamun went to bring Urmila home
and the entire detail is recorded in a symbolic fabric which
shows the love-hate relationship in a family:–
“Urmila is not overly keen to return home–an
excellent augury, that her cognitive befuddlement
and bodily distress have adequately decreased for
her to discern the comforts of twenty-four-hour
airconditioning, nursing, repose, silence,
greyness. She’s warmed to one nurse in
particular–demure, efficient, flat-chested–and has
jocosely proposed her to Jamun as a potential
wife. ‘She’s pretty and kind. While you introspect
about the meaning of existence and eternity, she
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 can look after your father and me.’ ‘We should
pick for her a less boring husband', suggests
Burfi.
Philip Jonas sends luxuriant bouquets thrice.
Urmila recalls him effortlessly and is charmed
even in her debility because she loves gifts. Jonas
also presents her, incongruously in Intensive care,
with a tin of Earl Grey tea, which delights Urmila
even more.
Three days after the operation, she’s been
shunted to a peripheral, presumably less intensive,
cubicle. Dr Haldia visits her much less frequently
there. The flatchested heroine is recruited as a
night nurse at a hundred and fifty rupees per ten
hours, and twenty rupees for every extra hour;
‘Like a bloody taxi kept waiting,’ bellyaches
Burfi.”13
Such a prolonged paragraph limpidly shows the
indifference that came even in Urmila’s mind. She remembers
practically nothing of her immediate past. She can’t recall
even when she was carted to Dr Haldia. Time has misted to
her and space too. She summarily asks:–

106
 “Isn’t my piles operation done... if you help
me to sit up, then perhaps I can stump upstairs
and loll in the sun for a time, away from your
father.”
This particular statement shows the disappointment of Urmila
that Chatterjee finely discloses through the graphic images in
the third chapter of this novel. Chatterjee’s instance
particularly in this novel compels us to recall the great
American dramatist Arthur Miller whose play ‘Death of a
Salesman’ is also entagled in the same family coweb like
Chatterjee. Indeed, ‘The Last Burden’ is full of naturalistic
images, rather a camouflage of different word-pictures. The
same train of thoughts even continued at the catastrophic
ending of the novel. The following passage emphatically
shows the climactic ending of the novel:–
“Jamun is aware that Shyamanand’s letter
doesn’t afford a complete picture of life at home.
If he telephones Burfi in his office, for instance,
he’s likely to be fusilladed with just how fiendishly
difficult their father has been. Jamun is unhappy
that Shyamanand is unhappy, but he’s also vexed
by his own guilt, and by the selfish, emotional
demands that his family members make on one
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 another even in absence. He is sad, too, at the
swiftness with which his mother’s augury–about
Shyamanand’s misery after her passing–is being
vindicated; at moments, he detests both his
parents, one dead, one dying, for continually
coercing him to choose between them; always, in
their weaning of their sons away from each other,
Shyamanand (as in the letter to Jamun) and
Urmila have both, mindfully or semiconsciously,
fibbed to them, or at least hidden from them bits
of the truth.”14
Rightly asserted by Firdaus Kanga in ‘The Tribune’ that
“Chatterjee is a mercilessly gifted observer. Basically the
novel is about the family disturbance and insane modalities of
a family. Though structured in a middle class family
ambience, yet the character of Jamun becomes larger than life
because of Chatterjee’s glaring symbols and images.”15 The
last line of the novel is very much crucial to comprehend the
succeeding novels of Chatterjee. Rather it is a mystic ending
as we find with Eugene Marchbanks in the drama ‘Candida’.
Here also the writer successfully aims with the vivid symbols
which are very much emphatic and forceful:–

108
 “Behind them is a gossamer rain. Well, not a
bad beginning, reflects Jamun.”16
In the same way the third novel is a coarse satire to the
grotesquery of the governance and the whimsical nature of the
government servants. We find India in its microcosom in this
particular novel. Some say that it is a sequel to the first novel
of Chatterjee’s ‘English, August’. Indeed, the author defies
convention in his writing and he has also defied “conventional
wisdom and proved that great book can have great sequals.”17
The novel begins with a series of image and symbols
starting from a very beginning in the very third page where
Agastya’s settlement is hinted out in a simplistic yet in the
cover of an image cluster:–
“She’d want her sunglasses and some tissues
from her travelling bag and he’d got up to take it
down from the overhead rack when he’d noticed
an uneven dark blue strip running down the
outside of the thigh of her whitish salwaar, like a
ribbon down a bandmaster’s trouser leg. His new
blue jeans had been shedding colour like a snake
its skin. Destined To Fade, ran their ad; they were
called Eff-Ups. He’d died of embarrassment for
four seconds, then had plonked down with her bag
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 on his lap, determined not to get up till journey’s
end, or till she lay down on the floor of the bus,
wriggled out of her kurta, peeled off her salwaar,
sighed and begged him to gnaw off her panties
with his teeth–whichever was earlier. Hadn’t she
noticed how he’d touched her up? Ahh, her
spectacles were off. Ohh, the blessings of
imperfect sight.”18
This authorial comment is tinged with a simple simile
which is significant enough to understand the mindscape of
Daya and Agastya. Then again at the fourteenth page the gist
of the novel is foretold in a brief and succinct paragraph:–
“I’ve been in Bhayankar now, me-laard, for
twenty-two years, in which time the Welfare
State’s done nothing for me for fee–which is as it
should be. I’m not a freeloader, and I’m not
complaining. I’ve paid in bribes for my ration
card, my photo pass and my electricity metre. I’ve
been bribed in return for my vote–but that’s all
fine, it’s the proper procedure. Self-interest is the
only commandment–naturally–of the Welfare
State, the rest is waffle.”19

110
 The last line of the paragraph emphatically tells the
lascerating wounds of a common man in the post- independent
ethos. Indeed, self-interest is the only commandment in the so-
called Welfare State and the rest, indeed waffle. The other
paragraph from the page twenty- sixth would automatically
tell the story of the Welfare State:–
“ ‘I did try once to milk a lakh or two of
rupees out of the Welfare State:-’ Agastya here
turned to an intelligently–smiling Suroor – it was
out of that dairy farm the Department of Culture
and Heritage. It had two mindblowing Twelfth
plan Schemes of doling out lakhs of rupees to any
bearded pseud documentary film-maker to shoot
our Endangered Tribal Heritage and the Jewels of
the North-East. A friend of mine and I’d mapped
everything out–we’d lug a Handycam down to the
dhabas by the river, behind the Tibetan Manastery
on Mall Road in the University area, and film
ourselves smoking dope with the pushers there.
But at the last minute, our middle-class
pusillanimity and squeamishness spiked our plans.
Many moons ago, when I was a babe in these
woods, I’d imagined that People Like Us–i.e., those
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 who’ve grown up on Richmal Crompton and the
Rolling Stones, and who speak English more often
than any other Indian language–we just aren’t
corrupt, we can’t be, constitutionally. Fortunately,
there silly notions evaporated pretty quickly in
these woods- as soon as one grew up, really. How
worthless one’s upbringing’s been when it’s come
to facing one’s own country ! Ah well.’ ”20
The chapter ‘EFFICIENCY BAR’ also portrays Chatterjee’s
visions and voices. Agastya’s day to day life has been hinted
out here also through the minute description and the linguastic
efficacy for which Chatterjee is well known. The chapter
started with the month October and Agastya’s camp-office has
been ‘showed vividly’:–
“The following October. Early in his career,
while examining the junk in the official pen tray
on one of the desks, Agastya had come across an
ear-cleaning pen. Steely-grey in colour, it was
made of some aluminium-like metal. Its nib, about
an inch long and made from the same material as
the body of the pen, was like the end of a ball-
point refill, only more rounded, considerate, more
moulded to the intricate inner spaces of the ear.
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 When he’d realized what it was for, Agastya had
been touched by the wisdom and the courtesy of
the Welfare State. Instinctively, in each new office,
he’d looked for it first thing on his desk and had
never been disappointed. Tickling one’s earwax
with it was a wonderful way to unwind when the
tensions of office become insupportable.
It was in his left ear and he in the midst of his
pre-lunch office crash (than is to say, with eyes
wide open, body behind his desk swaying in sleep,
mind at home, files open before him, hand jotting
and signing away) when the door opened to admit
a man who looked as though he expected Agastya
to spring out of his chair to receive him. He was
tall, fiftyish, slim, with gold-rimmed spectacles, a
trim jet-black wig, well-fitting dentures and bottle-
green safari suit and no moustache.” 21
This is a searing description of Agastya’s life. The line
‘Agastya had been touched by the wisdom and courtesy of the
Welfare State’ instinctively shows the thoughts galore that are
coming up in the minds of Agastya. The idea of the Welfare
State that Chatterjee infused in the entire novel symbolically
has been revolving round every nook and corner of the plot.
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Even Agastya’s interaction with Mr. Sen or Dr Harihara
Kapila is imbued with the same spirit. Chatterjee’s
protagonists here is very much conscious about the
mammaries as well as the Welfare State. Dozen of meetings
Agastya attended but he never forgets the actual ‘waffle’ that
lies behind all the things of life. Then again, the passage in
which Agastya’s oozings find an extra dimensional meaning,
will clarify the point:–
“As usual, Agastya exaggerated without
meaning to. To be sure, whenever he and Daya
met, Casper still flew with the old vigour and
froth, but because several hundred kilometres now
separated them, they simply met less often. They
wrote occasionally and frequently wished they
hadn’t. They were both by nature composed, self-
centred and unhappy. They thought of each other
only in fits and starts, often guiltily, puzzled at the
fickleness of their desire. They would have both
liked to return to the old life–the romance by
night, the yoghurt with honey at three in the
morning, the happy film music through the open
French windows–but they–Agastya in particular–
were too dazed by the minutiae of their daily lives
114
 to act, to move towards recapturing their past.
Their letters to each other reflected their sadness
and confusion only indirectly, that is to say, they
never straightforwardly described their fellings.
Daya for example never wrote: ‘Look, cut the
crap, let’s be together because then we both feel
very nice, and despite–or perhaps because of–the
differences in age, temperament and upbringing,
we should give a future together a chance.
Therefore, please ask the Welfare State for a
transfer back to where you belong.’ Her letters
instead were altogether of a different style.”22
Rightly asserted Dr Sharda Iyer that “Daya-Agastya
episode is so intricate that Chatterjee gives it a bit in the midst
of the complete waffle.”23 Indeed, Chatterjee tries to give the
relation a shape of sanity in the midst of insane atmosphere
pervaded throughout the novel. The author is very much
conscious that the description only of the Welfare State can
mar the intrinsic quality of the novel and at the same time will
make the texture of the novel borings, rather dry, dab and
shabby. That is why, the episodic intervention of the love-
story of Agastya is very much crucial in maintaining the
tempo as well as the relief to the readers who will be heat or
115
press if the dose of Welfare State is prolonged without
suspension or family drama. Here also the Daya- Agastya
episode is a long extended language of cart, ebony dark, arid
love affair of the post-modern times. The episode is further
symbolic in the sense that it brings out also the character of
Agastya as well as of Daya. The discussion is very much
comprehensive between Agastya and Daya and indicates
much that we generally expect of:–
“Agastya shuddered at the prospect of their
next assignation.
Moreover, she was right; his last visit hadn’t
been such a grand success. Of the three days that
he’d been there, she’d had a female friend–a
large, Caucasian Anand Margi whom Daya had
addressed as Lazy Susie–staying over two nights
and sharing her bed, hai Ram, so what was one to
infer? Lazy Susie and Agastya hadn’t hit it off.
She’d found August, his nickname, rather droll
and him in general ill-informed when he, to make
polite conversation, had asked her whether she, as
an Anand Margi, liked dancing with the skulls of
wolves. Later, Daya had told him that Lazy Susie
had disclosed to her that the vibrations that she,
116
 Lazy Susie, had received from Agastya had been
‘cold, sneering and anti-life.’
One of the many things that he’d liked about
Daya was that she came from another planet; there
existed nothing to connect her with the world of the
Pay Commission, the Steel Frame, Interim Relief,
Off-White Paper and the efficiency Bar. With her,
therefore, he’d felt less tired, less futile. On his last
visit, however, he learnt that he should have known
better; the Welfare State was truly everywhere and
even those who sneered at its clumsiness
condescended to suck at its dugs.”24
The very text symbolizes Upamanyu’s bawdy, the very
sexuality that is involved with post-modern men and women.
The language used by the author here is very much symbolical
as well as fabricated with emotions and passions. Agastya
realises here the other world quite alike from the world of
pay-commission, the steele frame, the interim relief, the off
fight paper and the efficiency bar. He also realised the
Welfare State that was truly everywhere and it is not clumsy
at all. The height of sarcasm in the form of dispersed images
is evident also in the chapter ‘FIREFIGHTING ON A WAR

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FOOTING’ where the very first paragraph along with the
second one shows awesome commitment of Agastya:–
“To lesson the awesome amount of paperwork
in the Welfare State, as a last resort, one
government servant does sometimes, request
another to arrange a fire in one of the rooms of an
office (not in his own, naturally, for that would be
conduct unbecoming of him). A great many files
are disposed of in this way. Numerous instances
of this style of decision-making spring to mind–the
Aflatoon Tower blaze of 1973, the Non-Aligned
National Centre conflagration of 1977, the
Senapati Place catastrophe of the same year, the
Millennium Plaza disaster of 1983 and, of course,
the Vesuvian eruption at the TFIN Complex that
the Welfare State took twenty-one months to
recover from.
The burning down of the last was special
mainly in the magnitude of the calamity. For the
rest, like its predecessors, it provided, while it
lasted, terrific entertainment to hundreds of
spectators and after it had charred itself out,
goaded the government to review for the tenth time
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 the existent firefighting measures in its
buildings.”25
Here also Chatterjee has quite sarcastically exposed the
condition as well as the predicament of the Welfare State.
Each word is a symbol in its own way. The last chapter
‘WAKE-UP CALL’ is also tinged with Chatterjee’s piquant
yet witty symbols. The very title of the chapter indicates a
new beginning amidst the all ends like Eliot ‘in my beginning
is my end’. The very last page is very much soothing as well
as abstract in the sense that though it is ended with ‘tetra
pack’ yet Chatterjee’s groan is inexplicable here:–
“Agastya, who was at that time inside the
cabin, was not however at fault. He had just that
moment managed to prise open the stiff fingers of
Suroor’s left hand and place in his swollen, livid
palm a Yin Yang box full of dope. He then
remoulded the fingers tight over the box. ‘You
look as though you need it, friend.’
Miss Natesan turned the knob and opened the
door a fraction when they all distinctly heard from
somewhere inside Rajani Suroor a groan. It was a
slow, loud and deep rumble of disgust, exactly the
sound that one hears from someone who is
119
 wrenched out of sleep by the heat. To Agastya, it
sounded dreadfully like a long- drawn-out Pa-yn-
cho-om. They were a set of syllables appropriate
for the occasion, he felt, a couple to bid adieu to
the dead and with the balance, to greet the world
of the living.”26
Indeed, the novel indicates ‘the world of the living’ in
the midst of ‘waffle’ yet Agastya’s pent up feelings somehow
find no cathartic outburst. Only the ‘life’s little ironies’
remain with him.
The last but not the least novel of Upamanyu Chatterjee
‘Weight Loss’ is also symbolical in its own way. Between the
ages of eighteen and thirty-seven, when he died, Bhola had
just eight sexual partners, four women and four males. When
he reviewed his life, it pleased him that he had maintained a
balance between genders in his choice of lovers. Of course, it
was ridiculous that he should at the age of thirty-seven be
faintly and lightheadedly embarrassed about how few were
the people he had slept with. Then he reminded himself that
that was nothing new, that he had also felt ridiculous not to
worry. Indeed, this novel is about losing-weight and though
the hero dies tragically young, it is, fundamentally comic.
Bhola is innocent and unremarkable, but he has had the
120
crippling obsession with sex and running, fears taking on the
burden of emotional commitment and goes through life falling
in love with all kinds of inappropriate people. At school, he
lusts indiscriminately after his teachers, of both sexes, and is
attracted to eunuchs. While in college, far from home, he has
vaguely demeaning affairs with his landlady and with a
vegetable-vendor-cum-nurse and her husband. Later, he
marries, a woman who sings with a voice of liquid gold,
fathers a daughter and suspects he is close to balance and
beauty. Then his past catches up with him. Really, Upamanyu
Chatterjee’s genius for black humour and the absurd has never
been more compelling than in this unforgettable portrait of a
lost life.
As for as the symbols and images are concerned in this
novel we find it galore from the very second page of the
novel:–
“ ‘Ridiculous. Only when you die, my woman,
will you cease to feel ridiculous’. With his thumb
and fore finger, he began kneading the soft
armflesh between Bhola’s left triceps and armpit.
‘You’ll find time enough later in life, my boy, to
learn big words.’ The pain puckered up Bhola’s
face and propelled him up to the tips of his toes.
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‘No sir please please sorry sir’–Anthony abruptly
released him. Bhola stumbled to his knees, his
upper arm jerking convulsively. Above him,
Anthony spread his legs, thrust out his crotch,
snarled and called him womanish. ‘Womanish’
was his favourite adjective with the younger
students of the school. With the seniors, he, while
stooging their cigarettes, exchanged jokes about
the females on the staff. Bhola’s classmates
relaxed, happy that he had drawn away so much
of the teacher’s attention and, looking at their
watches, calculated how much time was left
before the bell. Bhola remained on his knees till
Anthony entangled his fingers in his hair. The boy
then made to get up and butted his head into
Anthoy’s crotch. ‘I heard Cleopatra’s balls go
plinch,’ he later told an envious Dosto.
The teacher toppled over with a gasp that the
class rejoiced to hear. Bhola tripped against and
sprawled over him, rubbed his nose in the crook of
his throat, pushed his knee into Anthony’s abdomen
and scrambled up before he could gush out in his
trousers. Anthony turned over on his left, both
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 hands cupping his testicles, knees drawn up, eyes
shut, face screwed up, teeth bared. Bhola knelt
beside him, one hand tender on bicep, a second on
hip. ‘Please sir what’s happened. Please sir sir are
you all right?’ He trembled with the moment of
perfect pleasure.”27
Indeed, the symbols are the dencentred signifiers in the
post-modern texts whether it is a novel or a poem or even a
short-story. Here also Chatterjee’s symbols function as the
decentred signifies and thereby bringing out multiple layers of
meaning. The story of Bhola is not an easy story to sketch in
the course of the novel but as the plot advances Chatterjee
unflurls the story of Bhola in a unique way. The following
passage brilliantly exposes Bhola to the core:–
“He lost weight for twenty-five years but was
never content. When, at the age of twenty-two, he
learnt that muscle weighs more than fat, he was
torn for months between muscle gain and weight
loss. No matter what he tried apart from jogging-
swimming, situps, cycling, pushups, walking with
weights, chinups–there always remained a tyre
around his waist and pale blobs on his thorax.
The girth of his chest never exceeded that of his
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 hips. His torso remained a cylinder and never
became a vee. When, at the age of nineteen, he
first read Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, he felt that he
himself would quite willingly have sold his soul to
the devil in return for some divine pectorals. All
shapes more attractive than his own galled him.
Even the ridiculous Dosto with his swimmer’s
body became an object of subtle envy. In the
school changing rooms, as Dosto flexed himself
before the mirrors and drew the attention of the
world to the ripples beneath his skin, Bhola
behind him noticed the hideous contrast with the
dollops of fat on his own body and saw his
reflection become a distorted, watchful and
depressed double image.”28
The passage clearly states the condition of Bhola in a
symbolic yet lucid narration. Here the images Chatterjee uses
are graphic and very much sensitive as example, ‘pale blobs
on his thorax’, ‘sold his soul to the devil in return for some
pectorals,’ etc. These images altogether bring out the very
time through which Bhola undergoes in his teens. The passage
is also a contrast between Dosto and Bhola which constantly
infuses inferiority complex in Bhola. Another searing passage
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from the novel will clarify Bhola’s lust, the distorted lust for
sex:–
“The Sadhu has been both sexy and scary;
Bhola dreamed and daydreamed of him for
months. His mouth widened to engulf and suck on
Bhola’s skull and at the end of the red cord jerked
a fat, rigid snake, its sausage tongue twitching in
and out like the head of a penis. The sadhu joined
the circus that had been performing nonstop in
Bhola’s head for the last several years. Its lead
performers included Gopinath the cook, Anthony,
Jeremiah a couple of others and sometimes even
Dosto in his swimming costume. They all
uniformly behaved for more outrageously than
they would have in real life. Each of them had his
or her characteristic, typical setting but the stage
that Bhola most favoured, on to which all his
fantasy lovers eventually drifted, was the rooftop
terrace, where, in the company of Gopinath, he
had spent some of the most contented evenings of
his life.”29
The author finely develops the ‘contented evenings’ of
Bhola’s life in the passage. The extreme lust of Bhola finds
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here a fine representation through Chatterjee’s decentred
signifiers used as symbols in the novel.
Rightly asserted M.K. Naik in his article ‘Quest for
Identity in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s ‘Weight Loss’ that, “Bhola
himself is the symbol of dejection and degeneration, of shock
and violence in the novel”.30 Indeed, if we look at the
character of Bhola, we find the heavy dose of insanity and
discrepancy in his character. Chatterjee here becomes a
novelist of midnight hours in portraying the habits and
moorings of Bhola. Bhola is as much haunted by the
nightmare of existence as the character of Jonathan Swift. The
feelings that Chetterjee expressed in the novel are the feelings
of dread and disgust, misery and pain, tedium and weariness.
The feeling of essential loneliness which an artist of today
often develops has also its origin in Upamanyu Chatterjee. He
shows again in the novel the neurotic and eccentric
personality of Bhola. Bhola could not adjust himself to social
conditions, and the result was poverty, and misunderstanding,
licentiousness and malady. The more oppressive his feelings
of loneliness, the more was he inclined to be sinful. The sense
of sin was an obsession with him. He could have echoed the
sentiments voiced in some branches of Indian philosophy that
an individual has a sinfal soul and it is from sin that he derives
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his origin. Indeed, Chatterjee treads the primrose path of
dalliance to portray the exact character of Bhola. However,
the last paragraph of the novel further points the mindscape of
Bhola and his revised vision:–

“Before the blurred orange-dark veils of his

eyelids, a child’s face, moon-like, grinned
ecstatically at him. It was his daughter, he was
sure of it, from the world to come, reassuring him
that all was well. He had the impression that she
wanted to pummel him for several minutes into
waking up from the life that he was in. Never in
all his years or in his dreams had he seen
anything more welcome, more beautiful. At the
sight of her, some metal in his forehead seemed to
descend into his body and dissolve into the calm
at its center. Everything became smiling. Her face
crumpled up instead. Do people really weep for
God as they do for their wife and children? Now
who had asked that? Sri Ramakrishna? And why
on earth should they? retorted Bhola, gently
mussing his daughter’s hair, careful not to bloody
it as the life dribbled out of him.”31

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 This last passage is symbolical and philosophical as well
because here at least, we find a hope of redemption, a
possibility of rejuvenation in the midst of ebony black
ambience of the novel. Each and every word in the last
paragraph is significant for it portrays the synopsis of the
entire novel and the revised thinking of Bhola in a brief way
as well. Bhola thinks only of his daughter and broods over the
world of positive fantasy and imagination. His moorings here
find fine expression without any touch of melodramatic strain.
He then thinks of God, the Almighty and remembers
Ramakrishna. The image of Ramakrishna, at the very last line
saves the novel from being totally dark and absurd. The only
word supplies energy in the novel. Ramakrishna is the symbol
of greater understanding and comprehensive sanity of the
world. The image is apt and suits the occasion at the core.
However, to end the chapter few words more are
essential. Chatterjee, in all the four novels tried to show the
malaise and medley of the ‘botched civilization’ and the same
symbols and images become the significant tool to him. His
symbols are allusive, lucid, graphic and at times long–
extended like the imagery of John Milton depicted in Paradise
Lost. Chatterjee’s words, phrases and expressions gush forth
like a jet of water from a sprightly fountain, and in the rush of
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emotions and thoughts he sometimes loses track of syntax or
proper sentence-structure, but his sincerity, to the ‘self’ is
never shakable and his mastery of phrases in his novels is
simply superb and enviable. Upamanyu Chatterjee is
unquestionably wedded to art, and his commitment to prose
art allows the reader to forgive him for his minor blemishes of
rash pronouncement, harsh judgments of the manners of the
characters and excessive physical or sexual exposure. In this
golden realm of art, after all, nothing remains corruptible and
contemptible, nothing sinful and lustful. This is well borne out
by the mural paintings of Ajanta and Ellora and by the time-
tested maxims of vatsayan. Indeed, Chatterjee excels all,
especially in his portrayal of befitting images in his novels.

***********

129
 NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August’, Faber and

Faber, London, 1988, P.– 02.
2. Ibid. P.–09.
3. Ibid. P.–10.
4. Ibid. P.–13.
5. Glasgow Herald Review, Vol. III, No. VI, 1993, P.–34.
6. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August,’ Faber and
Faber, London, 1988, P.–194.
7. Ibid. P.– 217.
8. Ibid. P.– 273.
9. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Last Burden’, Penguin
Books, London, 1993, P.– 03.
10. Ibid. P.– 04.
11. Ibid. P.– 11.
12. Ibid. P.– 35.
13. Ibid. P.– 100.
14. Ibid. P.– 298.
15. Kanga, Firdaus, ‘The Tribune’, Vol. II, No. III, 1993,
P.–34.
16. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Last Burden’, Penguin
Books, London, 1993, P.–303 .

130
17. Majumdar, Boria, ‘The Hindustan Times,’ 24th Jan.
2001, P.–06.
18. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare
State,’ Penguin Books, London, 2000, P.–05.
19. Ibid. P.–14.
20. Ibid. P.–26.
21. Ibid. P.–305.
22. Ibid. P.–323.
23. Iyer, Sharda ‘Colonial Consciousness and Racial
Conflicts in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Novels’, Swaroop
and Sons, New Delhi, 2005, P.–61.
24. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare
State,’ Peguin Books, London, 2000, P.–324-325.
25. Ibid. P.–345.
26. Ibid. P.–437.
27. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘Weight Loss’, Penguin India,
2006, P.–04-05.
28. Ibid. P. –19-20.
29. Ibid. P.–27.
30. Naik, M.K. ‘Quest for Identity in Upamanyu
Chatterjee’s Weight Loss’, Indian Writing in English:
Past and Present, (ed.) Amar Nath Prasad, Swaroop and
Sons, New Delhi, 2004, P. –56.

131
31. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘Weight Loss’, Penguin India,
2006, P.–416.

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 Chapter -V

T H E R E A LIS T IC N A T U R E
O F U PA M A N Y U
C H A T T E R J E E 'S N OV E L S
 Modern novels down from the age of Virginia Woolf or
Evelyn Waugh, the most important trend that has been seen, is
its realistic nature. Realism may be conceived as realistic
portrayal of the society and men; the other way of realism is
what we call ‘naturalism’. The novels of Camus or Kafka are
naturalistic rather than realistic. Naturalism as we know is
extreme realism that we find even in Honore/de Balzac’s
‘Pere/ Goriot’ where father Goriot is facing extreme realistic
way of life, the reason being his own daughters. Realism is of
different kinds and colours, that depends on conceiver, what
one actually conceives.
Indian English literature has had a great legacy of
portraying the realistic literature down from the three
musketeers, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan. The
realism of these masters is of different kinds, quite alike the
realism of the new novels presented in Salman Rushdie,
Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Arun Joshi and even in
Upamanyu Chatterjee. Upamanyu Chatterjee, quite alike the
other novelists of his era has depicted the bleak realism and
the hard times which he faces in his life. Chatterjee always
wrote in an ironic mode, his brand of irony requires as its
vehicle a peculiar language. It should be the language that
looks playing but at the time unfolds layers of suggestions and
innuendoes. He wields his ironic flail against degenerated
society which has brought about socio-moral corruption in the
national scene. His novels are also political and represent the
political reality in a veiled form. He analyses the matrix of
existence in post- modern India and finds it to be largely
woven with the warp and woof mainly political in nature and
traces the perversions and total loss of values in national life
as well as in our personal life. He points out the ill politics
which has become so all embarrassing that there is no vital
area of our life which is not governed by the nature and
quality of the political life and atmosphere we are creating and
living in. For all the ills that we set our life, degeneration and
corruption, corroding our identities, total loss of moral values,
gloom and frustrations pervading everywhere. The source of
the malady lies deeper and consequently does not warrant
such a sweeping generalization; at the same time it may be
admitted and our experience bears it out, that it is difficult to
disagree with Chatterjee.
Actually Upamanyu Chatterjee is a novelist of a
disillusioned age. He is by his education and heritage, a misfit
in the modern world. He had a profound sense of his age. He
was pre-eminently concerned with urban life. Though the
places in his novels are the tiny cities and villages, but he

134
portrays the features of big cities. His novels are of streets,
houses and people and not of the woods, fields and flowers.
We are much impressed by his characters and their gross
selfishness and sensuality. The novels of Chatterjee are
pervaded by dissmelled steak in passage ways, of stale beer, of
cocktails and cigarettes, of dusty paper flowers, of females in
shuttered. The very first novel of the author shows the utter
realism. In ‘English, August’ the very opening paragraph itself
strikes the key- note what is yet to happen in the novel:–
“Through the windshield they watched the
wide silent road, so well lit and dead. New Delhi,
one in the morning, a stray dog flashed across the
road, sensing prey. ‘So when shall we meet
again?’ asked Dhrubo for the eighth time in one
hour. Not that parting was too agonizing and that
he couldn’t bear to leave the ear, but that
marijuana caused acute lethargy.
‘Uh...’ said Agastya and paused, for the same
reason. Dhrubo put the day’s forty - third
cigarette to his lips and seemed to take very long
to find his matchbox. His languorous attempts to
light a match became frenzied before he

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 succeeded. Watching him Agastya laughed
silently.
Dhrubo exhaled richly out of the window, and
said, ‘I’ve a feeling, August, you’re going to get
hazaar fucked in Madna.’ Agastya had just joined
the Indian Administrative Service and was going
for a year’s training in district administration to a
small district town called Madna.”1
The ominous paragraph and the references of witches from
Macbeth, ‘forty - third cigarette’, ‘hazaar fucked’ etc. show
the depressing and bleak atmosphere of the novel. The life of
Agastya and Dhrubo had been shown with great detail in the
novel. Another paragraph will clarify the point:–
“They smoked Dhrubo leaned forward to
drop loose tobacco from his shirt. ‘Madna was the
hottest place in India last year, wasn’t it. It will be
another world, completely different. Should be
quite educative.’ Dhrubo handed the smoke to
Agastya. ‘Excellent stuff. What’ll you do for sex
and marijuana in Madna?’ ”2
The detailed description of Madna is also a representation of
the reality in which the people of Madna live:–

136
 “Glimpses of Madna en route; cigarette- and-
paan dhabas, disreputable food stalls, both lit by
fierce kerosene lamps, cattle and clanging
rickshaws on the road, and the rich sound of
trucks in slush from an overflowing drain; he felt
as though he was living someone else’s life.
His education began on the first evening
itself. The room at the Rest House was big, and
furnished not like a room, but like a house. It had
a bed, a dressing table, a dining table with four
chairs, a sofa, two armchairs, a desk and chair,
two small tables and a beautiful bookshelf. The
room looked like the storehouse of a dealer in
stolen furniture. ‘Why all this furniture? I don’t
need all this”.3
Then, again the lampoonery and grotesquery of the
governance set the realistic tone most significantly:–
“District administration in India is largely a
British creation, like the railways and the English
language, another complex and un wieldy bequest
of the Raj. But Indianization (of a method of
administration, or of a language) is integral to the
Indian story. Before 1947 the collector was almost

137
inaccessible to the people; now he keeps open
house, primarily because he does a different,
more difficult job. He is as human and as fallible,
but now others can tell him so, even though he
still exhibits the old accoutrements (but now
Indianized) of importance–the flashing orange
light on the roof of the car, the passes for the first
row at the sitar recital, which will not start until
he arrives and for which he will not arrive until he
has ensured by telephone that everyone else who
has been invited has arrived first. In Madna, as in
all of India, one’s importance as an official could
be gauged by how long one could keep a concert
(to which one was invited) waiting. The
organizers never minded this of the officials they
invited. Perhaps they expected it of them, which
was sickening, or perhaps they were humouring
them, which was somehow worse.
And administration is an intricate business,
and a young officer who lacks initiative can not
really be trained in its artifices. There is very little
that he can learn from watching someone else;
Agastya learnt nothing. For a very short while he

138
 worried about his ignorance, and then decided to
worry about it properly when others discovered
it.”4
This paragraph shows the bourgeois traditions in the core of
the governance. Mostover, the paragraph shows the life of a
bureaucrat and the predicament of bureaucracy in the core of
the governance. Mostover, the paragraph shows the life of a
bureaucrat and the predicament of bureaucracy in the post
independent era.
The portrayal of modern, young India with all its
nuances finds perfect expression in ‘English, August.’
Upamanyu Chatterjee tries to give the reader a detailed
description of the modern and young India through his
characteristic realism and through the way of depicting catchy
and apt symbols:–
“He stayed in his room for the next three
days, to exercise, masturbate, listen to music,
stone, read slim books on philosophy, and live his
secret life. In Delhi’s sun the three days might
have been terrestrial bliss, but in Madna he
enjoyed his usual tepid insanity, the lizards
chasing one another around Tamse’s painting, an
exhausting courtship. Then the dubious

139
 consolations of Marcus Aurelius, whose wisdom,
at moments, he found infinitely amusing (‘Do
unsavoury armpits and bad breath make you
angry? What good will it do you? Given the
mouth and armpits the man has got, that condition
is bound to produce those odours...’), yet who
continued to fascinate him by his oscillations
between disgust and a longing for the cessation of
its causes. For three days he opened the door only
for Vasant and Digambar. On two nights he
walked along the rail tracks, for miles.” 5
These lines altogether show the inevitable gloom as well as
the realistic, if not naturalistic picture of a metro city, Delhi,
quite apart and away from the life of Madna, the life of
insanity and boredom. The reference of ‘masturbation’ adds
special dimension in the sense that no other novelist of the era,
except Salman Rushdie makes it clear that masturbation may
be, rather should be a part and parcel of life, of the young
people who entered into their very youth. Similarly the
passage also shows the limitation of man as he can’t do
anything without the acceptance of the society. Though
Chatterjee oftentimes overrides, rather excels in portraying the
natural code and conduct that lies covertly in the mind of

140
minds of young men. So also the realism is hinted in almost
every page of the novel down from the first page to its
ultimate catastrophe. The paragraph below should attract the
attention of the critic:–
“Perhaps it was the drink, or Bhatia’s use of
the word ‘fucking’, or some grotesque reaction to
the inglorious horror of the story, or a secret
relief that it was after all someone else who had
suffered retribution for his sins, but suddenly both
of them started laughing. They were deeply
shocked at themselves, and that somehow made
them laugh the more, in a kind of panic. Agastya
switched on the ugly bedside lamp and switched
off the tube - lights. ‘That’s better, laughing in
soft light.’ Bhatia drank from his glass and his
daughter turned to chocking.”6
This passage also portrays the condition of Agastya, the so-
called hero of the novel but the way in which Chatterjee
portrays it, shows his mastery over the language.
The second novel ‘The Last Burden’ is also tinged with
the same reality as we find in the first novel. Jamun’s story
has been highlighted very realistically and in a domestic

141
setting. How beautifully Chatterjee picks up the minutiae of
Jamun’s day to day life:–
“Hegiste and Jamun step out for cigarettes at
six. Hegiste’s son, three and a half, endomorphic
and captious, wants to go too. He puts Jamun in
mind of one of his own nephews, Doom, aged
four, though between the two there is no specific
likeness. On his last visit, on the last day, on his
way out, he had gaped at Doom kicking up a big
big fuss. ‘I want to go with Jamun, I want’. No
Uncle, nothing, just Jamun and with each ‘want’
Doom’s head bobs. Everyone is amazed, for
Jamun is not irresistible to children. Jamun is
unduly touched and mantles with delight. This
hankering for his company–who has evinced it?
Kasturi? His mother?”7
This passage shows the familial ties and the decreasing bond
of relationship in this novel. Then, again the passage fully
testifies Jamun’s character:–
“He is in a kind of rowing boat, closing in on
the waterline of a river, or a lake. Everything is in
focus, the keen night, the deathliness, the swish
and suck of the oars and the water, the hush. Then

142
 the clotted ooze of the bank, like phlegm and mud.
The lights on the salt knolls loom ice - blue in the
moonlight, the livid white of the tube lights
hemming the road pale into the wetlands. Other
contours in the boat, intimate yet shadowy. Jamun
is wearing his customary clothes, jeans etcetera,
and somehow knows that in everyday light the
sand will be oyster - grey and not brown. (How
was he privy to those settings, runs in his head
hourly–why had the sensed that on those flats he
was no stranger? Perhaps he tacks on some
minutiae later, in the discursive light, but the
gooseflesh defies the day–he had trodden those
sands before; on that ashen alluvium he had not
lurched.) Perhaps the hours just before dawning.
The two boatmen (Jamun is an extra for that one
particular crossing) are of a piece - diminutive,
swarthy and rock - hard (like those labourers who
transit past his kitchen window at daybreak tea on
their route to some sweat-and-blood slog.”8
The intricacies of family life have been extolled in this
particular novel. Jamun’s return to the family after hearing the
illness of his mother shows the familial knots and yet the

143
disruptions in it. Jamun knows it very well that it is to be a
great strife to his life that he comes at a time when everything
is not going conveniently. Jamun exposes his angst for the
successive burden which befalls on him. The dichotomy lies in
the fact that Jamun never says ‘no’ to the familial duties yet
his innerself tries to wander like a bird in the open sky. This
particular dilemma continues to the end of the novel and
Jamun is caught in the whirlwind as we find in G.B. Shaw’s
‘Candida’ where James Mavor Morell was also trapped in the
same situation like Jamun but the degree of suffering is less in
‘Candida’ and it is much more great in Chatterjee’s ‘The Last
Burden’. The realistic note is even continued in the successive
stages of the novel which is better illustrated by the author
himself in the authoritative commentary:–
“When Jamun goes down, Shyamanand is
loudly reminiscing to the supine Urmila in the
adjacent room. He is addicted to sporting with
memory. ‘...put a sliced egg in each of their tiffins.
I wrapped salt and pepper separately, in
Britannia Bread paper–Jamun never tried the
pepper; in the evenings in his tiffin the tiny wad
was all along unopened, but when I discontinued
the pepper he was bitterly resentful: Burfi’s tiffin

144
 has pepper, why have you denied me mine?
Occasionally I salted and peppered the bread-
and- butter. I furnished Jamun his lunchbox for
roughly a decade. Burfi scorned tiffin when he
was about twelve-too old, he said, which actually
meant that his contemporaries were ragging him
for being so dull as to cart food from home. In
place of tiffin, he claimed cash.”9
Time changes but the situation is not changing and through the
intermingling of omniscient narrator and the authoritative
commentaries of the novel finely explore what is it to be done
in the novel. Though the rising action of the novel is a bit
shacky yet the climax is finally elaborated and extended in this
narrative:–
“After dinner Jamun trudges down the back
lanes to the beach. Past the fisherwomen and the
offal, through the fetor of the sea, of fresh and
putrid fish. The heavens black and lumpish, the
waters thin and scummy, like black kerosene in a
wobbling, transparent can. Through the night
rovers, the queens, flashers, gynanders, old-world
floosies, the lonely hearts, Jamun casts about
vainly for a sequestered, unsoiled nook, from

145
 where sky and ocean will appear to be one, like a
boundless cinema screen seconds before the show.
May be he will be treated to spangles of lighting,
beguiling advertisements from some other life.
He is very happy that he has given
Shyamanand twelve thousand rupees. He feels
unburdened, blessed. He believes that in the
nursing home his mother somehow knows what he
has done, and is smiling in her numbness. He
plods on, wallowing to his ankles in the sand.”10
It shows Jamun’s happy go lucky situation as well as the
stormy self which is torn between ‘to be or not to be’. The
author’s character-cast is so important that Jamun here finds
special dimension amidst the bulgy humour and racy
dialogues.
The third novel of Upamanyu Chatterjee ‘The
Mammaries of the Welfare State’ is even more realistic but the
realism is quite different here. This is the first Indian novel
where bureaucratic hierarchy has been explored in its detail.
The limitations of the bureaucrats have been discussed at
length; so also the red-ribbon in the government works and the
idiosyncrasies of bureaucrats have been highlighted
throughout the novel. Agastya’s arrival and the meeting with

146
Daya have also been given special attention in this novel. The
following passage will prove the budding relationship between
Agastya and Daya:–
“Agastya spent three to four nights a week at
Daya’s, a forty - five - year - old divorcee whom
he’d met on the luxury coach that he’d caught out
of the Transit Hostel on the occasion of his
transfer. They’d found themselves sitting side by
side at the rear of the hot and crowded bus.
Luxury simply meant that its tickets cost more.
Daya was bespectacled, and had been dressed in
a whitish salwaar- kameez.
Agastya had been in his valedictory present
from the staff of his Rehabilitation office, his new
blue jeans. After eight years in the civil service,
he’d come to dread farewell gifts chosen by
subordinate office employees; after the tearful
speech-making, they’d routinely, on each
occasion, given him a clock.”11
This passage shows the growing intimacy between Daya and
Agastya but the more important fact is that the relationship is
established in such a way that it gives relief rather comic relief
to Agastya’s over burdened mind. Similarly, the shabby duties

147
of Agastya have been hinted out realistically through the
authorial voice:–
“Night Duty was in the Secretariat Control
Room. Up and down the sixteen floors, out of the
Annexe and into the East Wing, withdrawn from
the New Extension and eased into the Old
Basement, over the years, the secretariat Control
Room had changed venues in the manner of a file
being tossed about from Home Affairs to Labour
to Finance to Employment to Personnel to Home
Affairs. When Bhanwar Virbhim had been Chief
Minister the first time, the idea of a Control Room
in the Secretariat had been suggested by his
Principal Secretary to ‘convince the electorate,
sir, that yours is a government committed to
delivering the goods.’
The Secretariat Control Room was supposed
to monitor and sift the information relayed to it by
the thousands of Police-, Earthquake-, Flash
Flood-, Cyclone-, Typhoon, Fire-, Landslide-,
Other Acts Of God-, Communal Riot-, Festival
Mishap-, Special- and General-Control Rooms
located all over the region. To show that the

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 Bhanwar Virbhim government was serious about
the Secretariat Control Room, they set up the first
one on the sixteenth floor itself, within the Chief
Minister’s Secretariat, just a few doors away, in
fact, from his suite of rooms. After three months,
however–‘It’s a security risk,’ opined the police
on the basis of the evidence that began to be
discovered there in the mornings.”12
Rightly says Vasabraj Naikar, “The entire novel is a
galaxy of odd events and glaring circumstances and shows the
insanity and the disorder of governance and of Agastya.” 13 As
the novel advances forward the intimacy between Daya and
Agastya becomes more prominent than ever:–
“He continued to feel nervous and depressed
as he adjusted the pillow beneath his neck. You
deserve this, you Dildo King, he told himself
again as he watched her toss her hair off her
shoulders and straddle his stomach. He’d
generally lived his life according to two dictums:
Finish what you start, and Don’t start what you
can’t finish. He couldn’t quit his job, for instance,
because of his dictums, just as because of them he
now had to swallow whatever this middle - aged

149
 bomb was going to dish out. He was nervous
because he would have preferred to be in control.
Couldn’t she’ve asked him first whether he’d
relish being suffocated by her pussy? Wasn’t he
too a human being, with feelings? She wriggled
about a bit till her vagina was split wide and tight
against his solar plexus. She then began to ride
back and forth, slowly at first, then with gathering
momentum, lazily but irrevocably sliding up over
his chest towards his face. With her hands, she
fondled her breasts, teased her armpits, kneaded
her stomach, played with her hair, adjusted the
sound from the stereo by the bed. Rhythmically,
she groaned and gasped, deep but subdued, and
licked her upper arms, her breasts. By the time
that she’d crossed Agastya’s nipples, his spunk
was flying all over the room like Casper the
friendly ghost.”14
The second part of the novel ‘CONDUCT UNBECOMING
OF A CIVIL SERVANT’ is more realistic, if not naturalistic.
The second para is a beautiful instance of the protagonist’s
pent up feelings:–

150
 “Love-Like-Hate-Adore isn’t as well-known a
game as it should be. It is a splendid time-killer
because white squandering away one’s most
precious resource, it permits one at the same time
to rove from one object of one’s lust to another to
gauge whether–and to what extent–they
reciprocate one’s affections–and indeed, deep in
one’s heart, what one oneself truly feels for them.
It–LLHA– also encourages one to spell correctly.
On a piece of paper, one writes the name of
whoever one is idly itching for at that moment, or
on that day.”15
The passage shows the colour and variegated life of Madna as
well as of Agastya. Similarly, bureaucratic life has also been
portrayed with accuracy in this narrative:–
“One - eleven p.m. The Commissioner needed
to return home for his bracing massage and his
light lunch. He smiled at Suroor, scarcely
disarranging the hard fat of his face, and pushed
a paan into his mouth. He was a perennially
hungry, carnal man. In his unending, unscientific
tussle with obesity he’d snacked for years on
paans. Stocky, the hard fat enclosing cold eyes

151
and a gap - toothed, brutish mouth, the sort of
figure that, while erect, rocks all the time on the
balls of its feet. ‘The Collector told me that you
and he enjoyed a long chat last evening.’
Raghupati disregarded the minutiae of his work,
but was on the ball, intuitively, about the stuff that
cast long shadows. So to Suroor he added in a
purr, ‘I’ll be delighted to attend the performance
on Friday.’ ”16
“Two decades ago, when he’d been Assistant
Collector at Koltanga and had all but sparked off
a riot because he’d buggered his bungalow peon
who hadn’t liked it one bit, who’d caved in and
squealed blubberingly to his parents, the crowd
that had gathered around Raghupati then had,
without altogether swallowing his protests, finally
done nothing but complain to his Collector. It
hadn’t quite known how to touch– leave alone
manhandle him. In that golden time, he’d been a
thousand rungs above the hoi polloi and their law
that he administered. But with the years, that
interspace had narrowed and warped
considerably, and a few of them had even begun

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 to dress like him– in tight safari suits of elaborate
stitchery–and he simply couldn’t risk buggering
bungalow peons anymore, and could just about
get them to massage him instead.”17
Such a searing passage uplifts the realistic fibre of the novel.
Further the author says in nutshell the predicament of the
Welfare State:–
“The Welfare State hadn’t been paying her
either for her views or for the mulish
determination that’d changed her face, and he
hadn’t cared for the ease with which she’d
stopped calling him ‘Sir’ or ‘Saab’ in bed, so he’d
rammed into her for another fifteen seconds, and
then declared in farewell, ‘you know, our
country’s not progressing because of people like
you only.’
The following week, she’d sent him the first of
her two anonymous letters on the subject of
employment in the government. She’d signed both
Tina Munim, but since that hadn’t been her actual
name, he’d considered the petitions to be simply
two more in the endless list of unsigned letters

153
 received every week in numberless offices across
the land.”18
Being an administrative officer Upamanyu Chatterjee digs
deep into the root of the Indian administrative system, rather
we may say that, it is a satirical portraiture of the Welfare
State that is India. The lackadaisical atmosphere of the
governance and the indifferent attitude of the bureaucrats have
been finally explored page after page in this novel. The
loneliness and boredom have also been hinted in this narrative,
quite like the very first novel of Chatterjee where also the
solitariness of Agastya finds a fine expression:–
“Nervous, in two minds, without saying
anything, Agastya put the phone down. It
immediately began ringing again. Ignoring it, he
watched his host carry a plastic water bottle to
the window, rinse his hands, gargle and spit out
into the void three mouthfuls of water, return to
the desk, pack up his lunch box in a plastic bag, in
passing drop a cupful of water to douse a spark
atop a mound of files that had been smouldering
menacingly, flick invisible specks of dust off his
suit, and with a last, sad glance at Agastya, toting

154
 the plastic bag and the water bottle, make his way
to the door.
It unnerved Agastya to realize that he was
going to be left alone in the room. ‘Oh, I ought to
be leaving too. Many thanks for the light for the
cigarette...Aren’t you going to switch off your
heater?’ ”19
To quote ‘The Hindu’, “The passage is raunchy and tough,
smooth and almost facile, Mammaries shares with all good
satire, its power to simultaneously shock and amuse.”20 The
last part of the novel OUT OF THE WAY’ predicts the total
massacre and the hurly-burly situation of the governance,
though there is a ray of hope of rejuvenation and reincarnation
of the system. There is a gap between the aspiration and
acomplishment at the end of the novel. But Chatterjee finely
adjusts the situation among terrific take off.
The last novel of Chatterjee ‘Weight Loss’ is a dark
comedy in the sense that it portrays the abnormalcy and
adolescence of the character of Bhola. Bhola is a social misfit
and his grotesque nature has been highlighted in this novel
whereas the Bindu is a drop or globule. The Bindu is a
metaphysical point out of time and space, the zone in which

155
spiritual weightlessness is experienced. This description will
certainly prove Bhola’s character succinctly:–
“Bhola’s classmates thrilled at the sight of the
stick being broken on his head. Anantaraman,
however, a pale, sensitive, shy, nervous and
complex boy, passed out. Anthony sneered at
being distracted from his labours in so amateurish
a fashion and walked across to loom, hands on
hips,like a supervillain in a comic, over the
bespectacled heap. He bent and nudged the body
with the part of the stick that remained in his
hand, then, straightening up and looking around
commanded the group, ‘Here, some of you carry
the ninny over to the Dispensary.’ Bhola, scalp
aflame, stumbled forward to volunteer, to escape,
for he found Brother Dr. David Tolaram at the
Dispensary sexy too in a different, hairy sweat -
and - cologne kind of way. Some of the boys
snickered at seeing him lift up Anantaraman’s left
leg but he had correctly–though instinctively–
gauged that with one fainted student and one stick
broken on another’s head, Anthony had sated

156
 himself with violence for the day–or for the
afternoon, at any rate.”21
Similarly, Bhola’s dreams and daydreams have been portrayed
aptly in this novel:–
“Bhola knew the cooker, a cheap, counterfeit
product with a faulty lid, to be one of the most
dangerous gadgets in a household already
sufficiently menaced by violent and lunatic
tempers, passions and temperaments. Four times
a week, its lid flew off the handle and hit the
ceiling, spraying the next meal of the trio all over
the walls and bed. Moti found the antics of the
cooker more amusing than dangerous. Bhola
could see what he intended to do with it but was
paralysed by the tension of waiting for the event.
He opened his mouth meaning to alert the doctor;
what emerged sounded like a saline, hot water
gargle in the early morning. Positioning himself
behind Borkar, Moti with both hands brought the
cooker down on the back of his head with a thud
that seemed to rattle the windows. Water splashed
bountifully over the three of them. The bottle sank
into the pleats of the sari at Titli’s abdomen

157
 before bouncing on to and trundling–frightfully
loudly–away across the floor. With a soft,
sorrowful moan, Borkar slumped sideways and
across Titli’s legs. Moti flung the cooker down.”22
His crippling obsession with sex becomes a burden to him but
the novelist has finely explained the reality behind it. It is a
real novel with a black - humour and absurdity and so it is
very compelling. The CALM CENTER summarizes the entire
tone of the novel:–
“The silence was sudden and overbearing,
accentuated by the gentle rhythmical sighs of
Titli’s exhalations. She slept with mouth partly
open and forehead a little furrowed – perhaps by
the load of her sins. Even the scarlet wall behind
her with its geometrical designs in yellow and
black appeared too dark and oppressive. Bhola
shut his eyes. The room seeming to loom in
towards him, became even more intolerable. He
opened them again. He glanced around, arose
and shuffled across to reposition himself on the
mattress which the white women had abandoned a
while ago.”23

158
 Indeed, it is a novel of angst and anger, medley and
malaise, tension and terseness–amidst all these things Bhola’s
character is blooming up and becomes larger than life.
Being a post independent novelist, Upamanyu Chatterjee
tries to bring out all the nuances of human life and the
complex mind of the people at the verge of twenty first
century. Reality is a theme, rather a motif in all the novels of
all the novelists writing in India about the diasporic
experiences of the country but Chatterjee’s treatment of reality
is distinguished in itself because of his intermingling of gloom
and goodness, tragedy and taciturnity. His insight into the
characters is more real than any other novelists of the time. All
his novels are a psychological odyssey that can only charm
and amuse us.

***********

159
 NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August’, Faber and Faber,

London, 1988, P.–01.
2. Ibid. P.–03.
3. Ibid. P.–05-06.
4. Ibid. P.–10.
5. Ibid. P.–231.
6. Ibid. P.–265.
7. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Last Burden’, Penguin Books,
London, 1993, P.–05.
8. Ibid. P.–11-12.
9. Ibid. P.–16.
10. Ibid. P.–70.
11. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare
State’, Penguin Books, London, 2000, P.–04.
12. Ibid. P. –15.
13. Naikar, Vasabraj, ‘Indian English Novel’, Sterling
Publishers, New Delhi, 1997, Vol. IV, P.–65.
14. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare
State’, Penguin Books, London, 2000, P.–33.
15. Ibid. P.– 45.
16. Ibid. P.–60.

160
17. Ibid. P.–61.
18. Ibid. P.–89.
19. Ibid. P.–216-217.
20. ‘The Hindu’, Delhi edition, 14th Dec.2006.
21. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘Weight Loss’, Penguin India,
2006, P.–07.
22. Ibid. P.–187.
23. Ibid. P.–413-414.

161
 Chapter -VI

THEFINALESTIMATE
 “
Rich in stagnant expectations
The common man rehearses nothing but frustrations
Uttered in defeating silence of caves
Deserted for long.”1

These lines aptly sum up Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novels.

Indeed, expectations are there but frustration and silence writ
large in every pages of Chatterjee’s novels. The journey which
begins with ‘English, August’, down to the ‘Weight Loss’
there is a completed pattern in the carpet. The pattern is of
human urges, existential fears and evasive silence. Many
conclusions emerge from what has been said in the foregoing
discussions of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novels. Images from
nature and human life and its activity in the post modern life
are recurring in his novels. In styles and imagery Chatterjee
avoids all kinds of over - loading unless he is out for very
special effects generally he finds away, middle way between
intellectualism and lyricism, or Chatterjee balances the two in
ulternate novels. The variety and freshness of his style and
realism add to literary and artistic qualities of his novels.
Some efforts are required to comprehend them because they
reveal the inner state of mind of the novelists which is full of
thoughts and feelings. His images are clear - cut, concrete and
precise; sometimes he has borrowed allusions and images
from many sources but he has given his own original colour.
Chatterjee’s ultimate point of view is to make the reader
understand the significance of vibrating life and how people
struggle even in convenient circumstances. All the
protagonists of Chatterjee may be seen from the angle of
socially misfit but the throbbing sensations and passions make
them larger than life. If we take the instance of Agastya from
‘English, August,’ we find him in the world of carnivalesque,
masquerade. From the very beginning of the novel we find
Agastya in dichotomy:–
“He went up to the mirror on the dressing
table, bent forward till his nose pressed against
the mirror and asked himself silently what was
happening to him. Not even twenty-four hours
over and he felt unhinged, without the
compensations of insight or wisdom. He lay down
and looked at the wooden ceiling. He could
masturbate, but without enjoyment. What is it? He
asked himself again. Is it because it is a new
place? Yes. So do I miss the urban life? Yes. Is it
because it is a new job? Yes. The job is both
bewildering and boring. Give it time, not even
163
 twenty-four hours. He waited for the mosquitoes.
The ventilator was open, the room filled with the
stench of the excrement of others when the wind
came his way. My own shit doesn’t smell like that,
he thought randomly. He absent - mindedly
fondled his crotch and then whipped his hand
away. No masturbation, he suddenly decided”.2

These lines altogether are the testament of Agastya’s shattered

belief and paralysed thinking. He is not at all satisfied in
Madna he had to coke up with the situation there. This is the
reason that he is over addicted to mar the boredom off:–
“Agastya thought of getting some marijuana
to ignite the whisky, as it were, but desisted. He
felt unequal to the exertion, for one thing. Besides,
he wasn’t sure how Shankar and his brother
would view it. He remembered with a smile his
uncle’s last words at Delhi railway station. ‘If you
have to smoke that ganja, smoke in secret. It is not
an addiction for display.’ He had then looked
away. ‘Write as soon as you settle down’. His
uncle had been so scathingly cynical when he had
discovered Madan and Agastya smoking in their

164
 first college year. A winter Sunday, they had been
on the roof, Madan filling a cigarette.”3
Cigarettes and marijuana temporarily wave the
solitariness off from the mind of Agastya but the reality the
author tries to show, is the predicament of the post-modern
man. The characters are amply serving the symptoms of the
psychic malady which had taken hold of post-modern man. In
that novel ‘English, August’ it is but natural that we meet with
boredom, hopelessness and depression, mental disintegration,
and nervous exhaustion and pathetic efforts to find the
fragments of a shattered faith. The novel is peopled by
characters who have lost the ability to live life fully. So also
fear and sterile sex characterize the novel. Spiritual apathy
together with split personality of Agastya has been explored in
the novel. It is a realistic novel with the touch of Balzac’s
naturalism and Laforgue’s symbolism. The graphic images
and symbols as we stated early in the preceding chapters, are
enough proof of what is yet to happen in the world of Agastya
and in the novels of Upamanyu Chatterjee as well. In a sense,
it is the wasteland for Agastya even for all the protagonists of
all the novels. The circular journey amidst the bleak
atmosphere, the madness, malaise and malady of the

165
characters are so touching that we can hardly left any page
unturned.
Similarly ‘The Last Burden’ focuses on the story of
Jamun and the domestic family setting. The complexities of
life as Jamun faces successively have been portrayed
artistically as well as realistically in the novel. Indeed, Jamun
is compelled to live in the whirlwind of the family which
makes the condition more worse for him. He finds no solace in
the family though all the members of the family are in mental
stress. Once there he decides to stay on until one of his ailing
parents dies. He barely admits to himself that there is,
probably another stronger reason for his extended stay in the
family home. Here also Kasturi is the critical character and
Jamun finds relief in contact with Kasturi. Fleeting back and
forth in time and space, and writing in a language of
unsurpassed richness and power Upamanyu, Chatterjee
presents a funny, bitterly accurate and vivid portrait of
awesome burden of the family ties. It is extremely a well
crafted tale of moribund familial ties, with an admirable ease
and restraint. The author is a mercilessly gifted observer who
points out every minute details and the curve of vicissitude in
the family. In a sense, the novel is about breaking ties and

166
renew open-ended relationships. The last page of the novel
aptly describes everything in a nutshell:–
“An amiable, almost horizontal drizzle while
they wait on the platform. Hegiste shows up at
eleven - thirty with a shaky wheel - chair of the
gynae hospital. The train is fifteen minutes late.
Shyamanand is in his creamish kurta-pyjama,
crumpled and all-anyhow after the journey.
Jamun is stunned at how much his father’s
withered in three months; he is, or appears, a
couple of inches shorter than he was. His once-
silver hair is now acid-yellow, and he takes a
second or two to recognize his son. The fancy
flashes into Jamun’s mind that his father has been
supplanted by a scifi clone from another globe,
the inhabitants of which are slightly smaller
versions of ourselves. ‘Hello, Baba, you look
good.’ He touches Shyamanand’s feet and they
enfold each other. ‘Hi, Agastya. Many thanks.
How was the journey?’
Shyamanand doesn’t budge, but waits for the
chair to be hauled and jolted into place under
him; he feels so tuckered out that he can’t even
167
 rely on his right leg any more, and he mustn’t
make an ass of himself in front of Jamun’s friends.
Amidst considerable confusion-hissed directives
and yanking of paralysed limbs- Hegiste and
Vaman help Shyamanand into his seat.”4
Indeed, confusion is everywhere in the novel but Chatterjee
portrays it very scrupulously.
The third novel of Chatterjee ‘The Mammaries of the
Welfare State’ also portrays the same existential fears, human
urges and evasive silence through the portrayal of the
grotesquery of governance. As we have stated earlier, the
novel is a sequel to ‘English, August’, rather an extended
version of the author’s views and visions as depicted in the
first novel. This novel repeatedly portrays the difficulties and
anxieties of a civil servant in administration. In this novel also
Agastya’s views are expressed in a tangent manner:–
“Agastya wished to contribute his views. ‘I
too have examples of plain living and low thinking
. The plain liver is my Assistant Director friend
who turned vegetarian because he couldn’t afford
meat. The low thinker is my cop acquaintance, a
Station House Officer who was dementedly
corrupt because he contended that he had four
168
 daughters to marry off with dowries of over five
lakhs each. Speaking of which, why doesn’t the
Welfare State legalize dowries for the civil
servants of its Steel Frame? It could then stop
paying them salaries altogether.’ ”5
The dispersed meditation of Agastya finds its real
exhibition in this narrative. Agastya is torn between his beliefs
and disbeliefs, his vocations and avocations. Here Chatterjee’s
depiction of human nature is more severe and harsh because of
the tempo which has to be maintained by the novelist. The
doubts and conflicts continue in the novel and the quest
toward the interior has been showed through multi-
dimensional images and symbols. The novel also presents a
disturbing scepticism about the governance in India and also
an awareness that is illusory and can not be sustained. Here
the author’s use of motifs is indeterminate and not schematic.
The narrative method of Chatterjee includes all the variety
ranging from omniscient narrator to the authorial voice which
is one of the stylistic motifs of the novelist. It is a text of bliss
according to Roland Barthes because it unsettles the readers’
historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the
consistencies of his taste, values and memories. Sometimes
the novel seems fragmentary monologues of Agastya but all
169
the monologues together with soliloquies merge in this novel
and give it an organic shape. The data has been presented
methodically and unscrupulously in the novel, as if the reader
may take it as a report of the administration. Long passages
are adjusted with italic lines and report presentation:–
“Agastya made himself comfortable on some
files on the window ledge. It was a good place to
finish his joint; then he’d get back to locating
Dhrubo. Sighing richly, he exhaled dragon-like
through where the pane was meant to be. Before
him, not a hundred feet away, were the rows of
windows of some other wing of Aflatoon Bhavan.
From his seat, he could see nothing else, no sky,
no ground, just the occasional pipal sapling
tenaciously finding life in the damp walls, the
black waste pipes and the trash of fifty years
thrown out of a thousand windows. Where they
weren’t slimy - green with damp, the walls of
Aflatoon Bhavan were a duty gray. One in two
window-panes was broken, two in three windows
wouldn’t shut. Pigeons roosted on the occasional
air-conditioner. Families of monkeys went about
their business on diverse floors, under different
170
 ledges, much as though his seat was a vantage
point from which to view a cross-section of some
simian apartment block. He couldn’t see much,
though, of the interiors of any of the rooms that
faced him. Those windows that hadn’t been sealed
off by air-conditioners had been stoppered by
brown files, by mountain ranges of off-white
paper, chunks of which, in landslides, had joined,
on the overhangs below, the plastic bags, the
newspaper wrappers of lunches, the dry ink stamp
pads. Nothing, no record (the mountain ranges
seemed to say) is ever thrown away.”6
Indeed, the novel is a funny picture of the realistic situation
and the waffle.
The last but not the least novel penned down by
Chatterjee is ‘Weight Loss’ which is even more substantial
and heart - rending. It is only tangentially about losing weight
and though the hero dies tragically young yet the novel is
significant in its own way. As is stated iteratively that the last
novel of Chatterjee focuses on a particular topic that may be
seen as a case of distortion because the character of Bhola in
the novel is quite out of the way; he is the perverted
personality in the fiction. The only thing that he does, does for
171
himself, to satisfy his carnal desire whether it is homosexual
or heterosexual or sexual. The novel has been casted in such a
way that accurately and perfectly draws the attention of the
readers. Chatterjee here tries to unfurl the curve of vicissitudes
in the mind of Bhola and his moorings in the novel. As has
been stated several times, the novel portrays also the post-
modern sensibilities and the aftermath of the cyber age.
Novels galore in English written by the British or American
authors portrayed or are portraying the ‘botched civilization’
but more accurate picture of perverted sex or squalor of the
city life has been presented by Chatterjee in the Indian English
novel. The absurdity and austerity together with abnormality
looms large in this particular novel. Bhola may also be taken
as a symbol of waywardness and totally disconnected
personality, quite away from the general way of life as we
generally perceive in our daily routine life. Rather we may
also attribute the protagonist as a specimen of Chatterjee’s
dispersed meditation.
As it is the concluding chapter of the novel, so we must
generalise the things a bit. We have already given proper
attention in the successive five chapters about the main topic.
Evasive silence and the reality have been expressed with great
care in the first three chapters. It has also been tried to analyse
172
the matter according to the chronological order of the novels.
In each and every chapter, the discussions have been made on
chronological order of the novels. A few words on the stylistic
part may enrich the end. As far as the stylistic motif or style is
concerned Upamanyu Chatterjee follows the dictum of the
French critic Buffon’s words (as we have stated earlier), ‘l
style est l home meme’ (‘style is the man himself’). In all the
novels a general pattern in the carpet has evolved which we
can perceive very much. Right from the use of omniscient
narrator to first person narrative the author shows a variety of
narrative skill in the novels. Likewise, authorial voice is subtly
used in ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’ and ‘English,
August’ that also acts as a choric role in the novels. The
authorial voices at times, seem as a commentary on the
situation, other times, it may be seen as a suggestion to the
protagonist or the other Characters in the respective novels.
Likewise, in the great Greek tragedies of Sophocles or
Aeschylus or Euripides the author uses the authorial voices
with a definite point of view and purpose but in a refined and
sophisticated way. A lot of tones and overtones, eavesdrops
are seen in the novels which are specially designed to
embellish the novels. There also several images and symbols
used in each and every novel are also significant to portray the
173
evasive silence and the reality. First of all, the minute
descriptions as depicting poetry on the walls in ‘English,
August’ or showing all the nuances of administration in ‘The
Mammaries of the Welfare State’–all these things are carefully
set down to portray the essential vision of the writer.
Chatterjee has also presented graphic images, images that are
curt and naturalistic to set the tempo and theme of the novels.
The use of drafts and letters in the narrative scheme though
diverts the attention of the readers, yet the writer has
maintained the time-place-action unity to avoid
inconveniences and disparities. All the novels of Chatterjee
also represent the dichotomy and dilemma of the central
protagonists of the novels. The conscious, sub-conscious and
unconscious level of thinking and the way of thought
processing of the heroes are well-presented in the novels.
Rather we may say that the thought-structure of the characters
is presented in such a way that, at times, may seem absurd or
uneven but it is quite natural that to portray the discrepancies
of the characters, Chatterjee is compelled to show the
disparities alongwith abnormalcy through a tripartite structure.
The ‘English, August’, as well as the ‘Weight Loss’
simultaneously portrays the sub-conscious mind of the
characters and heroes as well. The sub-conscious thinkings of
174
Agastya or Jamun or Bhola are the marks of their own
distinguished way of living life. It has also been seen in the
context of the themes that the thought process is not rational at
several times but it is also normal because it shows, rather
unfurls the total thinking level and the graph of
comprehension of the characters.
To conclude the chapter, we may say that Upamanyu
Chatterjee has presented the panoramic view of life in his four
novels. The novels are tinged with human urges symbolised
by Agastya, existential fears showed through Jamun and
Bhola and evasive silence which is all pervasive in these
novels. In brief Chatterjee waves the wand in his novels and
the immortal characters of novels give us the sense of
‘longing, lingering, look behind’. Indeed, open-endedness
leaves the possibilities to unfurl more for the budding research
scholars.

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175
 NOTES AND REFERENCES

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6. Ibid. P.–212-213.

176
 S E L E C T E D
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