CHAPTER -V THE REALISTIC NATURE OF UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE'S NOVELS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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.”" 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?’”” The detailed description of Madna is also a representation of the reality in which the people of Madna live:—“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”? 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” 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.” * 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."* 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 li “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?” 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.”* 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.’” 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." 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. Afier eight years in the civil service, he’d come to dread farewell gifis chosen by subordinate office employees; after the tearful speech-making, they'd routinely, on each occasion, given him a clock.’"" 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 148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.””” 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.”"? 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.’ 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:—“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.”"* 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, ‘T’ll be delighted to attend the performance on Friday.’ ""® “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 152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.”"” Such a scaring 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 8received every week in numberless offices across the land.”"* 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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?’ ”” 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.””” 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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himself with violence for the day-or for the afternoon, at any rate.””' 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."”? 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.”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. feeNOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August’, Faber and Faber, London, 1988, P01. . Ibid. P.-03. . Ibid. P.-05-06. . Ibid. P10. . Ibid. P.-231. . Ibid. P.-265. YNaAwWR WN . 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, P65. 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, 14" Dec.2006. 21.Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘Weight Loss’, Penguin India, 2006, P.-07. 22. Ibid. P-187. 23. Ibid. P.-413-414. 161