Journey to the essence of India

Ratna Raman

In a longish writing career, Upamanyu Chatterjee has worked with the genres of the novel, the story and the novella. This collection of 12 eclectic stories of varying length written over a period of 30 years showcases both the possibilities of the short story as a contemporary genre as well as Chatterjee's brilliance at his craft. Some delightful short and not-so-short stories provide vignettes of urban life at New Delhi, Bombay as well as the interiors of ruraI India and journeys both within India and outside of it. 

The collection opens with a rather longish story that could have been shaped into a novella or evolved into a play as it is put together as notes for a skit over 10 episodes. 

History Lessons, hitherto unpublished and possibly recently written, is a tour de force because this is vintage Chatterjee, raconteur, critic, and historian, both direct and droll, playing with history and genre, drawing upon journals and memoirs and locating his identity very firmly as a post-colonial Indian. 

The visit of an English ambassador during the reign of Jahangir and Shahjahan and Alamgir keeps us abreast of the adventures of Thomas Roe who hopes to enable the British East India Company to establish trade links in india, while elbowing out the Dutch and the Portugese. Located, in the 16th and 17th century, correlation between the lives of Shakespearean and Jacobean playwrights and the Mughal emperors reveals a time warp wherein both England and Thomas Roe are shown as being of very little consequence. 

Although Roe’s journals are validated over subsequent centuries by white historians, neither Roe nor England receive so much as a mention in Tuzuk-e Jahangiri, the memoir documenting the life and times of Jahangir. 

Chaterjee's anecdotal oeuvre ranges from the comic to the satirical and ironic and is sharply critical of the Mughal dynastic hubris and the European merchant opportunisms. His story also draws attention to the marginality of the poor and disempowered, highlighting the compete indifference of those in power to their plight. The espousal of the underdog is, in fact, a recurring motif in Chatterjee's stories. 

He skilfully repossesses both literary phrases and personalities from the hoary English tradition to make them his own, adding to the reading pleasure of most literary aficinados. He tweaks time and imaginatively links details from the obscure past to contemporary places and events with little effort and with great humour. His nuanced revisiting of the story of the pied piper, who disappears with all the children of Hamlin, and the unexpected happy ending makes for a delightful intervention. His reworking of Coleridge's poetic journeys through The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Xanadu is compelling. 

Othello Sucks is a wonderful riposte demonstrating that literary texts must not be dealt with in the manner of sacred cows. It reiterates the need to re-examine extant traditions of canon formation and their relevance. The insertion of Hindi in Devanagari script in Foreigner as a literary nod to the bilingual predilections of the 20th-century novelists, is both charming and effective. 

Chatterjee is well read, a keen observer and a well-informed analyst of contemporary India. Looking out for all those who have been pushed to the peripheries of urban and rural lives, Chatterjee does not shy away from dragging the reader's attention to the abyss. The Killings in Madna, a story set in contemporary rural India, highlights the privilege and power enjoyed by the police and the bureaucracy. Juxtaposing this with the stark poverty and deprivation of most members of local communities, Chatterjee depicts the brutality and violence that characterises processes of administration in remote areas of our country.

The tone is often comic, self-deprecatory or laconic. Yet, each one of these short stories captures pain, trauma, ennui, horror and shock while serving as copybook examples of what the perfect short story ought to be like. Each story is layered and dense and very different from the next and could easily evolve into a full length novella. Woven around gay lives, the slow decimation of sparrows, rights of manual scavengers, the unbelievable murder of Arushi Talwar and Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Chatterjee's stories deal with issues of love, failure, loss and breakdown with great finesse.

He writes about Indians and non-Indians, in India and in the world, offering us a wide range of situations and characters we can empathise with. Sifting through history, myth, fairy tale and scientific data, the narrator of these stories serves as the eye of the storm. Pushing the reader to engage with the world and confront issues that plague and bedevil, Chatterjee persuades us of the need to re-examine, re-think and re-formulate. This collection of stories adds greatly to the literary, aesthetic and learning pleasure of every thinking person.