Made in JNU

Shiva

When speaking of Avijit Ghosh’s recent novel, one is tempted to quickly pigeonhole it as a regular campus novel. Well, like most campus novels, this novel too depicts academic life largely in terms of humour and sex, and boasts of a similar main outline. However, despite these familiarities, the novel provides for a delightfully fresh and youthful read. Thanks to its setting, it is set far apart from the bandwagon of IIT/IIM novels.

Set in the JNU (as Jawaharlal Nehru University is better known) of the late 1980s, Up Campus, Down Campus follows Anirban Roy, its Bihari-Bengali protagonist, as he ‘negotiates’ his goal of getting through civil services in a campus that certainly is not a passive setting. In the novel, JNU is not just a place but a character in itself. It both teases and teaches Anirban: From ingenuously contesting student elections to experiencing love and heartbreak, he is remodeled by this institution.

Rife with pamphlets and slogans, JNU had all the ingredients to dazzle a boy from a small town. As the author remarks in the beginning, “Anirban knew he was in another planet — a place unlike anything he had seen or imagined before, a place with an alternate set of norms.” While on other campuses muscular frame and flamboyance defined cool, in JNU “there was an inverse snobbery about being unkempt and unmuscled, if not entirely scrawny.”

It is not only the politics of faraway lands — justice for Palestine, solidarity with Nelson Mandela, evil America’s excesses — that concerned these ideologues, but the biology of their immediate self also governed their behaviour. “They say JNU is all about Marx… Marx was the means/Freud, especially his sex thing, was the end…” This interplay of means and end seemed nothing less than a maze to Anirban. On top of that, in a volatile milieu of Tinanmen square massacre, Mandal commission and anti-Sikh riots, he was expected to choose a tool for survival on the campus — ideology.

In JNU, ideology was ubiquitous. “Like an omnipotent virus, it was all over the campus.” Even love must pass the test of ideology. Romance in JNU was not saccharine; rather, it was a mélange of feelings and beliefs that were not to be perceived as lifelong angst, but as a step towards self awareness. “Boys and girls arrive carrying suitcases packed with past and prejudice. JNU upends and recasts you as a socially aware individual. You come to know who and what you are — and why.”

Adding texture to the narrative, the author profusely alludes to Manto, Muktibodh, Habermas, Heideggar, Lorca, Lenin and the likes so much so that the novel can serve as a go-to-book for the eminent names in Leftist ideology.

Ghosh’s JNU is a place for rebels and mavericks, but, at the same time, it is a breeding ground for future bureaucrats. The author shares self-awareness about multiple realities and, therefore, refrains from presenting his version as the definitive account of JNU of the 1980s. As he says towards the end of the novel, “What I mean is that I miss the JNU of our time; the way it was and the way I remember it.”

As the novel is semi-autobiographical, it runs the risk of getting swayed by the love of your alma mater. However, few writers are as qualified as Ghosh to both detect and overcome that risk. Nowhere does he portray force of the ideologies to be supremely overarching. Rather, he takes us to the loopholes, which serve as vantage points, to see the characters and their ideologies as fallible. Every so often he reminds us: “After a point, all ideologies devolve into some kind of faith and breed their own dogmas and gods.” 

This very ease in writing and style makes the novel fulfilling.