The Naxal Novel

The Lowland—Jhumpa Lahiri’s second novel—opens on the grounds of the Tollygunge Club, a British-built country club in Calcutta, West Bengal. The year is 1956, and although a decade has passed since India won its freedom, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth graces the club’s main drawing room. Two Bengali brothers have snuck over the boundary wall of the club and are gazing at its golf course in awe. Subhash and Udayan Mitra belong to a middle-class family. They live in a modest enclave of houses near the titular lowland, a marshy sprawl that floods during the monsoon. On its periphery, hundreds of Partition refugees from East Bengal have erected huts of sackcloth and bamboo between growing piles of garbage. The club’s walls have been raised to block out the squalor but also to prevent the poor from seeing how the elite live.