The Great Bengali Novel in English

One of the many intriguing features of Neel Mukherjee’s Booker–short-listed The Lives of Others is its hybrid genealogy. A Bangla- and English-reading purveyor of the novel form could trace it to the flowering of Bengali fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries just as sanguinely as claim its kinship with the serialized, multiplot roman familial penned by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope, or the disintegrating families made rich and strange in Henry James’s fiction. The Sanskrit word upanyas, widely used as a synonym for “novel” in Bengali and other North Indian vernaculars, was reputedly first used by the renowned educationist Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay to describe a historical work composed of two long tales. Mukhopadhyay had based his Aitihasik Upanyas (“Historical Novel”), published in 1857, on the Reverend Hobart Caunter’s The Romance of History (1836). In Bengal, where Mukherjee was born and raised, the emergent “upanyas” genre of the mid- to late nineteenth century was a harbinger of a modernity and democratic society to come, as several critics and historians, Dipesh Chakrabarty included, have noted. A unique, often agonistic combination of unsparing social realism and historical romance, the Bengali novel evolved into a superstructure that, in varying degrees, represented “men and women as they are, and life as it is,” as the anonymous reviewer of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Bishabrikha put it in The Calcutta Review of 1873.

In a September 27, 2014 interview with Hindustan Times, Mukherjee noted the allusive character of The Lives of Others and its echo chamber of Bangla sahitya: “there are a lot of Bengali novels and books stitched in the book.” The roster includes Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Ma (1974); Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Aranyer Din Ratri (1968, which Satyajit Ray made into a film in 1970); Manik Bandopadhyay’s short story on the Bengal famine, written in the 1940s, “Chhiniye khay’ni keno?” (“Why did they not snatch the food?”); and Samaresh Majumdar’s Uttaradhikar, Kalbela, and Kalpurush (1983–85). We can add to this list titles such as Samaresh Basu’s Mahakaler Rather Ghoda (1977) and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Brishtir Ghran (1985). If these disparate works of prose fiction have anything in common, it is the imbrication of the personal in the political and the intimacy of the subjective (and the literary) with social discourse. Mahasweta Devi’s novel, which describes the violent termination of urban Naxalites, is a “bringing-to-crisis of the personal through a political event of immediate magnitude,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written.¹ Kalbela (1983), the second part of the Majumdar trilogy mentioned above, is about the radicalization (and eventual destruction) of a middle-class youth from North Bengal who has arrived in Kolkata to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Bengali literature. Increasingly disaffected by the deepseated corruption of the state, he succumbs to the messianic violence promised by the armed Naxalite uprising.

“How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?” asks the first epigraph of The Lives of Others. These lines are drawn from James Salter’s Light Years, which Jhumpa Lahiri—incidentally the author of another acclaimed novel with a Naxal-movement subplot, The Lowland (2013)—singled out for its “breach between family and autonomy, between possessing and renouncing, between being and nothingness.”² These binaries would well describe the existential struggles of Neel Mukherjee’s protagonist, Supratik, scion of an affluent industrial (paper manufacturing) family, whose preternatural empathy for those crushed to death in independent India’s unsteady lurch between residual feudalism and laissez-faire industrial modernity makes him “push back against the life given [him]”(60). Despairing of the widening gap between the haves and have-nots in the private and public spheres, and inspired by the ideology of the Maoist guerrilla uprising known as the “Naxal” movement, Supratik repairs to rural Bengal with like-minded bourgeois intellectuals to mobilize and organize the proletarian revolution: “I feel I live in a borrowed house,” he...