Milking an icon

Agastya Sen is back, irreverent as ever. But behind the scatological buffoonery lies a clear-sighted vision of a systemic rot, says ANJANA SHARMA.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falconer cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

THE opening stanza of Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats's classic two-stanza poem "The Second Coming". Lines apt in the context of a review of Upmanyu Chatterjee's recently published novel, The Mammaries of the Welfare State. For Chatterjee's post- modern novel accurately distills over the length of some 400 pages, the terror and nightmare of socialist revolutions, of wars within, and ultimate barbarity as man cannibalises man, recapturing in essence Yeats' vision of a dark and bestial society. Eighty years apart, cultures, civilisations, even craft and temperament apart, Yeats and Chatterjee share an identical vision of a de-centered, de-natured world. Moreover, Mammaries is a second coming for the profanely sanctified, culturally celebrated fictional icon, Agastya Sen, better known to his English readers as English, August.

There was a book in between - The Last Burden - seven years ago, but it is the raw irony and sheer inventiveness of the 1988 debut novel English, August that readers of Chatterjee's work were waiting for, sometimes even without knowing it. Indeed, for some readers Agastya, August, his creator Upmanyu Chatterjee and his film counterpart, the ever ingenuous Rahul Bose, seemed to swirl into a single whirlpool of mockery and lacerating satire. That molotov cocktail is back again with all its power to decimate and rip apart in one frenzied burst. The Mammaries of the Welfare State, complete with its cheeky book jacket of a goat's dugs only a few steps away from a pile of official - read government - files, takes us back into the territory that fires the imagination of the man who writes from the inside. For Upmanyu and Agastya are like Alice, but an Alice who lives within the world of the Looking Glass, an Alice who is doomed to attend mad tea parties, drink from marked bottles, meet power hungry kings and queens, an Alice whose only defence against the insanity of this world is the power of articulation.

Thus, even as one revels in the familiar escapades that beleaguer the life of Chatterjee's ineffectual hero one cannot help marvel at his capacity to stay afloat upon the sea of sludge, never mind that it takes a joint or two for him to rock on his little lotus of irreverence. And some good sex as Casper the friendly ghost flies around the room. Raunchy and tough, smooth and almost facile, Mammaries shares with all good satire its power to simultaneously shock and amuse. Swiftian almost in its disgust of mankind's capacity to lie, cheat, swindle, destroy without thought anything that is fragile and vulnerable, Mammaries resonates with images of sins both venial and impossible to condone. More than the life of its several characters - some of whom we have already met in English, August - it is the scorching anger of their creator, the bureaucrat Chatterjee, that strings together the crazy jumble of events that constitute the novel.

This and Chatterjee's dexterity in creating visuals that quietly frame the disgusting unctuousness and fear that are at the heart of the workings of the welfare state. Take for instance the frame that cinematically sweeps the commonplace stroll of the sodomising, bullying, superstitious, sadistic and deeply corrupt Commissioner of Madna (a township where Agastya is the Collector):

Raghupati's progress across the lawns was feudal. Peons, attendants, gardeners, sweepers, washermen, housekeepers, drivers, masseurs, cooks, milkmen, constables, chowkidaars, watchmen, bearers, jamadars, dafedars, orderlies, daily wagers and indefinable lackeys all stopped idling, straightened up, cringed, beamed, and saluted him. Each of their appointments had been either a favour granted - whenever possible, at a price, and to be redeemed in good time - or a debt repaid; whenever possible, the debts repaid too had been construed as favours granted... Raghupati had signed up as many as he could, age, education, and experience, knowledge, competence no bar. Like countless others, he liked being munificent at the expense of the Welfare State.

And the Welfare State - as envisioned by Chatterjee via Agastya - has it all. The plot - for there is some attempt at keeping a story line, no matter how tenuous at times - takes into its embrace a whole range of functionaries who suck at the sagging mammaries of the welfare state. The corrupt politician, his idiot deviant criminal son, the cultural czar and czarina, the cunningly corrupt civil servants, the exploited, yet vengeful, members of the Other Backward Classes, the manipulative and immoral wives who run the office from their Home Ministries. Of course, the list would be incomplete without the bandit with political aspirations and here we have Sukumaran Govardhan who is to "sandalwood smuggling what Kellog's is to breakfast cereal." At the end of this noble line is Agastya like the clown in "King Lear" whose clear sighted vision of the systemic rot is concealed in scatological buffoonery.

Mammaries is not for the faint hearted, for those who like their real and fictional worlds sanitised and deodarised. Though a bit repetitive, it is a novel which demands and keeps one's attention not only by its sarcastic asides and inside jokes, but also because it dares to voice a moral outrage that very rarely finds its way into fiction, especially recent Indian English fiction. Read it if you can.

The Mammaries of the Welfare State, Upmanyu Chatterjee, Viking/ Penguin, 2000, p. 437, Rs. 395.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : First impression
Next     : Towards holistic farming