"I'm not Kiran Bedi"

Upamanyu Chatterjee's third novel brings Agastya Sen, the hero of English, August, back to the literary centre stage. It is not a book to love; but Chatterjee himself cannot be an authority on the subject. If "silence, exile and cunning" are the three weapons of an artist, this author is well armed, writes VIJAY NAMBISAN.

"SO you're going to meet that guy Upamanyu Chatterjee?" said a friend I had called soon after reaching Delhi. "Ask him what he means by writing such disgusting stuff. He's completely spoiled English, August for me."

Chatterjee laughs when I tell him this. He's quite unfazed; indeed he thinks his new book, The Mammaries of the Welfare State, is an "admirable corrective" to English, August. "There were so many people who thought Agastya Sen is this sweet, lovable character," he says. "He's nothing of the sort. He's a morally loose man in a morally loose world."

Some may think a 437-page book without discernible plot or structure, and which has taken a long time to put together ("write" is the wrong word), a bit excessive for a corrective. Chatterjee's second novel, The Last Burden, appeared in early 1993;

English, August had made his reputation in 1988. Burden was generally considered too difficult a book, though some critics (including the undersigned) admired its honesty and the pains its author had taken to understand and depict its characters. Much was expected from Agastya's second coming; and, while the book is naturally doing well on the stands, its reception has been something short of rapturous. The more recent reviews have been scathing.

I thought Mammaries much more difficult than Burden, and while I'm interviewing Chatterjee as part of the day's work I want some enlightenment as well. We are sitting in a restaurant in Pandara Market, waiting for Chatterjee's wife Anne to join us at lunch. I'd prefer to interview Chatterjee without culinary distractions, so this is just a preliminary bit of catching up; we haven't met for seven years.

Chatterjee is wearing a north Indian-style waistcoat and Himachali cap, which he doesn't take off in the restaurant. He's a bit weird altogether: He can't stand the cold and adores the Delhi summer. He's weird in other ways, too. Getting literary revelations out of him is like pulling teeth, and this is rare in these days when authors can be packaged and sold like toothpaste and often actively participate in the selling. Someone who has worked with him has told me that he's highly resistant to changes in his manuscripts: "He'll listen to you and politely insist on retaining the original unchanged." Some authors are lucky.

He talks a little about Agastya Sen and his own writing plans over lunch. "The next book will again be a Last Burden kind of book, and then I'll revert to Agastya. I plan to alternate themes. I'm all set," he concludes with a flourish, "I'm fixed for the next 15 or 20 years."

* * *

It's a pity I didn't read a recent issue by Ravi Dayal, The Fiction of St. Stephen's, before interviewing Chatterjee. This book, which came out four or five months before Mammaries, is a collection of essays which discusses the novelists (in English) produced by St. Stephen's College, Delhi. Chatterjee figures conspicuously - that is to say, Agastya Sen figures prominently as an object for bashing. He is the Anglicised "superior person" who doesn't fit in to the "real India" and doesn't care. Chatterjee has himself not contributed an essay, which is not surprising. Most of his compeers have.

The critic and prominent Indo-Anglian basher, Harish Trivedi, who taught for many years at St. Stephen's, has written in his "Epilogue/Epitaph" to the book:

(St. Stephen's) was the Shangri-La, the heaven of Englishness on the far horizon, which nearly all our eleven novelists inhabited and have cherished. I 'knew' six of them in college (in the broad sense in which everyone "knew" everyone else in a college that size) and of those who did English I actually "taught" Allan Sealy, Rukun Advani, Upamanyu Chatterjee and Makarand Paranjape, while Rukun and Upamanyu also went on to become colleagues for a year or two before they went their different ways. What I recall of them, largely fondly, has very little to do with their turning out to be novelists later... Only Upamanyu was wonky, witty and silent enough to possibly be a novelist, but this of course is hindsight.

This is a pretty accurate summing-up. That Chatterjee is wonky and witty his readers know. His capacity for silence - his genius for remaining aloof in the face of gibes at his or Agastya Sen's Englishness - is unnerving. With the three weapons of an artist (according to Joyce), silence, exile and cunning, Chatterjee has his armoury well stocked.

The first time I came up against this was at a Sahitya Akademi Festival for Young Writers in New Delhi in 1993. Chatterjee was Chairman of one of the sessions I participated in, the one at which Professor U.R. Anantamurti launched a broadside against all who write in English, alleging they did it for money. I was hot with indignation and asked for the floor, but Chatterjee - having listened politely to the audience baying for our blood - thanked everybody and declared the session closed. I afterwards reproached him for not having either replied to Anantamurti or given me the chance to do so, and he simply shrugged and said, "What does it matter what they say? I'm going to continue to write." This imperviousness shocked me. I was young then, of course, and thought political attitudes could be refashioned by rational debate.

Chatterjee has no qualms about continuing to develop the character of Agastya Sen - without any concessions to so-called Indianness - and about leading him into adventures which many think are in doubtful taste. The cold reception of The Last Burden left him indifferent; neither possibly did the wild success of

English, August lead him to sing hosannas in the bathroom. The criticism of Mammaries for its lack of plot and its frequent grossness leaves him unmoved. At least he appears unmoved; it may be he spends nights gnawing his pillow, but somehow I doubt it.

But the point is, if English, August had not received such attention, and sold so many copies, would he have been able to get the next two novels into print, and get them widely noticed if not with approval? He probably doesn't lose any sleep over that either. Fashionable critical theory currently asserts that the author has no claim to the book once it is in print. In The Fiction of St Stephen's, the academic Shobhana Bhattacharji refers to an informal survey she conducted of readers of Chatterjee's first book:

Readers, of course, do not always interpret literature as writers may have meant it to be interpreted... According to my informal survey, those who did not run homes loved English, August. The tedium, the boredom, they said, were brilliantly created. Those who did run homes, especially women, were convinced that Agastya would not be a good administrator.

And later,

English, August, one hopes, is the last gasp of those books and films of the 1980s which bored one to tears with their interminable accounts of their protagonists' inability to communicate, and of which Tom Lehrer... said caustically that if people couldn't communicate, they might as well shut up.

The Mammaries of the Welfare State (reviewed in Literary Review, January 21, 2001) is a much bigger and much weirder book than its precursor. Also much darker. Agastya Sen is older now but just as shiftless; minor characters drift in and out and when you least expect them in again; there is not even the excuse of a plot, because really nothing happens except a lot of bureaucratic obfuscation. If that is what it is about, then it works - perhaps. As far as I'm concerned, the blurb-writers at Penguin have not done Chatterjee any favour by printing on the front inside flap: "...a masterwork of satire by a major writer at the height of his powers."

* * *

I have to go to one of the nodes of the bureaucratic beehive to meet Chatterjee. Shastri Bhavan in New Delhi, like its clones elsewhere, is a large, grey, airless, cheerless micropolis. Chatterjee is a Director in the Department of Education, and he has a large, grey, airless, cheerless coffin to work in. There are several babus there, and Chatterjee deals with them in a businesslike manner with that air of frowning abstraction all civil servants learn at the Academy (named, appositely, for Shastri).

He resumes the theme of Agastya being "a morally loose man in a morally loose world". "It's been 12 years since English, August," he says, "and my first objective is to set Agastya Sen in his place. He is a misfit, so how does he survive?" He forestalls any questioning of his motive with "He is a character I am comfortable with. I enjoy writing about him, I enjoy watching him grow."

I ask him about the structure of the book, or its lack. For instance, Agastya's lady-love Daya is an important character up to page 37, when she suddenly fades out and as suddenly reappears 331 pages later. Chatterjee leans back in his chair with a smile. "Yes. So what about it?" And how about the often abrupt change of case and tense? "Tenses - that's something you'll have to grant me. Why should all books read like thrillers?

"According to me," he continues, "Agastya Sen is the tapeworm... the linking factor in the book." I suppose my exasperation shows, for my questions become increasingly exasperated, and finally, exasperated himself, he snaps dismissively, "I don't want to get into this shit" - "this shit" meaning I suppose all the search for meaning. As far as he's concerned, he's written a story, and he likes it.

"It's a comedy," he tells me. "The idea that nothing should be straightforward is clear in The Last Burden, but here it's at least funny. It's a comedy: people don't change."

But I'm still searching for clues. "Is there a touch of magic realism?" I ask.

"I don't want to say 'magical'; it's not magical... it's not Midnight's Children or One Hundred Years. If you're asking about the bizarre elements, they're all real. Even that scene where the babu's warming his food on the room heater - it's real. They do it."

I ask about Daya, has Agastya found happiness? "To my mind it's obvious that their relationship has reached stasis, it's going nowhere; it's not a love story. It's not a world where relationships can hold for long. I don't see the possibility, in the world of The Mammaries, of a romance blossoming..." He is not perturbed by the wickedness of the world he has created. When I ask about the possibility of changing it, he answers engagingly, "I'm not Kiran Bedi."

Then he gives me a clue at last. "There's one defining paragraph, about being transferred all over the place. That is fundamental." I find it much later, on page 116:

The Collectorship of Madna is the seventh post that he has held in eight years. He is quite philosophic about the law that governs the transfer of civil servants; he sees it as a sort of corollary to the law of karma, namely, that the whole of life passes through innumerable and fundamentally mystifying changes, and these changes are sought to be determined by our conduct, our deeds (otherwise, we would quite simply lose our marbles); only thus can we even pretend to satisfactorily explain the mystery of suffering, which is a subject that has troubled thoughtful souls all over the world since time immemorial. It is also a hypothesis that justifies the manifest social inequalities of the Hindu community.

So it is a virtue in this world not to be shocked by injustice, not to be surprised by mystery, not to be made unhappy by suffering - at least, not the suffering of others. Chatterjee in his writing is an uncompromising realist; I may wonder if that is his personal philosophy too, but am not about to ask. If he can do his own thing and get by, well good for him. And ditto for Agastya Sen - who is not by any means Upamanyu Chatterjee.

Chatterjee is more focussed, more disciplined than his creation. I remember asking him, many years ago, if he drank liquor. "No," he said, "Because once I start anything I don't stop." That said a lot, both ways.

There's another passage in The Fiction of St. Stephen's that comes to mind; the academic Leela Gandhi says the "new/postcolonial Indian English novelist" can speak from "an enviable position of privilege and dissent":

Paradoxically, it is by virtue of its hegemonic status within the nation that the new Indian English novel becomes counter- hegemonic in relation to the West... St Stephen's is utterly emblematic of the social aspirations and the postcolonial obligations of the new Indian English novelist. Where else can we imagine the formation of the radically abusive artist as a young civil servant?

But however Chatterjee did it, it seems to have worked for him. Who was it that said an artist is someone who can hold two diametrically opposed ideas and still function?

As I get up to leave, it's apparent that I'm still baffled by the book and what it means. Chatterjee muses on the best course of action. Then he says kindly, "Read it again."

I will, Upamanyu, I will.

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