OPINION:
A STATE OF FREEDOM
By Neel Mukherjee
Norton, $25.95, 278 pages
Although a relatively small percentage of India’s one-and-a-third billion people, educated Indians fluent in English can be numbered in the tens of millions.
And because most of them are drawn from their country’s middle and upper classes, often educated in rigorous but tradition-bound private and convent schools, they have been raised on a diet of English classics — Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope and the like — that lends a slightly-dated charm and eloquence to their distinctive brand of English. Like modern Ireland’s love-hate relationship with England, post independence India’s ambivalent attitude toward its former colonial master does not apply to the English language.
In fact, for both the Irish and Anglophone Indians, English fluency has been a material and cultural blessing, plugging both groups into modern times via the global language of choice in science, technology, transportation, medicine, law, diplomacy, popular culture and much else. It has also been a blessing for the entire English-speaking world since Irish and Indian writers, both in their native lands and as immigrants to England, America., Canada and elsewhere, have provided the English speaking world with some of its finest 20th and 21st century writers.
One of the newest additions to the pantheon of what I refer to as “Indglish” novelists is Neel Mukherjee, an ethnic Bengali with a brilliant prose style that is part Dickensian, part Angry Young Man and distinctly Bengali in its depth of feeling, poetic beauty and nervous energy. His latest novel, “A State of Freedom” is an impressive, if sometimes uneven, tour de force rich in deeply drawn characters each of whom is also a symbolic part of contemporary India, that incredible, conflicted, kaleidoscopic society that is still a molten, unalloyed mixture of progress and squalor, idealism and cant, humanity and inhumanity.
Structurally this relatively brief novel is divided into five parts that fall just short of making one greater, harmonious whole. This is only fitting since at the heart of each story — and what lends all of them a common theme — is the incredible disharmony of contemporary (modern is not quite the right word) India.
While Mr. Mukherjee’s narrative voice is that of an educated Indian expatriate, most of the action is seen through the eyes — and artlessly expressed in the words — of backward, beleaguered Indians whose ancient and often brutal village life is now being swept away for better or worse. In the case of many of his characters, it is for the worse, although the single most admirable person in the book actually manages to build herself a real life with a real future for herself and her children.
Milly is a downtrodden but brave and intelligent young villager condemned to domestic servitude while still a little girl. In some ways, she and her rescuer/husband represent the positive face of Indian society, the gradual emergence of a laboring class just sufficiently empowered to improve its lot and make at least some vital life choices for itself.
Ironically, the only other character who comes close to making that sort of successful transition is not even human. He is an abandoned bear cub named Raju who, like Milly, is brutally forced into an alien world at an early age and manages to adjust and cope a great deal better than his human master Lakshman. Lakshman, desperate to escape the drudgery and grinding poverty of village life, fails to make the grade as a would-be “qualandar” (itinerant beggar-owner of a dancing bear).
The weakest parts of “A State of Freedom” are the brief opening and closing sections, both more derivative than the rest of the book. Part I reads a bit like a Henry James ghost story while Part V is reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s rambling soliloquy in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
Fortunately, almost all of the pages in between reflect the author’s own honest, perceptive and beautifully illuminating talent as an artist meticulously depicting small lives on a large canvas. If India does eventually achieve a state of humane modernity — a “State of Freedom,” as it were — it will largely be thanks to people like Mr. Mukherjee’s Milly whose life was once dismissed by a radicalized village friend as “bits and pieces — a little bit here, a little bit there. One year in Dumri, another year somewhere else, then another year somewhere else yet somewhere else again “
Looking back, Milly disagrees: “Her life is not fragmented. To her, it has unity and coherence. She gives it those qualities. How can movement from one place to another break you? Are you a terracotta doll, easily broken in transit?” Certainly not Milly. And, hopefully, not contemporary India.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.