SOMETHING LIKE FREEDOM
The punning title of Neel Mukherjee’s latest work, A State of Freedom, suggests something of its central concerns. On the one hand—as it catalogues the stifling, constraining, devastating effects of injustice and deprivation on the lives of its characters—the novel shows the savage deformation of freedom in the state that is India. On the other, Mukherjee’s experiments with the novel form reach for the hope that, as long as we can imagine the lives of others, the condition of freedom remains possible.
It is hard, at first, to tell that this is a novel at all. Its five parts are seemingly separate narratives built around various characters—an NRI from the American east coast, showing his boy around Fatehpur Sikri; a moody Bengali cook as seen through the eyes of a London designer visiting his parents in Mumbai; a fox-faced young man from Uttarakhand who adopts a bear to become a qalandar; a tribal girl from Jharkhand who leaves the unspeakable violence of the Indian state and Maoist resistance alike for the everyday brutality of domestic work in metropolitan India. These stories are loosely strung together, carrying strange elisions and silences, their points of contact fleeting enough to feel troublingly incomplete—and to suggest a society haunted by divisions that leave people stranded and separate from one another. Mysteries arise but remain unsolved. There are many shades of horror: the dread engendered by the death of a child; the anxiety that mounts as uncanny coincidences and incomprehensible puzzles appear; the abhorrence at scenes of unbearable violence detailed with such precision that we must, nonetheless, read on.
Despite its centrifugal energy, even as it strains at the boundaries of coherence, Mukherjee’s novel never seems in danger of exceeding his artistic control. He traverses narrative modes masterfully, anchoring the novel in a magisterial third-person account but venturing at times into a more intimate first-person and even, at the very end, a Joycean stream-of-consciousness section. The novel is based in a densely socio-political realism, but Mukherjee weaves in elements of the gothic and supernatural. His surreal third section about a man and his bear holds together the central themes of the novel: the ways in which people strive to know and love each other despite their mutual unknowability—and the wounds they inflict on account of this fundamental otherness. Through its narrative content and its form, A State of Freedom tells us, above all, that the separate lives of an unequal society are nevertheless interconnected; we are inescapably one.