First among unequals
PHILLYA State of MALICKAFreedom by Neel Mukherjee Chatto & Windus £16.99 Oldie price £14.51 inc p&p What happens when you try to escape your own past? Neel Mukherjee’s searing novel probes the limits of freedom in contemporary India, treating it as an abstract ideal, everywhere obstructed by the country’s harrowing class and gender boundaries. Those familiar with Man Booker-shortlisted The Lives of Others will recognise Mukherjee’s panoramically populated prose and his unflinching stare at the fissures within Indian society.
The novel is carved into five parts: the first two focus on privileged, nonresident Indians who are visiting home and find themselves to be immigrants, tourists in their own country.
The next three tales explore the plight of the Indian rural poor; we meet a vagrant and his dancing bear, a domestic worker who moves to Mumbai for a better life and a Maoist freedom fighter.
The five stories exist independently but, like cracks in the earth, they begin to crumble into one another; characters disappear and reappear in each other’s lives. Within this, Mukherjee’s message is clear: the story of inequality is collectively shaming; the experience of social displacement and disappointment is universal.
The novel improves as it unfolds. Its earliest stories are a little time-honoured in contemporary Indian fiction, featuring the privileged outsider returned home, at odds with the tides and traditions of his motherland, disconnected and displaced. One non-resident Indian narrator, now a cosmopolitan food writer based in London, develops a fascination with the family’s cook, Renu.
Ignoring his prejudiced mother, he pays a visit to Renu’s family in her village, but finds he is disappointed at his own feelings of ‘shame and pity’, and the way he finds rural cooking ‘workaday and uninspiring’.
By contrast, Mukherjee’s treatment of the Indian precariat is compassionate, but never sentimental. The tale of the vagrant Lakshman who encounters a bear cub, perceiving it immediately as a fiscal opportunity to ‘make it dance’, results in a long scene of devastating cruelty. He knocks out the bear’s teeth and rams a metal bar through its nose. ‘The red-pink, open mouth, leaking liquid, would look as if a moment of utter, grinning glee has been frozen in time.’
Soon the creature is enslaved to the violent Lakshman and they travel the country, performing for hectoring crowds, fighting the monsoon rains, destitute and debased. Please, the reader thinks, can’t the bear bite back? When Lakshman discovers all his rupees have been destroyed by the rains, he sits next to the bear and ‘howls’. They are both captive. Mukherjee’s bear is simply an extension of Lakshman’s social imprisonment. The bear’s squealing, its tortured cogitations, even its two-legged stance, bring him ever-nearer to the plight of his exploitative human owner.
Mukherjee resists any temptation to provide neat conclusions to his stories. Instead, his writing moves swiftly in and out of his characters’ heads, sharing their struggles with extraordinary pathos. Sometimes his lens feels too sharp: the suffering, such as the mother who hangs herself over the pain of a tooth abscess, too raw to read. But, suggests Mukherjee, we mustn’t flinch from the truth.
A recurring image in this novel is the car window of the passing middle classes: ‘A pane of glass which could be lifted up or down depending on how much of the world you wanted.’ In A State of Freedom, Mukherjee winds this window right the way down and forces you to inhale modern India: a state founded on ideals of freedom which few can access; a state both spectacular and appalling.