MEAT IS MURDER
Upamanyu Chatterjee remains most famous for English, August, an affectionate satire of Indian bureaucracy and the elite young civil servants packed off to sobering stints in the hinterlands, part of an anglicised, angsty generation out of step with vast swathes of their own country. It is a funny, charming novel, despite the eponymous August’s sadness, his crisis as much existential as it is a product of his posting in a grindingly poor small town. And it is profoundly Indian. It is perhaps the Indianness of Chatterjee’s novels, their unsentimental, unsparing explorations of Indian life, that has prevented him, despite the success of English, August, from being more widely celebrated.
His new novel, The Revenge of the NonVegetarian, can only be properly appreciated, as the use of that very Indian word ‘non-vegetarian’ suggests, by an Indian audience, alive to its mischief, steeped in the culture that Chatterjee sends up. The protagonist is Madhusudan Sen, a young sub-divisional magistrate posted in newly independent India to another of Chatterjee’s acutely perceived fictional small towns. (Madhusudan Sen is, of course, the name of Agastya’s father in English, August.) His mamlatdar, a sort of all-purpose administrator at taluka level, and his family are killed in a fire. For Sen, a committed carnivore in a pious temple town, the mamlatdar, a Muslim, doubles as a supplier of eggs, fish, and mostly beef.
‘In the forenoon of that second day in the subdivision,’ writes Chatterjee, ‘after his second vegetarian breakfast, Sen had chosen Nadeem Dalvi to speak to because he looked the capable sort and, just as important, was highly likely to be a meat-eater.’ Dalvi and his family, it turns out, did not perish in the fire that reduces their house to soot and cinders but were clubbed to death beforehand. A lower court judge, sentencing the murderer to death, writes that the man ‘butchered and burnt six innocent human beings because he, inter alia, wanted to enjoy, all by himself, an entire pot of a preparation of beef, a meat, the consumption of which is forbidden to all Hindus’. In jail, the other prisoners, vegetarian rapists and kidnappers, nickname the murderer ‘beefeater’.
The revenge referred to in the title is two-fold—that of the murderer on the Dalvis and of Madhusudan Sen on the murderer. Or maybe this deceptively slight novel is a meat-eater’s sly revenge on the moralising vegetarians who dominate the country.