When I picked up to read 'The Lives of Others' by Neel Mukherjee last month, I had little familiarity with the author's work except for some of his columns I had previously read on the guardian. After reading the book in about a week's time, I am glad I chose this one from the wide selection of unread books available before me, for this might be the best modern literature in English centered around Bengal that I've read after Amitav Ghosh's 'The Calcutta Chromosomes'. Mukherjee's book was shortlisted as a finalist for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, which it didn't win, but that's hardly a deterrent for not reading this fantastic novel.
The book is set in 1960s Bengal and unravels the story of an upper middle-class Bengali business family. This is a joint family, one in which all immediate family members share a common ancestral roof over their heads even when they are as different from one another as possible in their educational, financial or social status . As is often wont in this sort of dysfunctional families, the almost claustrophobic confines of the home breeds all sorts of animosity, affection, complexity and discordance within the family members. Mukherjee explores these relationships with care and depth, straddling the line of subtlety and vivid imaginary beautifully. In the end, it is left to the readers to make of the characters what they will; Mukherjee, thankfully, doesn't categorize them into absolute saints or sinners.
I suppose Supratik Ghosh could be called the protagonist of the novel, the son of an affluent businessman, student in a prestigious Calcutta institution, believer in Maoist politics, comrade of a Naxalite party. Supratik abandons his plush Calcutta residence, much to the overwhelming grief of his doting mother- the matriarch of the family, and joins his fellow comrades as part of an organized Naxalite movement in rural Bengal. He ingratiates himself with poor farmers who are perilously in debt to a few rich and cruel landowners, toiling alongside them in the paddy fields, eating meagerly, carefully hiding himself and his comrades from the watchful eyes of the police. He indoctrinates the villagers into the Maoist philosophy and hatches plans for Naxalite reprisals that are so violent in nature that they do not befit someone with his bourgeois social status. Part of the novel contains letters written by Supratik (it is later revealed to whom) in first-person; the other parts are written as third-person encounters with Supratik's other family members. Mukherjee unravels the hardships, loyalty and grit of the Maoist revolutionaries in depth. Unlike the feeble attempt made by Jhumpa Lahiri to highlight the Maoist revolution in Bengal in her last book 'The Lowland', Mukherjee portrays an accurate picture of famine-ridden Bengal plagued with political insurgence and violent student uprisings.
Living in a multi-storied (residents of each storey belong to a different social stratum) house in South Calcutta are an assortment of characters, Supratik's relatives in the big joint business family which has now fallen on somewhat bad times. Mukherjee cultivates the familial relations well, digging deep into the eventual decay of the family business and the erosion of hierarchical power that sets into motion all sorts of trouble at home. The author succeeds very well in weaving these characters and revealing the complicated nature of relationship between them: an unmarried sister pines so badly for the affection of his brother that she slits her wrists when she hears that her sister-in-law has given birth, an old servant of the family is mistreated and framed by a family member who is ironically working for the liberation of the oppressed, a young widow in the family is relegated to live among servants for no fault of her own. Mukherjee's writing, especially in the context of his sketching the Ghosh family, reminds me of the great Bengali novelist Bimal Mitra, and I can't think of any higher praise.
Even though Mukherjee's novel unravels as a dismal, violent, morbid saga of post-independent Calcutta, there is still some hope in the form of Sona, the prodigious son of an ill-treated, poor, widowed mother, a boy genius, a maths whizkid. Sona's story serves as a comforting reminder that even in dark and desolate times, there is still a shimmer of hope, waiting to be rekindled with the help of some unlikely yet benevolent do-gooders, as has been known to happen so often in Calcutta all the while. To his credit, Mukherjee spares no details in his depiction of Sona's mathematical capabilities, devoting many pages to abstract maths. Sona, the reader of this review will be happy to know, builds for himself and his mother a far better future than what his relatives living in his grim ancestral home could have ever imagined.
