Faber & Faber, 1988
Book Review by K.S.Loganathan.
In his debut novel, Upamanyu Chatterjee, author and bureaucrat and Sahitya Akademi award winner, introduces Agastya Sen, whose petname” English, August” is, according to his uncle Pultukaku, ‘an absurd combination, a boarding-school English literature education and an obscure name from Hindu myth.’ The well-educated ,young, city- bred civil servant experiences culture shock when he is posted in provincial India for training in administration.
The complex bureaucratic hierarchy plunges him in despondency.The job saps him with meeting after meeting, journey after journey and a dreary succession of insipid and monotonous meals taken in isolation. In Madna, his mindscape is dominated by readings from The Bhagavat Gita and the Meditations of the Stoic philosopher- king, Marcus Aurelius, and reminiscences of his urban ,mixed upbringing. He spends his considerable leisure time in the company of oddball and dissolute characters and slips into lethargy and pointless ruminations over life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.Here, all that his mind seems to have learnt was the impotence of restlessness. Although his posting in a tribal district engages him with the common people, including tribals, naxals, leprosy patients, missionaries and others eking out a living in the barren landscape, his role as a civil servant fails to captivate him.
Upamanyu Chatterjee cocks a snook at officialdom as he deglamorizes Indian provincial life from the fashionable stories of the Raj : the episode of the Englishman on a pilgrimage mission on the trail of his grandfather’s tiger hunt decades ago,the official picnics, Agastya’s frequent references to Aurelius and the Gita in contextual situations , and the tragic story of Mohan etc, are couched in wry humour, irreverent language, and moving detail. Chatterjee wrote the screenplay for a 1994 English comedy film based on the book;the film is now being restored. This is a classic not to be missed.
