English August An Indian Story Upamanyu Chatterjee Read online

  ENGLISH, AUGUST

  An Indian Story

  Upamanyu Chatterjee

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  in association with

  faber and faber

  First published in 1988

  By Faber and Faber Limited

  3 Queen Square London WCIN 3AU

  First published in this edition 2002

  Printed in India by Gopsons Papers Ltd. NOIDA, India

  © Upamanyu Chatterjee 1988

  All rights reserved

  Upamanyu Chatterjee is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Any resemblance of characters in this novel to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional.

  Quotations from the Bhagvad-gita are taken from the Penguin Classics edition (1970) translated by Juan Mascaro. Quotations from Meditations — Marcus Aurelius are the Penguin Classics edition (1969) translated by Maxwell Staniforth.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN 978-0-571-21876-9

  11

  This edition is brought to you by Faber and Faber in association with Penguin Books India and is available for sale only in the Indian Subcontinent

  Praise for English, August & Upamanyu Chatterjee

  An “affectionate yet unsparing slacker view of modern IndiaÉlikened to John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye Unlike many of the other Indian writers we read these days, Chatterjee has remained in India...He's a writer worth discovering, and English, August is the place to start.”–Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

  “This is a very funny novel, but a humane one as well.”–Katherine Powers, The Boston Globe

  “Chatterjee offers…a funny, intimate portrait of one person puzzling over his place in the world…”–Julia Hanna, The Boston Phoenix

  A “witty and lyrical first novel…it is hard to believe that it has taken this book so long to reach American readers, but once they finish it, they will agree it was well worth the wait. A contribution not just to Indian literature but to world literature; highly recommended.”–Library Journal * Stared Review

  “English, August is one of the most important novels in Indian writing in English, but not for the usual reasons. Indeed, it’s at war with ‘importance,’ and is one of the few Indian English novels in the last two decades genuinely, and wonderfully, impelled by irreverence and aimlessness. It’s this acutely intelligent conflation of self-discovery with the puncturing of solemnity that makes this book not only a significant work, but a much-loved one.” –Amit Chaudhuri

  “A slacker seeks career success and sexual fulfillment in Chatterjee's 1988 first novel, since proclaimed a contemporary Indian classic…This beautifully written book strikes a nifty balance among satiric comedy, pointed social commentary and penetrating characterization. Widely considered India's Catcher in the Rye, it also echoes both R.K. Narayan's Malgudi novels and J.P. Donleavy's classic portrayal of rampant, unrepentant maleness, The Ginger Man…Excellent stuff. Let's have Chatterjee's other novels, please.” –Kirkus Reviews

  “The ‘Indianest’ novel in English that I know of. Utterly uncompromised, wildly funny, and a revelation of everyday life in modern India.” — Suketu Mehta

  “…Chatterjee, himself an IAS officer, creates a comic, entertaining portrayal of an administrator's life in the sticks.” –Publishers Weekly

  “…a remarkably mature first novel” –The Times Literary Supplement

  "There's a popular conception that Indian fiction in English hit the road to big time with Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August in 1988. The irreverent language, the wry humour and the immediately identifiable situations struck a chord with a generation of Indians which was looking for its own voice and found it in Agastya Sen." – The Sunday Express

  “[an] elegant and gently mischievous satire” –The London Observer

  “By the highest serio-comic standards, this novel marks the debut of an extraordinarily promising talent.” —The Observer

  “Beautifully written…English, August is a marvelously intelligent and entertaining novel, and especially for anyone curious about modern India.” –Punch

  “A jazzy, baggy, hyperbolic, comic and crazy clamour of voices which…brings a breath of fresh talent to Indian fiction.” –Glasgow Herald

  “…when New York Review Books Classics publishes Upamanyu Chatterjee’s 1988 debut novel, English, August, for the first time in the U.S., Americans will finally have the chance to be in on what readers in England and India have known for years: that the great outpouring of Indian lit over the past decade and a half owes as much to this irreverent, acid-witted book as it does to Salman Rushdie’s magnum opus, Midnight’s Children…A best-seller in India (and later a hit film), English, August struck a chord with a generation of young writers wrestling with the messy sprawl of modern South Asia…English, August is more than a satire. It’s also a novel with resonating concerns about the meaning of maturity in the modern era. …American readers should identify with the brainy, sarcastic and slightly confused protagonist of English, August as he struggles to find a purpose in a rapidly changing world.”–Time Out New York

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Praise for English, August

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twentyone

  Twentytwo

  Twentythree

  Twentyfour

  Twentyfive

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Also by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  To my Parents

  Introduction

  by Akhil Sharma

  (AKHIL SHARMA was born in Delhi, India, and grew up in Edison, New Jersey. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories anthology, The O. Henry Award Winners anthology, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. His novel, An Obedient Father, won the 2001 Pen Hemingway Prize.)

  Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was the first Indian novel to be widely perceived as a vital contribution to literature in English. Since that happened many Indian writers have gone on to become household names not only in England and America but all around the world: Arundhati Roy; Amitav Ghosh, with his historical novels; Vikram Seth, whose A Suitable Boy is a marvelous thousand-page-plus social comedy about arranged marriage. These famous authors, though, only begin to suggest the range of excellent English-language literature being produced in India.

  To me, as an American writer of Indian ancestry and an avid reader of Indian fiction, one of the most striking things about so much contemporary Indian fiction is the way it presents itself as being representative — of the historical moment, of the social situation, of the cultural climate, of, above all, India. And perhaps it is this stran
ge, but not unusual, idea that every Indian novel is, or should be, THE Indian novel, that Upamanyu Chatterjee had in mind when he gave the subtitle of ''An Indian Story" to English, August, his extraordinary first book. A story and not the story, even if English, August tells a story that could only be Indian. Whether or not that was Chatterjee's intention, there's no doubt that his book stands apart from other Indian fiction by virtue of being so attentive to the particular. English, August is a story about a young man in a small Indian town, who has a very particular job in the civil service. It's a book about doing paperwork (or avoiding doing paperwork), going to teas with your boss's wife, and overseeing village well-digging projects, as well as smoking pot, masturbating, and reading Marcus Aurelius. And if by the end of the book it turns out that English, August does indeed have much to say about India, that's almost a happy accident. Because it's the particularity of the book that makes it a work of art and gives such pleasure.

  English, August does two things that are central to what novels have always done. It brings us news — about the way we live now; about the way others live now — and this is deeply satisfying. Almost as important, English, August offers us the pleasure of seeing what Upamanyu Chatterjee can do with language. Chatterjee is one of those rare writers who can be as funny as sad, as lyrical as plain. Let me quote a few passages:

  Funny:

  Kumar remained adamant about finishing the booze while watching the [pornographic] films. They [two men traveling for work] settled down in bed, with mosquito-repellent cream on their skins and incense in the air. Kumar was giggling with alcohol and the promise of titillation. The first shot of the first film showed a thin American black man with painted lips and white bikini, gyrating. He was cajoled into stripping by five white girls, demented with lust. They all licked their lips and one another until the black, with horrendous coyness, displayed his penis. Then the girls got to work. "See, see," squeaked Kumar, trembling with adolescent excitement, "lucky black bastard . . ." Throughout the ogling he shifted in bed and intermittently muttered, "... this kind of thing never happens in India ... Indian girls are too inhibited ... bloody shame ..."

  Sad:

  [The protagonist, a government official, goes to a distant village to examine complaints of a well that has become silted.] He was relieved to see more people around the well. But something was odd, and he realized in a moment that it was the muteness of the village, there seemed to be no laughter and no conversation. The village did have children, but they were all busy. Women were tying them to ropes and letting them into the well. After a while the ropes were bringing up buckets. He went closer. The buckets were half-full of some thin mud. The only sounds were the echoing clang of the buckets against the walls of the well, and the tired sniveling of a few children on the side. He looked at them. Gashed elbows and knees from the well walls, one child had a wound like a flower on his forehead. The woman who had come to the office was looking at him in a kind of triumph. He looked into the well. He couldn't see any water, but the children were blurred wraiths forty feet below, scouring the mud of the well floor for water, like sinners serving some mythic punishment.

  Lyrical:

  Then the rains came to Madna . . . Suddenly a roar and a drumroll, as of a distant war . . . The world turned monochromatic . . . Cloud, building, tree, road, they all diffused into one blurred shade of slate.

  I said to a friend, also an admirer of English, August, that the book was, of course, a coming-of-age story. My friend countered, not at all, it was a slacker novel. Both descriptions are in fact true.

  We meet Chatterjee's hero, Agastya Sen, at night in a car. He is driving down an empty street in New Delhi with a friend who is getting ready to roll another joint. Much is signaled and set up by this brief scene. To be a young man driving a car in India implies meaningful wealth, while the marijuana suggests rebelliousness and lassitude at the same time. These are children of privilege, young city sophisticates. We soon learn, however, that Agastya is going to be leaving Delhi: he has been accepted into the Indian Administrative Service, or IAS, about which he has very mixed feelings, and will have to start living in the sticks.

  The town Agastya soon finds himself in is Madna, and Upamanyu Chatterjee's portrait of it is one of the great imaginative achievements of recent Indian literature. Probably American readers will have never seen a small town quite like this, one that by American standards would hardly qualify as small. The population could easily be in the high tens of thousands or more; the congestion and racket more akin to that of an American city. Its remoteness from the rest of the world, its claustrophobic self-containment, cannot be exaggerated.

  Readers of this book will come to know Madna intimately. There is the dust, of course, which seems present in most books about India, but there is also the badly constructed statue of Mahatma Gandhi that is common to many town squares (often the statue is sculpted so blockily that Gandhi looks like a muscle-bound wrestler with glasses and a shaved head). The bedraggled country club that Chatterjee introduces us to is usually the social center of the town elite, a place where everyone seems aware of very fine distinctions in status. There is this and there are the local characters: the town doctor, the journalist who prints gossip, the police chief who loves pornography. Agastya is more at a loss in Madna than he ever imagined he'd be, and he soon finds himself devoting much of his time to hunting for wild marijuana plants.

  Agastya is one of the funniest characters in Indian fiction and one of the saddest. His mother died when he was a child, which may have helped to make him the deeply lonely person he is. Part of the reason that he cannot bear Madna is that his isolation there makes that loneliness unignorable. Talking to colleagues, Agastya even invents a wife for himself, and this stupid, conceivably self-destructive falsehood is not just pointless but poignant. Because Agastya's life is littered with missing people: the dead mother, but also an absent father (off in Bengal, being the governor, it turns out; the father communicates with Agastya through letters that are both aloof and disappointed), a possible girlfriend gone off to graduate school in America, and a Hindu saint. Unsettled and restless in Delhi, Agastya is almost paralyzed with misery in Madna, where his colleagues repel him as grotesque, while such friends as he finds there strike him as even more to be pitied than himself. Because of all this, and for all his wisecracks, the question Agastya is struggling to put to himself is, Why am I so unhappy?

  The way the question is raised and the way it is resolved connect English, August to the Western coming-of-age novel (it has been described as India's Catcher in the Rye) while also marking it as distinctively Indian. The sense of inauthenticity Agastya suffers from feels very Western (so much so that one might be tempted to dismiss it for a while as a citified affectation). This inauthenticity, by the way, is what is captured by the novel's somewhat puzzling title. Agastya is an old-fashioned kind of name — it comes from a mythological Hindu guru — which is why Agastya's friends have taken the liberty of Englishifying it into August, or even, going a step further, simply calling him English. Agastya, in short, seems un-Indian to them, and to himself as well at times. That hardly makes him English, though, as he is perfectly aware. Inauthentically Indian, inauthentically Western: in Madna this crisis of identity comes to a head.

  What feels oddly and specifically Indian to me is the resolution of the crisis. The resolution is not the breaking away that Agastya has been contemplating all along, and it's not a reconciliation. It's not a renunciation either. It's not even exactly a decision. In any case, Agastya does not surrender his independence or his native wit. But there is a change, an acceptance, that the reader cannot miss. An acceptance of necessity by virtue of which Agastya is set free.

  There's an Indian saying that if you want to keep a secret you should put it in a book. It's all the more amazing, then, that when English, August was first published in India in 1988 it was an enormous best seller.

  The reason English, August was such a popular succes
s probably has to do with the Indian Administrative Service. In India to belong to the IAS is a little like being a movie star. Each year approximately two million people take the exam for eighty entry-level IAS positions. One of the lowest rungs of the IAS is district collector. Agastya is an assistant to a collector, though it is assumed that in time he will become one himself. A district is the equivalent of an American county, and the district collector runs or has great influence over the district's judicial, police, and administrative functions. The IAS is considered to be honest for the most part, though there is a joke that if you become an IAS officer you can earn so much money through corruption that your family will have enough to eat for seven generations.

  The first time I read English, August, I was living in a small town in India and working with various IAS officers. The book was so spot-on that it didn't surprise me in the least that many of them complained about it. I read the book over and over and found comfort in Chatterjee's observations of the world I was living in, the sound of lizards plopping off the ceiling and falling to the floor, the squabbling among adults as to who gets to sit in the front passenger seat.

  Chatterjee has followed English, August with three further novels (The Last Burden, which was published in 1993, The Mammaries of the Welfare State in 2000, and Weight Loss in 2006) while continuing to pursue his career in the civil service. A character in English, August talks about how each language has a "tang" and that it is hard to translate this very specific flavor. That, of course, is true of the work of our best writers as well. Upamanyu Chatterjee has his own "tang" and it is like nobody else's.