The turmoil and disarray that pervaded West Bengal in the 1960s and 1970s — a West Bengal torn apart by the Naxal uprising — has been chronicled in legions of historical reports, documentaries and works of non-fiction. Today, even as the contours of the red map are softening in the country, I think it would be unwise to trivialise the manner in which communism has fashioned India’s past.
Written in this vein of cautious remembrance is Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2013 Man Booker Prize-nominated novel ‘The Lowland’, that presents an alternative narrative of the movement and of the upheaval it caused in the social and political lives of Bengali society.
Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, live through this tumultuous phase of Indian politics. Subhash, the more careful and rational of the two, quickly perceives the danger and emigrates to the United States to sculpt a life of peaceful scientific research. Angered by the incident at Naxalbari and the ones following, his brother, however, is disillusioned by the Marxist belief in the violent revolution and is prematurely shot dead by the police. Udayan’s death is reminiscent of the murders of so many young, educated college-students like him in the 70s. In today’s Calcutta, in fact, it would be surprising to find a family without the fabled grandfather who once had links to the movement in its infancy.
Built on this initial fabric, the rest of the novel spans around 50 years of Indian and American history and a good 340 pages of fiction. It traces Subhash’s return to Calcutta, his marriage to his dead brother’s pregnant widow Gauri and their subsequent return to Rhode Island. Their marriage is far from ideal, expectedly, and complicated themes of identity, loss and self-discovery forge the rest of the novel.
From V.S. Naipaul to Salman Rushdie, the immigrant experience has produced a body of prolific writing. Similarly parallels can be drawn between Jhumpa Lahiri’s own upbringing as a London-born Bengali living in the United States and the uncertainty ever present in the lives of her characters. She cleverly underlines the differences between the unchangeably-Indian migrants in Subhash and Gauri and their thoroughly-Americanised daughter Bela and is therefore able to accentuate the sense of guarded apprehension in first generation-migrants to a culture and lifestyle that is still foreign to them. Perhaps she draws from her own experiences to present the almost “existential dislocation”, as Michiko Kakutani phrases it, in people who are comfortable neither in their ancestral country nor the country of their adoption. In fact I think the book is not as much about migration or history, as much as it is about human lives and human relationships that suffer deep reverberations because of the historical and social context they are placed in.
Plot and characterisation apart, Lahiri’s writing is restrained but not dispassionate. Her language — straightforward and lacking ostentation — carefully steers clear of unnecessary nostalgia or misplaced lyricism but is still able to carry the power and emotion it is entrusted.
For instance the tribulations of living in an alien country, of speaking a strange tongue, the isolation and loneliness of it all, is captured by her in one beautiful dialogue.
“Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night. She had no wish to overcome it. Rather, it was something upon which she’d come to depend, with which she’d entered by now into a relationship, more satisfying and enduring than the relationships she’d experienced in either of her marriages.”
I do find a hint of the unrealistic touching certain aspects of the book, however. The characters, for large parts, seem one-dimensional and the text is a little slow at places. Udayan, for example, seems to embody nothing but the rebellion and recklessness of youth; Gauri is a selfish and entitled woman, who harbours her second-husband a silent contempt throughout; at times Subhash’s own magnanimity seems a little inexplicable. In the later chapters when the pace of the narrative speeds up, Lahiri redeems herself from her flaws in characterisation. She writes about the narrow, dangerous thread upon which the immigrant is balanced and artfully maps the many moods and emotions, often bewildering and contradictory, that the immigrant —essentially an insecure, frightened creature — goes through.
Added to this, her writing effortlessly conjures moments of beauty and possesses a mysterious charm, much like Khaled Hosseini or Amitav Ghosh.
“She’d convinced herself that Subhash was her rival, and that she was in competition for him for Bela, a competition that felt insulting, unjust. But of course it had not been a competition, it had been her own squandering. Her own withdrawal, covert, ineluctable. With her own hand she’d painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.”
Exile and identity have been dominant in writings of many languages. Lahiri merely continues what was started in the 19th century by Toru Dutt and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, but does so through a novel that will undoubtedly leave an indelible mark in postcolonial fiction.
THE LOWLAND
By Jhumpa Lahiri
352 pages. Vintage Books. ₹399/ $10.09
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