Neel Mukherjee

Neel Mukherjee’s first three novels share an overarching concern with the underdog caught in a global order characterised by movement and constraint. Like the titles of his books, his central themes deal with big concepts: ‘life’, ‘lives’, ‘state’, ‘freedom’. But they are all ultimately animated by small things that give the books ballast and keep them grounded: the minutiae of daily life, banal objects, the powerless and the have-nots.

Mukherjee’s debut, A Life Apart, is a novel about home and the world. Its orphaned hero, Ritwik Ghosh belongs to both and neither. Cast adrift following the death of his parents, Ritwik leaves Calcutta for Oxford as a young man but continues to revisit Bengal through personal memories of a traumatic childhood and through his creative imagination as an aspiring writer.

As Mukherjee’s novel progresses, Ritwik’s high cultural ambitions gradually come undone with his descent into sex trafficking and the seedy London underworld of prostitutes and paperless migrants. The novel’s bookish exploration of queer sexual politics against the quotidian backdrop of everyday metropolitan life reads in places like a cross between Alan Hollinghurst and early Hanif Kureishi.

But it is the unhomely associations of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916) that provide the novel with its most obvious literary point of departure. A Life Apart splices the narrative of Ritwik’s late twentieth century life with fragments from his own historical novel which takes Miss Gilby (a minor character in Tagore) as its central character.

Historically and geographically worlds apart, the parallel lives of Ritwik and Miss Gilby illuminate each other obliquely. Like the dictionary definition of the term ‘counterpoint’ that Ritwik commits to memory as a boy, A Life Apart works through: ‘the idea of note-against-note, or point-against-point … It consists of melodic lines that are heard against one another, and are woven together so that their individual notes harmonize.’ (117).

Miss Gilby is an English teacher in colonial India and a campaigner for women’s education; Ritwik is a student of English in post-colonial England. Their shared experiences of struggle and alienation within socially divided worlds is what paradoxically binds these two characters together, even as the novel’s dramatic, violent conclusion seems to sever the harmonic consolations of counterpoint.

The Lives of Others is set squarely in West Bengal, and avoids the expansive transnational trajectories of A Life Apart. Yet in other ways Mukherjee’s second novel reads like a scaled-up version of the first, with its epic cast of characters and intricate, multiple plot lines. Even their titles seem to echo each other.

The Lives of Others weaves family saga and state politics with the trademark skill that has come to characterise the Indian novel in English, from Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry. Through three generations of the Ghosh family the reader meets a cast of self-aggrandising and often self-centred characters, the heirs to a once successful paper manufacturing business that has fallen on hard times. They live together fractiously on Basanta Bose Road in a house whose multi-storey architecture seems to embody the hierarchical ambitions of the building’s inhabitants.

When the eldest grandson, the idealistic young Supratik, flees with his comrades to join the Maoist Naxalite movement, he appears to have broken the mould. This is novel about the stark divisions between rich and poor, but The Lives of Others is more than a sentimental morality tale, and Mukherjee’s real talent is in his supple portrayal of people. The flawed personalities of his many characters manage to engage the empathy of the reader, whether she likes them or not.

If Mukherjee’s first two novels operate within the broad conventions of the classic realist novel, A State of Freedom operates at its edges. Pushing the experiments with form, fragmentation and genre that are tangible but largely latent in the earlier work, A State of Freedom is an example of what the author terms ‘Trojan horse’ realism:

What does a realist novel do? Can it be pushed in another direction? Within the realist framework, can we sabotage realism from within? You can no longer write about reality by just telling a story, and I wanted to take out all the things you would assume makes a realist novel cohere, like plot or character or narrative. Could I do that and still have something that would answer to the name of a novel? Could meaning be a way of making a novel cohere?

Organised around five putatively stand-alone stories, Mukherjee arguably makes more concessions to coherence than his own account allows. It is a work inspired by the oblique, sectional logic of V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State, but it contains one narrative element that Salman Rushdie has noted is missing from Naipaul’s later work: love.

As a result, Mukherjee’s work remains attached to human relationships, relational structures and the desire for contact and connection in a world beset by cruelty and inhumanity. It seems fitting in this context that the book opens and closes with that monumental structure to love – and its opposite – the Taj Mahal.

Asked to describe the future of the literary field, Neel Mukherjee has speculated that:

In forty to fifty years, this generation of paper-book readers will die out, leaving the truly digital generation remaining, the generation that can, impressively, read, tweet, do Facebook updates, Snapchat, talk, listen to music, message, and other as-yet-unthinkable things, all at the same time and all on their phones. What’ll happen when they inherit the earth, I cannot say. The most likely outcome is that forms will change to accommodate the change in the physical act of reading.

For the time being however, Mukherjee’s own critical success suggests that the taste for the long form remains strong, and that the novel is not just yet a dying art.

James Procter, 2018

Neel Mukherjee’s first three novels share an overarching concern with the underdog caught in a global order characterised by movement and constraint. Like the titles of his books, his central themes deal with big concepts: ‘life’, ‘lives’, ‘state’, ‘freedom’. But they are all ultimately animated by small things that give the books ballast and keep them grounded: the minutiae of daily life, banal objects, the powerless and the have-nots.

Mukherjee’s debut, A Life Apart, is a novel about home and the world. Its orphaned hero, Ritwik Ghosh belongs to both and neither. Cast adrift following the death of his parents, Ritwik leaves Calcutta for Oxford as a young man but continues to revisit Bengal through personal memories of a traumatic childhood and through his creative imagination as an aspiring writer.

As Mukherjee’s novel progresses, Ritwik’s high cultural ambitions gradually come undone with his descent into sex trafficking and the seedy London underworld of prostitutes and paperless migrants. The novel’s bookish exploration of queer sexual politics against the quotidian backdrop of everyday metropolitan life reads in places like a cross between Alan Hollinghurst and early Hanif Kureishi.

But it is the unhomely associations of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916) that provide the novel with its most obvious literary point of departure. A Life Apart splices the narrative of Ritwik’s late twentieth century life with fragments from his own historical novel which takes Miss Gilby (a minor character in Tagore) as its central character.

Historically and geographically worlds apart, the parallel lives of Ritwik and Miss Gilby illuminate each other obliquely. Like the dictionary definition of the term ‘counterpoint’ that Ritwik commits to memory as a boy, A Life Apart works through: ‘the idea of note-against-note, or point-against-point … It consists of melodic lines that are heard against one another, and are woven together so that their individual notes harmonize.’ (117).

Miss Gilby is an English teacher in colonial India and a campaigner for women’s education; Ritwik is a student of English in post-colonial England. Their shared experiences of struggle and alienation within socially divided worlds is what paradoxically binds these two characters together, even as the novel’s dramatic, violent conclusion seems to sever the harmonic consolations of counterpoint.

The Lives of Others is set squarely in West Bengal, and avoids the expansive transnational trajectories of A Life Apart. Yet in other ways Mukherjee’s second novel reads like a scaled-up version of the first, with its epic cast of characters and intricate, multiple plot lines.  Even their titles seem to echo each other.

The Lives of Others weaves family saga and state politics with the trademark skill that has come to characterise the Indian novel in English, from Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry. Through three generations of the Ghosh family the reader meets a cast of self-aggrandising and often self-centred characters, the heirs to a once successful paper manufacturing business that has fallen on hard times. They live together fractiously on Basanta Bose Road in a house whose multi-storey architecture seems to embody the hierarchical ambitions of the building’s inhabitants.

When the eldest grandson, the idealistic young Supratik, flees with his comrades to join the Maoist Naxalite movement, he appears to have broken the mould. This is novel about the stark divisions between rich and poor, but The Lives of Others is more than a sentimental morality tale, and Mukherjee’s real talent is in his supple portrayal of people. The flawed personalities of his many characters manage to engage the empathy of the reader, whether she likes them or not.

If Mukherjee’s first two novels operate within the broad conventions of the classic realist novel, A State of Freedom operates at its edges. Pushing the experiments with form, fragmentation and genre that are tangible but largely latent in the earlier work, A State of Freedom is an example of what the author terms ‘Trojan horse’ realism:

“What does a realist novel do? Can it be pushed in another direction? Within the realist framework, can we sabotage realism from within? You can no longer write about reality by just telling a story, and I wanted to take out all the things you would assume makes a realist novel cohere, like plot or character or narrative. Could I do that and still have something that would answer to the name of a novel? Could meaning be a way of making a novel cohere?”

Organised around five putatively stand-alone stories, Mukherjee arguably makes more concessions to coherence than his own account allows. It is a work inspired by the oblique, sectional logic of V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State, but it contains one narrative element that Salman Rushdie has noted is missing from Naipaul’s later work: love.

As a result, Mukherjee’s work remains attached to human relationships, relational structures and the desire for contact and connection in a world beset by cruelty and inhumanity. It seems fitting in this context that the book opens and closes with that monumental structure to love – and its opposite – the Taj Mahal.

Asked to describe the future of the literary field, Neel Mukherjee has speculated that:

“In forty to fifty years, this generation of paper-book readers will die out, leaving the truly digital generation remaining, the generation that can, impressively, read, tweet, do Facebook updates, Snapchat, talk, listen to music, message, and other as-yet-unthinkable things, all at the same time and all on their phones. What’ll happen when they inherit the earth, I cannot say. The most likely outcome is that forms will change to accommodate the change in the physical act of reading.”

For the time being however, Mukherjee’s own critical success suggests that the taste for the long form remains strong, and that the novel is not just yet a dying art.