English, August

"This is one of the first books I read in English that was written by an Indian. What amazed me at the time was the sarcasm within it, which is very strong. The novel is about a young trainee civil servant called Agastya Sen who is posted to Madna, in India’s hinterland. Agastya had grown up in the cosmopolitan city of Delhi and he finds it very difficult to cope with his new environment. He lacks enthusiasm for a life in administration, and he is more interested in smoking marijuana and having fun. The young man faces an existential crisis, which is the focus of the book. It’s very funny, and very convincing too – the author was himself a member of the Indian Administrative Service for many years."

"There have been so many Indian novels in English. This, I think, is perhaps the best. This is the story of a man called Agastya Sen, who is a civil servant. He’s a member of the elite Indian Administrative Service. When you become an IAS officer, you’re basically the king of a district in India, you have all the accoutrements of power that the British created and enjoyed. There are retinues of staff at your disposal. Upamanyu Chatterjee finds the comedy in this. He doesn’t spare anyone. He considers the English-speaking Indians who turn up in villages to perform experiments with the ideas they have absorbed from other places. He considers the inequalities of India, the cruelties of rural India and the pettiness of the officials sent to govern rural India. All these high officials are obsessed with protocols. There are hilarious descriptions of government guest houses, with all the horrors of post-colonial India’s socialist aesthetics, hideous bungalows and even more hideous wallpapers, and a frog in Agastya’s bathroom. Chatterjee describes this world so vividly. “Nobody, understandably, wishes to be hounded, harassed, and harried by this administration” Agastya Sen’s friends call him August. His father is the governor of West Bengal. There’s no real plot. It’s just August waking up every day. He smokes pot. He listens to Chopin on his stereo. He’s a mythomaniac, he just lies all the time. One of his officers asks him, ‘Where did you go to university?’ He says, ‘I was at Cambridge.’ And the officer says, ‘Oh, I was at Cambridge, when were you there?’ And Agastya says, ‘Oh, I meant Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was at Harvard.’ Then he meets people in rural India who’ve been brutalized by the state. He has a real social conscience, but he’s also lost. Nehru once said, “I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” Agastya is a figure like that. He’s thrown into this village life where nothing’s happening, and he tries to retain his sanity. I’d say it’s the most comically brilliant English novel to come out of India in the past 70 years. The bureaucratic maze Chatterjee describes is very much intact. Those obsessions with protocols are very much alive. I was in small town India just a year-and-a-half ago and those guest houses are still there, the aesthetic is still there. The pettiness of the officials is still there. The deference of the villagers is still there. What has changed is that there are fewer people like Agastya now. There’s greater diversity among the IAS officers, and so many of them are doing work that deserves applause, but there are still others who have imbibed and inherited the pettiness of their predecessors. The bureaucratic maze remains just as maddening. If you read this novel, you will appreciate why the government machinery of India is so dysfunctional and why it moves so slowly."