#the central narrative of jhumpa lahiri's lowland is... killing cops is bad and will bring emotional vengeance upon you wtf

[metamatar]

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014), that embody this tendency: a universalization that, in fact, neither comprehends nor sympathizes with the social and political contradictions in contemporary South Asia.

Both novels place at the center of their narrative what is commonly referred to as the Naxalite movement, which began in 1967 with a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, a village in northern Bengal near the Nepal border. Initially led by armed members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the movement later broke away to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and has largely followed Mao’s doctrine of “people’s war.” Begun in the countryside, it spread to the cities during the 1970s, attracting significant numbers of educated, unemployed youth energized by the peasants’ struggle for rights and recognition. A brutal counteroffensive, empowered by draconian anti-terrorist laws, brought the first phase of the movement to an end. In both novels, the central figures are Naxalite militants. Their immersion in the movement, together with the fallout of their decisions on the lives of those around them, largely propels the narrative in both.

By placing an emancipatory movement at the core of their novels, Lahiri and Mukherjee also place the politics of resistance front and center. And yet, even though both novels are structured by the political actions of key characters, neither author is able to muster an empathetic understanding of their characters’ actions. Moreover, the very idea of a life of struggle is made to appear at best quaint, at worst objectionable. In both novels, politics remains something imposed on the characters, an external, impinging force—but never a source of self-actualization. Instead it serves as a source of dislocation, self-doubt, broken relationships and disrupted lives. Each novel exposes its author’s inability to perceive the political as an intrinsic aspect of the individual being.

Hence, while each of the authors locates a politics of resistance at their novel’s center and views that politics through a universalizing prism, neither can fathom its attraction. Such an approach to emancipatory politics reinforces the neoliberal view that all resistance is doomed because there are no possible alternatives to the current order. And although both authors seem to want to escape an ethos where resistance is viewed as futile, neither is able to do so. As a result, neither is able to engage, much less express, the internal lives of their own central characters. Because of this, they remain limited, not just as post-colonial novels but simply as novels.

The World In a Grain of Sand, Nivedita Majumdar (emphasis mine)