Recently, I
concluded reading two books – The Lives Of Others and The Lowland
– the former written by Neel Mukherjee, an Indian based out of England and the
latter written by Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian-American. Both these books are a
simulacrum of Charles Dickens’ famous composition – The Tale Of Two Cities and
can best be captured in Dickens’ own words -
"It was
the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was
the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was
the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going
direct the other way”
Like
Dickens, who set in front of us a panorama of the raging fight during the
French revolution between the bourgeois and the aristocrats in France and a
parallel world set in London around late 1700s, Mukherjee and Lahiri captivate
us with a similar tale of somebodies in Calcutta, Bengal, during the Naxal
revolution and a parallel world set in the US, almost 200 years later.
Still, the two
books beautifully bound by a saga of heart-wrenching love, death, a failed
movement – a revolution, couldn’t have been more diverse at once. Lives Of Others is primarily set in Calcutta and the hinterlands of Bengal during the
decades and those immediately succeeding the Indian independence when the Naxal revolution had erupted, while in contrast The Lowland mainly commences in the
decades of the Naxal revolution stretching upto the early years of the current
millennium.
Not just
with their timeline of event presentation, the two authors contrast each other
in their drama presentation as well. Mukherjee, more Rushdiesque in his style,
lionizes his characters and expresses them through their action as much as
their locution compared to Lahiri who distinctively adopts a blander but
saucier approach to her characters.
The
comparisons and contrasts in the two books continue beyond the two authors’
style of presentation, much into the lives and deaths and in the palisading of the
characters. Lives Of Others ends with a contrived and tragic turn of events in the
protagonist – Supratik Ghosh’s- life after he had hatched the plan along with
his comrades from CPI (ML) to kill policemen so that they could loot their
arsenal and take their revolution forward. Concomitant with Supratik Ghosh, Udayan
Mitra’s, the protagonist in The Lowland, life also follows a similar sequence
of events as if by design. The protagonists from two different books surreally come
together, as if to plan and execute the same policemen, for the same purpose. At
this juncture, the reader can easily be transported to an emplacement where
Supratik and Udayan would meet daily to chart out their execution plans,
discuss the road ahead for the party and their afterlives, as if they were one,
as if a reflection of each other, comrades forever. Mukherjee and Lahiri’s
characters meet only to diverge once again. Mukherjee limns his saga around the
Ghoshes, Supratik being one of the grandsons, who are a rich and conservative
business family and where lives revolve in and around Calcutta, but ends it
with the youngest grandson ending up in the United States. Lahiri on the other
hand chooses to depict her characters as a set of free-flowing strong willed agents
from the Mitra family, who choose to stay in the United States for a better
part of their lives but almost in bathos ends her saga in Calcutta.
