Tale of Two Books

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.

The two authors brilliantly bring together, with their compelling, comparable but contrasting stories, an idea of Bengal and Bengalis who saw the spread of India’s first peasant revolution – a revolution that still continues but is much less understood today. Full marks to Mukherjee and Lahiri for their beautiful portrayal of events.