The post-colonial period seems to be taking a different turn altogether, Arvind Adiga raises questions pertaining to the relevance of an ‘eternal victim’ that makes its appearance in many third World novels today. I can’t say who started this, whether it was Dorris Lessing with her The Grass is Singing or even earlier Salman Rushdie with the Midnight’s Children. Who cares if things do not change and they keep on providing raw material to any literary work positioning against Edward Said’s Orientalism; he probably saw it better later: Nobody exploits (both figuratively and idiomatically) Orient better than Orient does it itself. Arvind Adiga, as a conscious writer is aware of two debates, one that the Orient is always painted black in Western imagination- just heard it recently in a seminar. And, the Orient is the neo-Imperial (not an adjective, but a complete noun). Mittal Steel was all about European Protectionism, but that’s what “Khadi Andolan” was about. They don’t teach us that in schools, over there they just teach us Adam Smith and Keynes. To which School did Adiga go? Looking at the way he sums up things, I am sure that he must have learnt it all by himself: the truth. With the fictional touch of exaggeration though; but why can’t a cynic and a clairvoyant prophesize doomsday? After all, that’s what how he ended his The White Tiger.
The evil is right here, knocking at the door, touching the epitome of modernity first, contrasting it with the anachronisms like segregation; isolation; attack on individualism. The novel starts as a warning bell: not that it has such an ornamental beginning, but the credentials of the author are such: he is a cynic and so are we… We read him because we know that he is giving expressions to our sentiments, and we are also aware of the fact that we won’t be good at that. A middle class Mumbai society, with all lower and middle class values: La Malaise indienne, as famously put by one of my teachers: family; responsibility; children; parents; rituals; festivals; anachronic ideologies, and opposed to it, a Masterji. A nerd, a misfit in any society, it’s pretty obvious that he would have been a misfit in any society/community. People like him are less a nonchalant object meant as fixtures and are more like ideas that keep on flowing, they tend to define their own positivism and yet remain attached to the cause of Universal good.
This man doesn’t want to vacate the apartment that represents for him the souvenirs of his wife and daughter. He is also the last man standing between the windfall and his neighbors residing the same apartment tower (sic.). A Guajarati builder had offered them “Rs.20000/square foot” for their dilapidated building that might anyways fall anytime. This Masterji won’t let a Punjabi Puri, a Sindhi Ajwani, a Christian Communist Rego, a Muslim Ibby to claim a stake on what they ‘deserve’ for having toiled for such a long time in pre and post Mumbai-Bombay or Bombay-Mumbai. The human greed metamorphosed into fantasy and then need is the lesser part of this novel than the human nature. Emile Zola made this trend ostensible in France, in one of his novels, Germinal, on an experimental basis by putting one of his characters, Etienne, in a situation detrimental to the mine laborers. What did he expect Etienne to do? Compromise or vanish, the character being more sure of himself rebelled. It caused destruction. Adiga’s Etienne rebels too, but doesn’t have a similar fate.
This inter-textuality demands just more than a superficial comparison. A century has elapsed, the contexts are not similar and yet there is this experimentation with the human nature. In the Indian context, it all begins with essentialism. A favorite among many writers, essentialism has provided the backbone for many social novels, the Maximum city by Suketu Mehta was another example in this context. Mumbai as they say a Melting pot is not going to be the one as it was never one; nothing melts there, except Gold perhaps. Coincidentally, it’s the money and not any other common cause that unites these Guajarati; Sindhi; Punjabi; UPwallah; Bihari; Bengali Mumbaikars. The essentialism comes from within these communities and does not flow from the pens of these authors. Representation is what Adiga and Mehta stick to. Moreover, this generation of authors like Adiga, Mehta and Gautam Malkani- the last one of the trio had recently produced a Time Bomb, titled, Londonstani, provide hope to us that everything is not lost and stagnated at Gayatri Spevak and Said. The understanding of each situation needs a heterogeneous approach; their characters are not united by a sense of community, but with the sense of situation (Julia Kristeva invisibly present). Zola’s naturalism was perhaps a step in this direction, but it is bringing a lot of objective understanding to different contexts- all dissimilar. The Orient is a neo-imperial too, if not the only neo-imperial.
Last Man in tower is authentic in approach, if not in the theme and characterization. We were anyways not expecting any surprises from this writer of social novels. The pricing was harsh on Indian readership, one thing that Chetan Bhagat types have taught us is the pricing technique. No one expects Adiga, Malkani and Mehta to be sold at less than “Rs.100”. This honor best remains with Bhagat and his ilk. They deserve it. But how do publishers plan to make these other books more widely read with such a price tag? India might not yet be ready for an exclusive hard-bound release, take a lesson from The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, it did pretty well thanks to its soft-bound copies.
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