Unequal lives

The Lives of Others; Neel Mukherjee random house); Price: Rs.425; 528pp

Though bested against all expectations by Richard Flanagan in the final round of assessment for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize 2014, Neel Mukherjee’s second novel The Lives of Others made literary headlines as the front-runner until the last mile. In recent years, the retelling of (as in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland) the turbulent history of West Bengal in the 1960s has become a genre for recalling youthful intellectual idealism and mounting a critique of impotent communist activism.

The history of the Ghosh joint family, residing in Bhawanipore, an upper middle-class borough of Calcutta, unfolds in slow, complacent mode, with three generations living, interacting, quarrelling and sparring in their sprawling four-storey mansion. Presided over by the patriarch Prafullanath and matriarch Charubala, the cast of meticulously drawn characters enacting the everyday drama of petty rivalries and envy, love and hatred, pride and hypocrisy include sons Adinath, Priyonath, Bholanath, their families, the youngest Somnath’s widow and children, and their only sister Chhaya, a cross-eyed spinster.

The flourishing family business, Charu Paper and Sons Pvt. Ltd is in the doldrums, plagued by frequent labour troubles endangering the family fortune. Yet form has to be maintained with a retinue of servants, ritual observances, social customs, and religious traditions to sustain a sense of continuity and security.

But the sudden disappearance of Adinath’s eldest son, 21-year-old Supratik who flees this bastion of middle-class morality and feudalism to “find some air, some place where I shall be able to purge myself, push back against the life given to me and make my own”, is a rude jolt to a family reluctant to come to terms with a changing world and its declining fortunes. Supratik is sensitive to class discrimination and the differential treatment meted out to family retainers and his widowed aunt Purba and her children.

Alienated, he moves out of the city to work with “landless peasants, the sharecroppers, wage-labourers and impoverished tenants… to organise them into armed struggle”.

The adversarial relationship between the establishment and people at the grassroots, the widening chasm between town and country, is the larger national socio-economic history that Mukherjee narrates in the novel. Therefore the recurring domestic crises of a typically Bengali bhadra family pale in comparison with “something that was going to explode like a thousand suns in an unsuspecting sky — Naxalbari”.

This dramatic tension is sustained through a narrative style which criss-crosses the boundaries of past and present, and moves in alternate chapters from the family home with a prestigious Calcutta address, to unspecified marginal locations where the revolution is enacted. The technique of parallel narratives and corresponding voices (the family saga using impersonal narration, and Supratik’s letters a confessional tone) highlights the unseen linkages between the characters and events.

In trying to ascertain the whereabouts of her son, Sandhya pieces together newspaper reports about violence in Naxalbari, peasant uprisings in different parts of India, and the iconic revolutionary Charu Mazumdar’s declaration that “hundreds of Naxalbaris are smouldering in India”. Even as the connections become clear, Sandhya slips into denial mode, reluctant to come to terms with her worst fears.

Suspense is a common leitmotif of both narratives — one, the genealogy of a family circumscribed by selfish goals and expectations; the other, a revolution seeking to change the world and society at the cost of intense personal sacrifice. A melee of visible and invisible characters, farmers and businessmen, administrators and policemen, prostitutes and beggars, moneylenders and landlords vie for equal attention with grandparents, uncles, aunts, Malati-di, Madan-da, and comrades like Dhiren and Samir in a panorama that was commonplace in Bengal in the Naxal era between 1966-70. Mukherjee is able to penetrate the Bengali psyche while retracing the memory of family entrepreneurship of the earlier generation of pre-independence India, the Second World War and the nationalist/swadeshi era.

At another level The Lives of Others is a story of sons who enjoy and fritter away the family fortune, even as Supratik and Suranjan representing the third generation are caught up in fateful events (Maoist insurgency and drug addiction) representing a society in transition. Finally, in two consecutive epilogues, the family saga and the class struggle are pitched forward to 1986 and 2012. The lives of ‘others’ — marginalised victims of middle-class indifference — are shaped by trajectories of neglect.

Sona emerges as a brilliant yet reclusive mathematician and Supratik leaves a legacy of rage for his Maoist comrades.  In The Lives of Others, Mukherjee counterpoints two disparate worlds into an emotionally charged and compelling narrative.

Jayati Gupta

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http://educationworldonline.net/flexycms//myadmin/index.php/page-article-choice-add-issue_id-142The Sufi Movement: East and West; Jan Slomp Henry martyn institute & media house (delhi); Price: Rs.250; 185pp

The mystical dimension is an essential part of religions, calling human beings towards deeper and more profound reflection and knowledge. Mysticism is an essential experience of every genuine religious persuasion and the common heritage of all religions. In this insightful book, Dutch scholar Jan Slomp introduces readers to a great Indian Sufi mystic, Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), who at the turn of the 20th century believed the time had come for the rest of the world to share in the spiritual accomplishments of Mother India. This book explains how he arrived at this conviction and responded to his calling.

Arguably, Hazrat Inayat Khan introduced sufism to the West. In 1910 he travelled to America, accompanied by his younger brother and cousin. Their grand tour of the West lasted 16 years, until 1926. In all his years abroad, Khan sought to evolve a mystical experience for the modern secular world, offering to the West his knowledge developed as a great classical musician of India.

Besides the two well-established approaches of contemplative philosophy jinana yoga or, in Arabic/Urdu, ma‘rifat and yoga (or riyazat), Inayat Khan advocated aesthetic contemplation as a means to spiritual evolution. For him, the beauty of nature or art, including music, was a source of contemplation. His Western audiences loved his discourses, and over the years he attracted numerous Western disciples.

Original Muslim mysticism, liberal and open, was connected with early Christian mysticism. The Quran refers to biblical revelations, and there were active contacts between the first Muslim mystics and their Christian contemporaries. In the Indian setting, sufi sages freely interacted with bhaktas, sadhus and jogis, giving rise to expressions of sufism with a distinctly Indic flavour. Following the philosophy of great Indian sufis, Inayat Khan was convinced that in essence all religions though superficially different, were expressions of one fundamental Truth. This allowed him to discover and reach the mystical core of all religions. He believed music and mysticism could lead people to the common heart of all religions: love, harmony and beauty. His dialogues with a wide cross-section of priests, prophets and mystics of all religions confirmed this discovery.

Inayat Khan’s mission was to bridge the gap between East and West and between people of differing — often antagonistic — religious persuasions. He sought to attain this objective by propagating a pure mysticism that transcends humanly-constructed barriers of communal, ethnic and national differences. He was the one chosen to disseminate sufi wisdom in the West, as was made clear by his murshid or guru, Hazrat Abu Hashim Madani.  Inayat Khan described sufism as “a mother of the coming reform in the religious world”.

His theatre was primarily the West, and his vision integrated Western philosophy, Christianity and Judaism, in a universal understanding of piety that had no room for narrow interpretation of religious dogma. He often cited the Quran, the Bible and Hindu saints and scriptures in the same breath. Slomp shows how he creatively integrated the religious, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of life into one ideal of love, harmony and beauty.

Interestingly, many of Inayat Khan’s disciples were women, amazing at a time when the women’s liberation movement was still in its nascent stages. Subsequently, female mureeds (disciples) carved out sufficient space for personal development within the movement Hazrat Inayat Khan initiated.

At a time when the ‘polarisation’ of religious communities is lauded as brilliant electoral strategy, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s message of the universal harmony of all religions is to be welcomed. Slomp’s efforts to resurrect the essential message of sufism as interpreted by Hazrat Inayat Khan prompts readers to reflect whether mysticism might be the much sought after bridge between people of differing religious persuasions.

Teresa Joseph