‘The Politician’: Finally, an English novel set in the heartland of Indian politics, Uttar Pradesh

The impulse to write the great Indian novel has been too tempting to resist for a number of Indian English novelists. From Qurratulain Hyder through Shashi Tharoor to Vikram Seth, many have written their own great Indian novels, works of considerable merit, but not the great Indian novel.

Such is the diversity of lands, people and cultures in India that most novels of this kind remain regional in focus, however ambitious they may be in scale. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata/Bengal, Kerala, and western India have usually provided settings and characters in Indian English novels. But Uttar Pradesh, an area which has wielded considerable political influence in independent India, has held out its appeal to a host of Hindi and Urdu writers and poets, but has only occasionally appeared in Indian English fiction.

One can think of Lucknow in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, Lucknow and Benaras in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Benaras in Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics, and western UP, though cursorily, in Mirza Waheed’s Tell Her Everything. But Uttar Pradesh’s geography and its political significance has largely been absent in Indian English novels.

Observing the quotidian

The Politician is unabashedly a north Indian novel, more specifically a novel about a specific region in central Uttar Pradesh. Written in a realistic mode, not trying too hard to embellish the narrative with literary texture, it provides a glimpse into the political culture of this region. All characters in the novel obviously speak Hindi – and the novel is imbued with a Hindi-speaking culture – but such is the quality of Devesh Verma’s expressive prose that The Politician might appear a lesser work if rendered into Hindi, losing its novelty and freshness.

Every bit a twenty-first century Indian English novel, it neither tries to write back to a centre nor cares for a western reader. The novel captures both the energy and the chaos that characterise life in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, showing effortlessly both the machinations of power politics and mounds of filth.

The narrator in The Politician is certainly a great observer of the ordinary, day-to-day life in Uttar Pradesh directing the reader’s gaze to the poor children “who wanted to push the jeep” quarrelling among themselves, or constantly sniffling “to hold back the snot that would peek through before being drawn back in quickly”; a candidate for a job surprising a big official “by his correct use of the conjunction ‘lest’”, or the landline phones always developing snags, and the telephone officials’ indifference to people’s complaints.

In many places, the description of filth – of “clogged urine outlet, an assortment of faecal mounds of various sizes and colour” – fills up the narrative. EM Forster had been reminded of the virtue of reticence in western literature while thinking of the filth and the description of bowel movements in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. It is another matter that HG Wells discovered James Joyce’s “cloacal obsession” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, while another reviewer found Dublin too ugly in the great modernist’s work.

Verma, writing in the 21st century, does not have to think about reticence. All chaos and disorder in mofussil India, which is routine and to which people have become accustomed, is captured by his expressive prose at these moments. Even the description of filth is treated with humour. Thus, in a choice between an extraordinarily filthy and foul-smelling urinal which displays the picture of a “smiling prime minister with a rosebud in the buttonhole of his white khadi waistcoat” and the boundary wall, people make for the boundary wall.

Caste and crew

The energy latent in the political culture of Uttar Pradesh is the main subject of The Politician. The communal angle of this political culture has interested many novelists, but The Politician brings the elephant of caste arithmetic into the world of English novel, especially the relationship of caste and politics in the Hindi heartland.

Mulk Raj Anand, wedded to his social realism, brought out the issue of caste in Untouchable. Arundhati Roy brought in the caste angle through the forbidden relationship of Ammu Ipe and Velutha in The God of Small Things. Caste obviously is an important subject in Dalit literature. But novels about a specific backward caste, in this case Kurmis of Western UP, have been non-existent in Indian English fiction.

The Politician views entire election campaigns for parliamentary and assembly seats from the angle of Kurmi influence in and around Fatehpur and Kanpur. This is also seen in the larger national politics of the Congress and the non-Congress parties, before the ascendancy of right-wing politics. Criticism of Brahminical influence in Indian politics completes this picture.

In treating political themes The Politician also sets up a dialogue between different political ideologies living up to the polyphonic character of a novel. It dwells on the personalities and ideas of a number of major Indian political figures, like Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, and Jayaprakash Narayan, and minor ones like Raj Narayan, Banarsi Das Gupta, and Sampoornanand.

Ambedkar, Periyar and Phule are referred to for their radical political views in the discussions of characters about caste. Some other major characters in the novel are based on real political figures. Baran Singh appears to have been modelled on former prime minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, and Sansadji on the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna.

Characters and narratives

Taking the reader back and forth in time, Kartik Verma, the narrator who is the head at a new TV news channel, is also a minor character in the novel. The notes and diaries left for him by his deceased friend Deena give him privileged access into the world of Ram Mohan, Deena’s father and the central character in The Politician, turning the novel into a kind of third person narrative, though sometimes interrupted by his first person narration.

But the point of view in the novel is that of Deena, a sensitive soul in a ruthless world, mediated by Kartik, his alternative self, who studied with Deena at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Deena’s peace-loving nature, his devotion to vegetarianism, his tender self, and his inability to adjust to the cruelty and viciousness in the world are aspects of the latent ethos of the novel contrasting beautifully with the novel’s overt cynicism.

The first two sentences of the novel, also used on the book jacket, immediately pull the reader into the narrative: “I was about to leave for work when the telephone rang. Deena was dead.” Did we hear the echo of the opening sentence of Camus’ Outsider: “Mother died today”?

Ram Mohan, a college teacher of Hindi and a scholar who has written a book of Hindi grammar, nurses a political ambition which is further whetted by his political mentors. However, despite being the main character in the novel, Ram Mohan’s character appears very thin for almost two thirds of the novel. It is only in the final third that he is fully realised, letting readers make their judgment about him.

Whatever idealism he might have aroused earlier is completely punctured. His authoritarian and patriarchal thinking is outweighed only by his hypocritical morality. He evinces no active virtue through the 350-and-odd pages of the novel. The secondary characters appear more interesting. Is it because many of them are inspired by real life figures? Baran Singh’s ideas, beliefs, and habits are sharply drawn. Dixit ji with his novel morality sticks in the mind. Sansadji’s near and distant presence, his vacillations and permanent promise to deliver also hold the narrative beautifully.

History and fiction

No novel can escape history – however it may try to give history the slip. Contrarily, novels may faithfully use actual political and historical events and situations, but still cannot pass as history as novels do what only they can, not the textbooks of history. The success of Sunlight on a Broken Column or, for that matter, Milan Kundera’s and Amitav Ghosh’s novels is largely due to their fine blending of history and the main narrative.

The movement from history to narrative and vice versa is seamless in Sunlight and Unbearable Lightness of Being, to take just two examples. This seamlessness deserts The Politician at some places where the reporting of actual historical events and developments in independent India has an obtrusive presence.

Most poetic and novelistic creations defamiliarise the familiar, the mundane, the everyday. The treatment of distant events in history achieves a defamiliarising effect more easily than more recent historical developments, unless used as a context for the main narrative. Events like the China War, Nehru’s politics, and Indira Gandhi’s taking over the Congress are too fresh in public memory, permanently kept on the boil by an overzealous Indian media and speeches of leaders.

But, most certainly there are varied interpretive communities of readers in terms of age groups, regions, nationalities and gender. The Politician will achieve a defamiliarising effect for the new generation of readers, and an international audience, not necessarily based in India. The role of relatively marginal political figures like Charan Singh or Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna is almost forgotten today, and they may not even be recognised by most readers behind their fictional personas.

It is not even required to know the actual people a novelist uses to conceive characters, because no novel is a mere copy of real life. Real life figures, when used as characters, undergo a transformation in the hands of a novelist because they must look authentic in the novel. They do in The Politician.

Readers usually discover new facets of life when reading the fiction of another culture and recognise familiar things when reading works of their own culture. But even our own culture may hold elements which may be in danger of being forgotten or which may not have been foregrounded in fiction enough. The treatment of many of such elements, in particular the chaos and disorder in the everyday life in small towns, and the relationship between caste and politics in the Hindi heartland before the grand success of the right-wing, make The Politician a welcome addition to the canon of Indian English fiction.

Mohammad Asim Siddiqui is Professor in the Department of English at Aligarh Muslim University.

The Politician: A Novel, Devesh Verma, Penguin Viking.