Class Act

Neel Mukherjee’s Latest Novel, a State of Freedom, Is an Important, Empathy-building Probe of Urban India’s Class Divide. And It Retains All the Devastation and Despair of His Earlier Works, Finds Vatsala Chhibber.

- Vatsala Chhibber

All three of Neel Mukherjee’s novels open with tragedy. In the first few pages of Past Continuous (Picador, 2007), his debut novel, Ritwik Ghosh watches his dead mother’s head flop and roll as her stretcher is queued in front of an electric furnace. In The Lives Of Others (Penguin Random House, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, an indigent wage labourer slashes and chokes his unfed family of four before killing himself. And in the opening paragraph of his latest, A State Of Freedom (Penguin Random House; out now), a paralysing grief finally abates, allowing a father to weep for his dead son. Which is to say, you need to have the stomach for a Neel Mukherjee novel.

Death, violence and despair are the meat and potatoes of Mukherjee’s prose. An unspectacular devastation blankets his stories, whether of a gay Bengali immigrant seeking furtive sex in public toilets (Past Continuous) or of a prickly family affected by the Naxalite surge of the ’60s (The Lives Of Others). Mukherjee’s novels grab you by the chin and force you to focus on all the unpleasantness you’ve learnt to turn away from—and he does this compellingly. So, when you put away A State Of Freedom, you know some of its images have been burned into your consciousness for good. Like the blood pattern made by a severed arm when it’s lopped off a body, the residue of hot tar on bare feet on a blistering day, the way a smashed egg travels down the face of an abused wife, or how a bear cub’s eyes dance when a hot iron rod pierces his nose.