CONTAINING MULTITUDES

SIDDHARTHA DEB's The Light at the End of the World is a saga of continental proportions that travels effortlessly through time

- Gautam Bhatia

THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD: A Novel
by Siddhartha Deb
WESTLAND

Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World tells the story of modern India through multiple, intersecting timelines. The story moves between present-day Delhi, 1984 on the eve of the Bhopal Disaster, 1947 Calcutta on the cusp of Indian Independence, 1859 and the immediate aftermath of the Revolt, and back again to the present day. In each timeline, individuals are caught up in the great currents of the age, currents characterised by violence—whether it is the violence of the coloniser, the genocidal violence of Partition, or the industrial violence of the oleum gas leak. Their stories, connected by thin threads of history, constitute an ensemble where different characters speak in different registers.

In doing so, The Light at the End of the World draws on multiple traditions and conventions of narrative. The most obvious one is the use of an inter-generational frame to unspool what is, in essence, a national history (with a fair bit of scepticism about nations and how they are constituted). Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is, of course, a predecessor, but Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014)—which does something similar for Uganda—is perhaps a more appropriate point of comparison, given overlapping colonial and post-colonial histories.

A more striking effect that the book achieves, however, is a simultaneous nearness and distancing from its subject matter. We see this most recently in NoViolet Bulawayo’s