Dawn at Kottakkal, Kerala ~ my photo from 2017
In the early 1930s, after his stint as a policeman in Burma, George Orwell went about submitting his first full length manuscript to various publishing houses in London including at Faber & Faber. where the owlish magisterium of T. S. Eliot reigned supreme. Eliot’s pencil marked up texts that won his favor and rejected others with scrupulous disdain, particularly towards those that carried among its pages the whiff of radicalism. (Eliot described himself in those days as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion”). Orwell’s humble but earnest volume was titled ‘The Scullion’s Diary’—a scullion or a plongeur is a dishwasher, a lowly servant in a culinary establishment rife with hierarchies. Orwell’s submission was rejected by Eliot with a note that archly observed: ‘We did find it of very great interest, but I regret to say that it does not appear to me possible as a publishing venture.” Like many writers down on their luck with publishers, Orwell too arrived into the superstition that changing titles might propitiate the gods of publishing. He dreamt up other possible names for his book—from the solemn ’Lady Poverty’ to the pitiable ‘Confessions of a Dishwasher’. Eventually, when the book saw the light of day, it appeared as ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’—a work filled with wry descriptions of his life as a dishwasher in the twilight zone between wage-labor respectability and out-on-the-streets poverty.
In this slim volume, Orwell wrote about his days as a plongeur in a French hotel— a dishwasher who is “a slave’s slave”, shouted at by other servants who were themselves at the bottom of an elaborate “caste system” at the apex of which sat the anonymous and unknowable Patron, followed by the Manager, the Maitre d’Hotel, the Chef du Personnel, other Cooks, the waiters, then the laundresses, and finally the plongeur below whom were the dishwashing soap and the gunk of used utensils. Orwell was shouted upon, ordered harshly, and was often subject to casual chauvinisms that the French (of an older generation) reserved solely for the British. Despite these circumstances, Orwell used his days when he teetered on the edges of hunger and despair to observe closely the edifice above, at the bottom of which he found himself. This inversion—from the top of the social order as a white, male, and, most importantly, a policeman in colonial Burma to becoming a dishwasher in a Parisian hotel—in effect, meant seeing closely and elaborating upon the manners, moralities, and machinations within a corporate enterprise that had little use for abstractions like ‘humanity’ or ‘freedom’. But even while being at the bottom of that totem pole among fellow Europeans, Orwell was alert to an even lower kind of social existence—“an extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe.” This was the life of an “Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony”—those “black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in loin-clothes”. Foreshadowing his talent for striking summaries, he writes about them—“Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their gray mustaches…Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation—whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food.” In his own despairing state, amid unwashed plates, kitchen grease, and everyday harangues, Orwell found comfort in thinking about those Indian rickshaw pullers and consoled himself—”the Plongeur..is a king compared with a rickshaw puller”.
But this act of consolation, and perhaps even self-valorization, is nevertheless thin gruel, for he inevitably comes face to face with the singular uselessness of the plongeur’s work who is made to do trivial tasks, often in order to fill up his time and satisfy the petty tyrants of lower management. Anticipating what the sociologist David Graebaer, nearly a century later, describes as ‘Bullshit Jobs’ ("flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, & taskmasters"), Orwell notes the emptiness that froths up every time he ‘thinks’ about the nature of his work. But he writes his wasn’t the only meaningless job—in fact, much of modern society is structured around other types of jobs, many which are high paying, but are still underscored by the same qualities—mindless, repetitive, stressful tasks and with ultimately nothing to show for. What they do however have in common is the ability to trap the labor provider into an endless cycle. Orwell’s observations read as a thinly veiled, but more intimately chronicled, version of what Marx called ‘alienation’ from the fruits of one’s labor.
But there was another form of estrangement too—a cognitive one—which Orwell tells us is rooted in class. This refers to our abilities, or more precisely inabilities, to know anything useful about others who live utterly different lives. This difference affects our abilities to know and circumscribes our imagination—both of which limit the range of emotions we can experience. He writes, “the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?” So distant is hunger from the lives of the middle class readers of literature and books, even amid the throes of the Great Depression, that Orwell somewhat exasperatedly notes that an editor of a poetry collection had to add a footnote to explain what was going on in a 15th century verse by the French poet François Villon who wrote “And [others go begging naked] and see white bread only in shop windows'' (‘Et pain ne voient qu’aux fenestres’). The middle class, Orwell writes, needed footnotes and explanations to understand this depiction of poverty. The behaviors and emotions that hunger created remained alien and was inexplicable without an editor’s gloss.
Amid such observations—sometimes often scathing, always observant, and yet suspicious of herd behavior—the emotional valences that inform Orwell’s own intellectual journey and writings to come become discernible. Any reader of ‘Down and Out…’ will not be surprised that he would go onto critique bourgeois societies and their hypocrisies—charges not dissimilar from those made by the Russian revolution and its demagogues—but what would have surprised many was the moral courage he had to reject the authoritarian solutions—terror midwifed by bureaucracy— which emanated from Stalin’s Kremlin and the Lubyanka Prison overrun by Cheka-NKVD-KGB apparatchiks. But politics and ideological struggles are less important in ‘Down and About…’. It is something else he is consistently after in that book. Throughout the narrative on his life as a plongeur he returns, like some eagle surveying the plains below, to the meaninglessness pregnant in most modern labors and the uncrossable emotional distances between much of society and those at the margins—“those who were once human”. The very poor, like the very rich, are different from us. But whereas the rich become Gods in our social pantheon and literature’s response often is mockery and to satirize their vanities and self-delusions, the very poor pose more complex difficulties for a writer, especially in fiction, at the heart of which is the question: how must we write about poverty, how must we write about the poor? Is poverty as a typology of social condition unsuitable for fiction but the poor are perfectly good cannon-fodder for literary ambitions? How do we render into words the experiences of those whose everyday life is marked by extreme material deprivation and the foreignness of the moral ecology in which their worldviews take shape?
The easy answer is to say the very poor are just us but with less money. While this is blandly true, it loses sight of the primacy of the psychological and social ring fences inside of which much of the middle class lives and the importance of this socio-cognitive scaffolding from the insides of which we navigate the world. This is especially true when we seek to answer ‘what is it like to be poor’—a question that leads us into two separate paths. The first, more easy to identify and what this essay articulates, is the question of “can literature make the poor and poverty visible? Can it overcome the blindness with which we operate?”. Allied to this question is another that asks, “Can literature do this in anything other than a sociological register”? When I discussed this essay with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, he reminded me that this question of ‘subjectivity of the poor’ is particularly difficult in India because, as a culture or people, we remain “more skeptical about the possibility narrating the subjectivity of another: what it is like to BE that person?” We are content to sing praises or pillory Nehru or Modi, but to the question of what is it to be these larger than life figures is something we do not seemingly value as a people interested in ideas or as artists grappling with the Indian experience. The result of this is often stark—hagiographies are perfectly respectable, popular biographies that construct narratives stitched together by facts, but ‘real’ biographies that seek to recreate the person out of words alone—think of Saint Genet by Sartre—are entirely absent. If this view is right, one could argue that the lives of other people are interesting to Indians as sociological curiosums that facilitate a trafficking in facts, gossips, and rumors—but beyond that we do not grant further power to the written word. This framing—albeit, marked by generalizations—forces us to ask, what if the narrative is about the poor, or more precisely, what if our (conceited?) ambition is to recreate the subjectivity of being poor.
To this end, if there is any possibility to arrive unto this psychological horizon, it is only fiction—not economics, not sociology, not even that great shapeshifter, democratic politics—that can try to enter into this world of the poor’s mind. But a tension is constant in these creative efforts between a sociological register versus a psychological recreation. How does one describe that which awaits us when we are without the benefit of familial bonds, without the support of rudimentary capital, and in many cases not even in possession of the entireties of our bodies? There is a darker reality too, one that complicates most progressive pieties and even traditional glorification of poverty as a fount of moral values—in contrast, there are circumstances in which the very experience of being extremely poor facilitates something macabre wherein the polarities of right and wrong lose their potentiality as the guard rails of life, where truculence and villainy become the steady state, where conventional acts of goodness are rendered insubstantial, and where questions of meaning that informs most of our discourses rarely figures for it is survival—the very act of providing basic caloric intake—that becomes the grounds out of which all meanings emerge. The stomach is the site where truth is born, and all like births it is bloody, painful, and the moment is fraught with peril.
This recognition was not new for Orwell’s generation in Europe, embroiled as they were in the aftermaths of the Great Depression, or for that matter even young Indians—from Mulk Raj Anand to G. V. Desani to Ahmed Ali (author of a 1940 novel titled ‘Twilight in Delhi’)— whose novels in English were published in 1930s and 1940s in England, even as Indian freedom struggles sought to find its own voice distinct from the extant discourse of colonialism, Communism, and Fascism. The cause and consequences of poverty figure prominently in the once celebrated but now forgotten Kamala Markandeya’s ‘The Nectar in a Sieve’ (1954) —her novels sometimes appear in the International Baccalaureate coursework for high school students but rarely in bookstores—and to the even lesser remembered writer-bureaucrats like Bhabani Bhattacharya who published two novels set in the Bengal Famine of early 1940s titled ‘So Many Hungers’ (1947) and ‘He Who Rides a Tiger’ (1954). In all three novels, hunger and desperation from poverty were writ large but the similarities largely end there. The ‘hungry’ in Bhattacharya’s work appear as two species of human wants—the famished who are always on the lookout for food in an agrarian world and those who hunger for sex which is often satisfied through rape in the years after the war. His novels weave around these great themes which reads today as the newly independent India’s efforts to make sense of the post-World War 2 era—hungry and rapacious. Meanwhile in Markandeya’s celebrated novel, it is the economics of industrialization via a tanning factory that acts as the villain. The mechanized facility destabilizes traditional arrangements and introduces hunger, poverty, and desolation into the lives of its protagonists. Disillusionment with the consequences of industrial modernity, especially for her female protagonists, is a theme she returns to.
These novels from the 1940s-1950s were already a change from the ones that appeared in thrall of India’s freedom struggle. A couple of decades earlier, K. S. Venkataramani wrote his novels—Murugan, The Tiller (1927) and Kandan, The Patriot: A Novel of New India in the Making (1932)—in which the answers to poverty were variations on the same theme: Gandhian economics and moral ambitions. Its themes seem like reworkings of the ideals we find in the purana literature, albeit colored by the colonialism—earnest and idealistic protagonists who overcome cynicism and suspicion by virtue of their commitment to anti-materialism. In the age of propagandistic literature—the Communists in USSR, the Fascists in Germany and Italy, the colonialists in Western Europe—Venkataramani’s novels also seem like an effort to do something similar for the Gandhian discourse in the world of literature.
But this recognition of material conditions making its way onto the world of fiction and song was not solely the remit of the Indian writer in English, but was a description of reality that ranged far and wide in other Indian writing. In a series of poems collected from the Gond tribes by the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, we find a critique of the extant system by the tribals of ‘Middle India’ for whom the British and the elite Indians were both villains, one grafted over the other and who thus formed layers upon layers as the functionaries of an extractive State. One of those verses ask:
In this kingdom of the English how hard it is to live
To pay the cattle-tax we have to sell a cow
To pay the forest-tax we have to sell a bullock
To pay the land-tax we have to sell a buffalo
How are we to get our food?
In this kingdom of the English how hard it is to live
In the village sits the Landlord
In the gate sits the Kotwar
In the garden sits the Patwari
In the field sits the Government
In the kingdom of the English how hard it is to live.
By the time Indian Independence rolls in 1947, poverty is at the center of elite consciousness, but what emerges in Indian English novels is an effort to portray psychologically complex aspects of the human condition while being poor. Thus we find widowhood, the lure of prostitution, and unemployment figure often in these works, even if these writers row their creative boats hugging the shores of middle-class respectability. The poor in these works are often thinly veiled versions of a middle class reader who has fallen on hard times. Thus what emerges often is a portrayal of the circumstances while being poor, as seen by a careful and sensitive observer. But what is it to be poor—the phenomenology of poverty—is often absent in these works. Innovation in language or experiments with form—think Joyce in ‘Ulysses’ (1920) or G. V. Desani in ‘All About H. Hatterr’ (1948)— is largely absent when writing about the poor.
India’s bhasha literature—which aims for a more intimate relationship with Indian reality as opposed to Indian writing in English which has always had to moonlight as an interpreter of Indian experiences while nurturing more transnational ambitions—has over the past century produced novels about poverty and the experience of being poor in singular and, sometimes, extraordinary ways. These range in style and content widely: from Thakazhi Shivasankara Pillai’s ‘Thottiyude Makan’ (1947) (translated from Malayalam as ‘Scavenger’s Son’) which is a melancholy account of generations of night soil carriers to a much older Fakir Mohan Senapati’s ‘Chha Maana Atha Guntha’ (1902) (translated from Oriya as ‘Six Acres and a Third’) which is a dark but ironic portrait of a colonial experience with feudalism as its center and feudal bosses who grew rich on the backs and blood of fellow Indians. The diversity of styles and approaches while describing poverty—from pathos to unrelenting despair, from the comic to gallows humor—speaks to how extensively an older generation of Indian writers thought and engaged with the question of hunger, self-respect, and the quest for a modicum of individual freedom. Thus, whereas Thakazhi writes in an effort to carefully account for and portray a world of socio-economic oppression from which there is no respite, at its heart is portrayal of a caesura. As the contemporary novelist Subhash Chandran reminds us, this is a novel that places itself at the ends of one extreme of the human story where ideas of defilement and pollution are linked to the very touch of another’s skin or body. Untouchability in Thakazhi acquires a centrality that Malayalam or Indian novels neither before nor after have found the creative wherewithal to return to. In contrast, Senapati's novel is a chronicle of the manifold efforts to see beyond the visible reality of impoverishment in a manner that anticipates the magical realism revolution in the 1960s Latin American ‘boom’-era writing. Everything is what it is, but poverty alters it all, birthing new meanings and tools to extract meaning.
But more than the stories they tell, their narrative styles speak to the difficulty of writing fiction set amid the poor. Their works grapple with the fact that poverty itself can’t be presented in fiction as a sociological category or an anthropological curiosity but rather it can only be evoked in the form of an atmosphere which is hard to represent except obliquely. The novel which is the art form dedicated to consecrating the individual must therefore reconcile with poverty which is a social condition in which the individual is obscured. Here then craft becomes key to allow the writer to exploit the narrative landscape. Allusiveness, realism, monologues, mythologies of the poor—each become tools that a novelist can seek to deploy to varying effects. The challenges made visible in these novels set amid the poor are then putative attempts to rescue the individual from the very phenomena that makes him or her imperceptible. How to suggest and evoke resonances without being obscure or melodramatic, how to pace one grim event after the other, how to evoke and suggest something so psychologically unfamiliar to most readers, including readers in 1950s India—these are the challenges that these writers try to solve. In a patrimonial sense, these two stylistic approaches to realism—Thakazhi’s pointillism and Senapati’s impressionism, the grim and the hysterical, the tedious and the comical—become the two poles between which most Indian novels with poverty as the foregrounding material have wandered since.
But once one begins to think about poverty as potential material for fiction, it is hard to resist its lure for the psychological, subtle, and macabre material hidden is both seemingly infinite and also repetitive. Whereas the middle class offers itself up for a comedy of manners in fiction—why do middle class Indians of an older generation take to P. G. Wodehouse or more recently to the American TV shows like ‘Friends’— the poor and poverty are sites where comedy is distinctly absent. Barring for a rare novel like Shrilal Shukla’s ‘Raag Darbari’ (in Hindi, 1968) which mines governmental malfeasance, underdevelopment, caste prejudices, and hints of rank poverty to create a literary text where despair filled laughter is commonplace, humor is often absent from these novel about the poor. One may very well ask, do the poor not laugh? Or are Indian novelists who belong to upper echelons of society unsure how to make the poor laugh in their novels? What we find are novels where poverty is a totalizing phenomena. Like war and love, the possibility of a world outside poverty is near impossible to imagine while trapped inside it. In some cases, like Thakazhi or Bhattacharya, different novels written across their lifetimes attempt to describe the same underlying set of concerns which in their case was the question of transformation—what follows when a premodern society is hurtled into the epochal changes that we saw in the 20th century.
In a sense, an older generation of Indian bhasha novelists begin to resemble mountaineers who attempt to scale the same peak from different sides only to discover each path is filled with narrative possibilities but the original ambition to describe the totality of the mountain is impossible. Their works seem to suggest that it is only through continued engagement with aspects of Indian poverty that one can even hope to approximate the truth of it all.
Nearly a century later after Senapati’s novel, by the early 2000s, poverty and hunger have receded from much of Indian novels, especially in its English language form. It is not farfetched to imagine that a novel like Mulk Raj Anand’s carefully plotted narrative called ‘Untouchable’ or ‘Coolie’ in which the poor are the protagonists may find it difficult to get a mainstream publisher today. This is not a comment on Indian publishing but rather a testament to two secular trends: one, the demographics of Indians who pay to buy books has radically changed—they are richer and more educated and poverty is a distant phenomena for most of them even if there are millions of fellow citizens who are the newly formed urban poor; two, the nature of Indian poverty itself has changed—from landless peasants in the countryside yoked to a feudal system in the 1900s, the Indian poor today are often those who live on the margins of mega-cities who transition in and out of construction sites, vast highways and other transient labor markets whose dynamics defy easy portrayals. If stasis and immobility was the dominant condition of the poor a century ago, then continual displacement is the singular characteristic which spans the state-space of Indian poverty today. These have led to challenges in description for the socio-economic conditions that facilitate the location of an individual within a context are no longer easily discernible. While there are homogenizing factors of modernity that create the urban poor, they have also facilitated the steady vanishing of the Indian poor from its fictions and films except as slum-dwellers or the unwashed masses who ingress into the perfumed lives of the upwardly mobile middle class dreams. The specificities and vividness of the lives of the poor which was visible in the novels from the 1940-50s were born from an understanding and observation of their largely unchanged lives over the recent centuries which was then beginning to suffer from the onslaught of change and the ideologies of ‘progress’. To recount that change was possible, however difficult it was to subsume all of its characteristics into a narrative, because the author himself was rooted within an hierarchical structure. But by now, just as the phenomena of urban poverty has been fragmented and dissipated, the writers’ themselves are no longer rooted in a society wherein they can observe closely.
Instead what we have are monolingual authorial cohorts—especially in English writing—who have evolved from middle-class into a new being with aspirations to belong to a cosmopolitan global literary elite for whom much of their own backyard is a foreign land. Thus when the poor do appear in Indian English writing—at least since Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ (1982), they appear as flavors, as exotica, or as an ingredient which lends the appearance of an Indian authenticity for a reading audience in the far corners of a global publishing economy. Recognizing this problem, some authors like Vikram Chandra’s ‘Sacred Games’ (2006) have sought sidestep this debate of verisimilitudes and valorization and instead offered a different solution—to write a novel that speaks of the poor and urban poverty in a matter of fact narrative, to speak of them as yet another cog in the great mercantilist wheel inside of which spins the fate of nations while noting the linkages between global crime circuits and urban poverty. The facticity of being poor, in such renderings, is in of itself nothing special; it is yet another feature of the global south in the manner of its sewage and polluted rivers. Poverty is merely one more monster to escape from in the daily lives of the middle class.
There has been another kind of portrayal of the poor and oppressed which has appeared under various names and guises—which nowadays often referred to as Dalit and tribal writing—wherein identity, oppressions, and poverty come together. Nowhere perhaps is this seen more vividly than in the world of autobiographies by Dalit and tribal writers in Marathi since the 1960s. These names rarely figure in most contemporary discussions of Indian writings, including among bhasha literature published in translation—with its one eye on the Booker Prize and another on convenient fashions of the day—for these are often literatures of reluctant reconciliations. These writings have their feet in many different worlds and defy categorizations on their own but are subsumed under a single identifying rubric. From the Dalit Sanskrit scholar Kumud Pawade’s ‘Antahsphot’ (Inner Explosions) to the great poet Daya Pawar’s ‘Baluta’—these are often stories of an hardscrabble exterior and an interior monologue that observes its own self disintegrate. In Jerry Pinto’s translation of ‘Baluta’ which appeared 37 years after the novel was published (itself a commentary on Indian writing in English), Pawar writes in it: “Just as Krishna ripped Jarasandha’s body into two and tossed them apart, my life has split my psyche into two”. In an essay, Rongrao Bhongle writes that “these archetypes, so to say, stand for the dehumanized social conditions — ignorance, poverty, helplessness, fear, violence — the traits that are the important characteristics of all Dalit writings. The "I" in these autobiographies, therefore, is not an individual; he is a representative of all the oppressed races in the world.” While much of 20th century fiction has often been about the effort of the individual to escape the masses, and on occasion the author himself, these writings by Dalit writers invert this paradigmatic force that has animated modern fiction. Their words often come to the pages, sometimes burdened and sometimes intentionally taking upon themselves, the weight of the Dalit experience in which poverty often figures, not as a temporarily impoverished state of affairs but as a phenomena as permanent as the rains pouring from above and the red earths below their feet. Like some ray of light that fails to escape the event horizon, these novels speak to the singularities of the Dalit historical experience. Their lives are pigeonholed—by the grieving, the opportunist, and the impassioned alike—and the individuals in these novels cease to matter. This is the fate of the individual in any mass movement and yet this is precisely what fiction has historically often tried to resist. The reclamation of the individual is the novel’s metier, its reason for existence. How to salvage the individual from the crowd and the obscurity imposed by the masses and political brinkmanship waged in his or her name?
There are luminous exceptions of course, and it is to these exceptions that we must turn to discern the shape of the landscape. In Joseph Macwan’s ‘The Stepchild’ (2005)—translated from Charotari, a form of Gujarati, by Rita Kothari—the individual is imbricated within a wider cultural milieu of formalized exclusion, and perhaps none-too-surprisingly the manifold complexities and conflicts within the wider Dalit community. But unlike most Dalit writings which have pedagogic and political aims, Macwan explores that often ignored and unknown aspect in contemporary discourse: the internal world of a Dalit person. The novel, as an cultural artifact, facilitates the construction of a private self amid a literary-political movement that valorizes public engagement and seeks to chronicle the near totalitarian nature of caste practices in some Indian villages in which intercaste violence and sexual exploitation is commonplace. But where Macwan’s is an earnest and tragic recounting of subaltern lives, Manu Joseph’s ‘Serious Men’ (2010) is a subversive account of its ambitions. It shows how the very same identity politics can be used to suborn the extant power structures whose logic, or illogic, especially following India’s 1991 economic liberalization has only one true master—capital, especially one blessed by Americans. The dark comedy of the novel is born out of the singular insight that the Dalit mind can perpetrate fraud on his caste ‘superiors’ in the very thing they hold as key to their advancement in a neoliberal world—technical knowledge, mathematical prowess, and approbation from Western universities. A lesser novel would have turned this plot device into a socio-economic commentary, but in ‘Serious Men’ we find the locus of action and deceit begins and ends with an individual. The deep insight of the novel doesn’t revolve around the games and charades of identity as its major register, but in its retelling of that most biblical of truths: to avenge or appease the God of our times, a man will sacrifice even his son.
Farther away from the metropolis, poverty and accompanying despairs take on new forms in Indian fiction—in Benyamin’s ‘Aadu Jeevitham’ (Goat Days, 2008, translated by Joseph Koyippally), poverty is married to that great Malayali dream—emigration to the Arabian Gulf. What follows the protagonist is backbreaking and dehumanizing labor on a goat farm within an unnamed desert monarchy. With little respite, the great shimmering dream of the Malayali mind becomes a site of another kind of poverty: the poverty of human contact. In this sense, Benyamin’s novel is the true descendant of Thakazhi’s aforementioned ‘Thottiyude Makan’ for the locus of their narrative energies is the hunger of man for another’s touch. For Thakazhi the protagonist’s caste forfeited his access to perform any other labor but scavenging and thus was condemned to a proverbial loneliness in the crowd, in Benyamin’s novel it is the labor and emigration that brings its hero to ultimately speak to goats in his feverish longing for human contact. Both novels, separated by over 60 years, offer an implicit answer to the question we rarely hear— ’Are the poor lonely’?, a question we rarely hear being asked for loneliness is often seen as an affluent condition.
By the early 2000s, when Indian writers began to reflect upon what was wrought by this great wave of neoliberalism, they were faced with a changing India in which real income were on the rise but inequality skyrocketed as well. Old institutions which lent stability to a traditional society were now hollow shells, sons genuflected to their fathers knowing well that the older generation had little to teach them in this new world. New cars, new apartment buildings, new fashion—these were the currencies by which respect and status were accreted. In retrospect, it was the apogee of neoliberalism before our present wave of reactionary nationalism reasserted itself. It was, and remains, an age of tumult—only that the sources of tumult have metastasized. It is in this context that Arvind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’ (2008) appears as a creative testament that records an increasingly foreign kind of poverty in Indian societies—one that is a relative, shapeshifting, omnipresent, and seemingly irresolvable by traditional means. In it, the source of tensions is the relative lack of status and social acceptance—both of which become the spur for the plot. The protagonist’s moral pettiness is contrasted against the immensity of structural injustices that usually dissuades most of India’s underprivileged men and women from aspiring to improve their station which thus creates a permanent underclass. But omnipresent in the novel is the recognition by the protagonist—an hustler from the India’s vast hinterlands who has scrounged his way into the metropolis—that one way to escape his blighted status was not by resisting but rather by adopting the mores of modernity, the frenzied urgencies of capitalism, and worshiping at the altar of the English language, that great Goddess of our times who blesses all those propitiate her by opening the doors to the globalized world. The protagonist of ‘The White Tiger’ recognizes this and writes to Wen Jiabao—a key member in the world’s most powerful capitalist cabal, the Communist Party of China—: “Sir. Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English".
What we find in the above and piecemeal description—from Venkataramani in the 1920s writing ‘Gandhian’ novels to Adiga in 2008 on the convenient hypocrisies of neoliberalism—is the steady accretion of an ideology of escape. Escape from poverty and rural backwardness into a world of markets and mercantilism. A world where politics and history no longer impinge on one’s fate in the world. A dark side of this narrative is found in Tarun Tejpal’s novel of political violence, ‘The Story of My Assassins’ (2012) where young men from this increasingly unstable social fabric become paid-for-hire killers entrusted with executing the narrator, who happens to be a political journalist who asks one too many inconvenient questions about arms deal involving the State. Where Tejpal’s narrative is about what happens off camera, in Vikas Swarup’s ‘Q&A’ (2005) [a version of this book was adapted as the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’] the very escape out of urban poverty is telecast live. The dark horizons of history and society, the shackles of politics and identity are swept aside and the individual’s emancipation is deemed only possible through the politics-free hot seat of chance, camaraderie, and cunning. Emancipation and freedom are gamified. Q&A is a novel that smuggles the distilled hooch of rhetoric favored by the Indian elite and the newly rich middle class in which to escape poverty all you need is some wit, energy, and the will to bootstrap oneself into prosperity.
This arc of Indian novels and fiction that I have sketched, with poverty, hunger, and the desire to escape one’s material (and mental) confinements—with writers ranging from Senapati to Swarup—mimics the journey of Indian society itself and increasingly the triumphalist story it tells of itself. In it, India metamorphoses from a feudal and premodern society with manifold types of hegemonies into a country with neoliberal fantasies, cable TV, and a revolution of aspirations accessible to all who can pay. The apogee of our individual life history in this narrative is to sit on the gameshow seat, earn ten million [crore] rupees, speak English, and avenge all past humiliations. Money is the great equalizer in this version of the narrative. All forms of deprivation then are merely artifacts of incorrect policy and when we get that right we will no longer think of poverty and hunger. ‘Life is perfectible’ is the mantra here. As a popular self-help book, widely available in Indian railway stations by Shiv Khera declares: “You Can Win: Winners Don’t Do Different Things, They Do Things Differently”.
It is into this vision of steady progress that Jeyamohan’s ‘The Abyss’ (translated from the Tamil original ‘Ezhaam Ulagam’ by Suchitra Ramachandran, 2023) squirms its way like a worm to become a great serpent of imagination—a Takshaka hidden in the plum-apple of neoliberalism—which grows its fangs and takes a bite out of a reader’s mind. The title refers to a subterranean world, a seventh hell in the taxonomy of hells. But in the novel set in Tamil Nadu, poverty, physical deformity, homelessness, and truculence come together to speak of lives that exist and travel in parallel to the self-congratulatory culture of the Indian elite and middle class. This is the world of beggars, beggar gangs, and beggar lords with its own hierarchies no different than a capitalist firm. No different than Orwell’s hotel, at the top of this gang is a proprietor-manager who is cruel and mendacious to his employees but kindly towards his own family'; then come the muscle and logistics personnel who transport the beggars from one location to another. At the bottom are the beggars themselves—and like employees of a firm, they are not all equal. The more deformed, the more damaged they are, the more preferable they are to the beggaring enterprise. Even more so are beggar-women who are often mentally ill but physically capable of giving birth—through rape and forcible sex, they become bearers of children who can then be sold or put to ‘work’ as a prop at first and then as a full time beggar soon. It is a novel that alludes to the sociology of poverty—but its talent as a work of fiction lies in its ability to depict beggars who are self-aware of their servitude and deprivation but have either made peace with it or, in fact, revel in that squalor because the greatest good they treasure is the camaraderie of other beggars.
The claustrophobic worlds that envelop them, despite living for most part out in the open in the city or at the foothills of a temple upon a hill, reminds one time and again, page after page, that the deformities of the bodies can deform one’s inner worlds too. In ‘The Abyss’ we witness networks of procurement and sale of deformed men and women, the intentional birthing of congenitally deformed children who will grow onto become future beggars, the traffick of men and women at a price, and the happy sustenance of such practices by those who live perfectly middle class lives. All these are material to mock the hypocrisies pregnant in Indian society, especially its middle class—an easy target if there ever was one— but instead in Jeyamohan’s hands we witness something deeper and more disconcerting. It subverts convenient pieties that many harbor about the poor and reveals the moral inversions that poverty engenders and facilitates. The truly poor live by a moral code that is different from most of us. This is in contrast to Mahatma Gandhi or St. Francis who elevated material deprivation, or poverty even, as the means to moral perfection. What Jeyamohan shows without telling as much is that while these attitudes towards anti-materialism are widespread across India—courtesy religious traditions that valorize figures such as the sramana, the bhikshu, the sadhu, the parivrajaka—when the very same psychological aspiration is infected by commerce and corporatism in the form of beggar-rings and violent mutilations, the effacement of the Self as an ideal is replaced by archipelagoes of avarice and cruelty. Like any private corporation, these armies of the indigent go on to adopt tactics and negotiations that are geared towards self-preservation and expanding their own kind in which squalor and poverty are not something to escape but to happily submit to. ‘The Abyss’ presents extreme poverty as a blackhole, where the event horizon is as far as literature and novels can go. What lies beyond is effectively unknowable except perhaps to intuit that a world of subhuman cruelties and despairs can coexist with friendships and idealisms. ‘The Abyss’ lays claim to the idea that it is not by irony or satire or cunning that we can intuit something deep about poverty, and Indian poverty in particular, but only through a kind of open-spirited realism wherein the author lets his characters, his ‘items’, wander as is their fictional destiny and only sparingly uses them to ventriloquize perennial themes in fiction.
What ‘The Abyss’ tells us about poverty and its endemic abilities to corrode all it touches—men, women, sentiments, actions, the experience of time, our understanding of God—is more troubling for what it tells us when we think of the very poor. The cultures that they inhabit are a function of wealth, the freedoms they aspire for is a function of their abilities to maneuver in this world—all this is clear. But none of this makes them good people. They steal and rape, assault like villains and act as fools, dream and betray those very dreams—just as the rest of us. Poverty of groups has no redeeming value as many early Indian novels and intellectuals had suggested. Poverty grants no moral blessings, except perhaps the ability in a few of the poor to laugh more freely at the games of self-importance that the rest of us take too seriously. Jeyamohan’s beggars in ‘The Abyss’ sit outside temples of Tamil Nadu, watching and observing the desires that devotees carry within as they walk up the stone dappled paths, rowing from this island of hope to that island of despair, only to eventually get to their God on the Hill. The beggars are the great skeptics of this whole drama, but they too put aside their skepticism and become believers periodically—for it is belief that brings devotees to the temple, it is those devotees who throw scraps at them, it is those scraps that earns them a place in the beggaring racket, it is that racket which fills their stomach, it is that stomach which is their great God, and it is the only God they can touch and feel, even in that seventh hell. []