Books & Poetry

History is things happening, but it is also things happening to people; Sujit Saraf’s overpowering novel of modern India does not try to present an objective view of the slow process of events so much as a series of episodes in the life of someone who hardly understands what happens around him, even when he is briefly elected to parliament.

The Delhi tea-seller Gopal is our principal viewpoint for the massacre of Sikhs that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her bodyguards, as he is for various subsequent events like the destruction of the Ayodhya shrine, but the whole point about him is that he is hardly a protagonist, but rather a gentle foolish man to whom things happen. As such, he is one of the few entirely sympathetic people in this crowded novel; the only other one is the upper-crust liberal woman Madukhlai, whose attempts to help the poor and expose the corrupt are ultimately ineffectual, and whose immunity from consequences stops her being quite as sympathetic as all that. Gopal’s innocence ensures his survival, but not that of the people who surround him; his adopted son in particular is corrupted into political thuggery and then tricked into a painful death.

This is quite a hard book to digest: its combination of narrative verve and sensory appeals that approach overload gets the Western reader through some intense exposure to Indian politics at street level, whose finer points might normally be lost. Suraf has a good eye for the dramatic incident told dramatically – the violence that continually erupts during the book’s political episodes is genuinely upsetting and often surprising. Vivid set-pieces crop up again and again, sometimes in places where one would not have expected them: Suraf writes as well in the scene where the pragmatic whore Gita turns tricks with rich punters as he does in the moment towards the end when Gopal is given a pair of glasses that actually correct his sight and suddenly sees things more clearly than he has since boyhood.