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Murder in North India
By Seema Chishti, March 25, 20077, Indian Express
Amitava Kumar may try hard to convince you that
it is his first brush with fiction — a first novel — but this author
of Husband of a Fanatic and Passport Photos has written a sensitively crafted
book, probably as real and as "factual" as the essays before this
work.
Home Products centres on Binod and Rabinder,
cousins based in Bihar, trying to overcome the gaps in the social ladder in
modern India, and dreaming of making films for Bollywood. Thereby the novel
bristles with the social complexities of Bihar's small towns, with residents
having to invent their own version of modernity in trying to better their
lot. Kumar ostensibly works with a simple plot with few surprises. But each
character's story is like a journal about the middle class in Bihar routing
its journey to a better world —through Delhi, and later through Mumbai.
Each of Kumar's characters will at some time have to break his or her shackles.
The novel is remarkable in the manner in which
it deals with its women characters. Binod sets out to tell the story of Mala
Srivastava through a film he intends to script. Mala, a small-time poetess,
is murdered after a controversial affair with a prominent politician —
no doubt inspired by the Amarmani Tripathi case in Uttar Pradesh. Her story
is seen to be symbolic of small-time ambition breaking through small-town
tedium.
Another powerful character is "Bua",
Binod's aunt, who pretty much beats the system by breaking the rules herself
and doing so boldly, after her infirm husband dies and she is plunged into
the murky politics of Bihar. Guilt-free and liberated, ruthless and crafty,
Bua becomes almost iconic. " In Bihar, Bua became a symbol of a form
of independence that was still new in independent India… Bua had had
nothing. She got an education and then entered public life at a time when
there were no women around her to even give her company."
Home Products is a narrative of new India, new
north India, to be precise. It gets straight into the north Indian realities
of today, with "internet brothels", powerful people parked in jails
with mobile phones being used to orchestrate all kinds of activities and even
the tragedy of Satyendra Dubey. But the book draws strength from the author's
refusal to limit it simply to a judgmental journal detailing rising crime
rates, rifle-carrying men on motorcycles or Bihari stereotypes of the times.
It also sketches the opportunities, sometimes brutal opportunities, and options
available in India today. And the diverse ways in which the people have reacted
to these options.
Keeping to a fertile space between fact and
fiction — his fictional characters living in very real times — Kumar
eschews the kind of bald celebration of the emerging India and the euphoria
that usually accompanies such accounts. For example, while talking about the
sudden and rapid displacement of lives that change in India has meant and
that too what it has meant to several of those left behind, there is a moving
sequence where Binod goes to talk about his divorce to his wife's old uncle
and aunt in their crumbling home in Deogarh — evoking the "the undeniable
sense that they occupied an abandoned time… these fragments from a little
visited place in the past." It is this incongruity, which he senses there
— contrasted with his life lived partly in Delhi and Bombay — that
the novel succeeds in portraying very well.
Home Products reads like the powerful Hindi novels that through the 1970s, '80s and even now capture the angst, misery and fullness of north Indian lives as they struggle to cope and then "modernise" themselves and cope with the "opportunities" springing up. It is also an excellent read.
