English, August: An Indian Story (New York Review Books Classics) Review

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English, August: An Indian Story (New York Review Books Classics) ReviewImagine combining Salinger's THE CATCHER IN THE RYE with Roth's PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT and Kevin Smith's CLERKS and setting the whole story in rural India, using for a protagonist a college-educated, citified, pot-smoking, Marcus Aurelius reading, half-Bengali, half-Christian slacker whose friends have Anglicized his Bengali name, Agastya, into August. All this and more are accomplished in Upamanyu Chatterjee's hilarious 1988 novel ENGLISH, AUGUST. Whether you view it as a coming of age story or a slacker novel, this book is a comic masterpiece, THE GRADUATE in India without a Mrs. Robinson.
Chatterjee's story centers around a recent college graduate named Agastaya Sen. Known to his friends as August and to his family as Ogu, Agastaya lives the dissolute, carefree life of the privileged in Delhi, his father being the Governor of Bengal. Unfortunately, his mother, a Catholic from Goa, died from meningitis when Agastaya was just three years old, so he was raised largely by aunts. He passes seemingly effortlessly through college, acquiring a hybrid Western/Indian lifestyle that includes ample quantities of alcohol and marijuana. His major goal in life is simply to be happy, to live contentedly and not be bothered, and certainly not to fall into the rut of commuting to an office, working, commuting home, and then rising the next day to do it all again until he dies.
Having successfully achieved a high score on the national examinations for government service, however, August consents to a position in the Indian Administrative Service and a posting to a distant country town named Madna. Once there, he begins a training period and proves himself to be a heroic shirker of work, an incorrigible pot smoker, a compulsive freeloader, and an almost pathological liar. He arrives at work at 11:00 in the morning and works until lunch, then repairs to his private room for the rest of the afternoon, getting stoned, listening to music, reading some occasional Marcus Aurelius, and sleeping. Still, despite his best efforts to do little or nothing, August ingratiates himself into the local society and actually learns bits and pieces of his future job. Along the way, he develops friendships with an iconoclastic editorial cartoonist named Sethe, a good-hearted alcoholic government worker named Shankar, and Madna's police chief, Kumar. When he finally moves into a position of modest responsibility as a Block Development Officer in the even smaller and more backward village of Jompanna, August surprises himself (and us) by unexpectedly, and modestly heroically, solving the village's water shortage problem.
ENGLISH, AUGUST is subtitled An Indian Story, and indeed it is, yet it is also a universal story about growing up and finding one's place in the world, about giving up one's ideals and acceding to the tedious realities and responsibilities of adult life. Chatterjee's is a tale of India's multiple worlds, from the West itself (represented by England and America), the cosmopolitan strivers of the big cities, the ineffectual but lifetime-employed government workers, and the countless millions of Indians living in the rural countryside. Chatterjee reminds us constantly of India's many languages, of the difficulty that the people of one nation can have in understanding one another's lives as well as their speech.
No doubt the most noteworthy aspect of ENGLISH, AUGUST is its humor. Agastaya is a comic hero, wise-cracking and irreverent with regard to India's social and cultural institutions. One of his first observations in Madna is an excruciatingly ugly statue of Gandhi, with his walking staff now being used to prop up the statue from behind in a particularly unsightly manner. Each time he is asked the meaning of his given name, Agastaya, August invents (and sometimes actually spurts out) an outlandish explanation. When a frog takes up residence in his Madna room, August decides to leave him there and even gives him a name. The best of Chatterjee's observations concern India itself. He describes his father's serious approach to life as a blend of Marcus Aurelius and Reader's Digest, describes an over-Westernized college classmate as the kind of person who would love to get AIDS because "it's raging in America," and notes that "most of us seem to be so grateful that he [E.M. Forster] wrote that novel about India." Referring to an Indian movie director, August's slacker pal Dhrubo (who ultimately takes a job at Citibank) comments that "he [the director, Ritwik Ghatak] was awful until the French said he was good, and now he's a Master."
Chatterjee creates an exceptionally strong sense of place and a strong cast of distinctly memorable supporting characters (mostly male) who orbit dizzily around August's search for himself. August's boss, Srivastav, is a portly, bloviating big shot, yet a surprisingly good-hearted and efficient administrator. Another government administrator named Bajaj is described as "very tall and worryingly thin, with large woebegone eyes and a receding chin, as though his progenitors had been a female spaniel and Don Quixote." Then there is August's cook, Vasant, and Dhrubo and Sethe and Shankar and Agastaya's hilariously sarcastic uncle Pultukaku, and Mohan Gandhi with his wife Rohini, and the strange story of John Avery and his Indian wife, Sita, who set out to find the place where Avery's grandfather was devoured by a lion a half century earlier.
ENGLISH, AUGUST offers a marvelously entertaining passage to modern India, with all its complexities and paradoxes and sufferings and inanities. Along the way, Chatterjee drops little observational gems on the path, as when he observes that most Indians "would never read Gandhi, much less implement him" because "it was always much easier to deify a hero than to understand him." This is a first-rate comic novel that presents life in a country few Americans understand.
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