Up Campus, down campus
Author- Avijit Ghosh
Publisher- Speaking Tiger, Rs299
The narrator of this book lays bare his sharp observations about rampant casteism and a sense of entitlement that still prevail even in the most liberal university, in this case, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, writes Binoy Bhushan Agarwal
Over the last decade, there has been a revival of the subgenre of Indian Campus Novels marked by Chetan Bhagat’s phenomenally successful Five Point Someone. Following his commercial success, the Indian literary marketplace was bombarded with aspiring and incidental authors and publishers eagerly awaiting to cash on the new found literary trend of Campus Fiction that caters to young adults grappling with revolutionary aspirations, insecurities, libidinal impulses, sexual frustrations and campus politics located as they are within educational institutions and shaped by peer pressure.
While most campus novels are located in the prestigious engineering colleges and business schools like IITs and IIMs, Avijit Ghosh’s novel, Up Campus, Down Campus, is set within Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Published by Speaking Tiger, the novel carries forward the narrative of Anirban Roy, a Bengali boy growing up in the crime infested hinterlands of Bihar, the character central to the plot of Ghosh’s debut novel Bandicoots in the Moonlight. Consequently, Up Campus, Down Campus marks the point of transition in the rites of passage that Anirban has to necessarily undertake in his pursuit of higher education like many other small town students who migrate to cities for quality education and a better life.
The narrative opens with Anirban stepping inside his room in JNU and an unexpected encounter with a couple who seem to have been abruptly interrupted while in an intimate courting session. This encounter sets the tone for the novel for Anirban’s stay in JNU is largely a narrative about his sexual reveries and bumbling.
Aiming to offer a slice of lived reality as experienced by the author-narrator, Anirban’s is a story of a demanding academic life, an unwilling foray into the world of pamphlets and politics, his awkward experiences with girls and sex crazed roomies, and a not-so-secret desire to crack the civil service exams. It also maps the nostalgia for the life left behind and an uneasy relationship with the city and its apparently progressive culture. While struggling to make sense of things in this ‘alternative planet’, he comes across as a driftwood who finds himself a misfit and remains a reticent character for a larger part of the novel.
However, in telling us the story of Anirban’s bewilderment, the institution too comes alive with its detailed evocation of students union elections and the presidential debate as conducted in JNU. The descriptions of hostel life, mess food, tentative experiences with girls, first crush, and cultural shock lend themselves to an easy identification with most college goers.
Striking a contemporary note with 1980s, it exposes the moral conflicts, double standards and the existence of caste based hierarchies and a feudal mindset among the more politically aware students unleashed in the wake of the Mandal Commission report that sought to implement reservations for the OBCs. The consequent agitation and Anirban’s own ambivalent attitude towards his girlfriend undercut any delusions that one might have about university as a space purged of caste politics. The narrator lays bare his sharp observations about rampant casteism and a sense of entitlement that still prevails even in the most liberal university.
However, in a dismal failure of the novel, it is not so much the complexity of JNU but the recurring stereotypes of the institution and its people that have been in circulation of late that has become more pronounced. Time and again, it seems to be reinforcing the prevalent stereotypes of JNUites, Biharis, leftists, and liberal women. Nonetheless, the author does try to ameliorate the inadvertent effect through brief and intermittent reflections and commentary on the parochial mindset that he thinks is as an import from the small towns of India.
The universe of the 1980s JNU, it seems, is peopled by four character types: A hopeless bunch of ‘civil services desperadoes’ hoping to clear IAS for a handsome dowry, the middle class types looking to settle down into Governmental jobs that despite their anonymity provide respectable existence, the ‘campus veterans’ taking years to finish their PhD and a fourth type who were rebels by choice living off their moneyed girlfriends. What unites them all is that they mostly belong to the frustrated lot looking for sex as in JNU ‘Marx was the means/Freud, especially his sex thing, was the end.’
Working with such archetypes has the effect of flattening the distinct character of the institution itself which the author labours to evoke. It does little to further the idea of JNU as an educational institution that is also cosmopolitan as well as liberating. Thus, while it might seem to offer a hilarious account of campus life as lived in JNU, it betrays its own hypocrisy and sexism.
However, it’s in the second half that the novel begins to redeem itself. With its poignant observations on a sense of shared communality among the migrant labourers as evident during a journey back home, and keen insight into men’s anxiety in dealing with independent women and/or wives, and in its analysis of the DTC buses as means of democratising travel and fostering ‘an egalitarian travel culture’, the novel enriches the genre of Indian campus novel that is otherwise mostly limited to romantic plots against an academic setting. In doing so, Ghosh redefines the genre even while he is working with predictable tropes of a familiar territory.
Finally, notwithstanding its limitations, the novel with its easy readability, comic humour peppered with campus lingo is a tantalising read for the aficionados of campus fiction.
The reviewer is an Assistant Professor of English at Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi
