A State of Freedom
Author- Neel Mukherjee
Publisher- Penguin Random House, Rs 545
Searing and uncanny in equal measure, Neel Mukherjee’s new book, A State of Freedom, is not a saga of unmitigated despair — there is struggle, there is strife, and there is the shimmering ghost of hope, writes ANUBHAV PRADHAN
Grimy, disturbing, and odd, Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom is a curious thing to grapple with. It is, very clearly, not a novel: It is also, just as obviously, not a collection of short stories. It may be possible to think of it as a grouping of vignettes, snippets of apparently unrelated life stories, but a lingering dissatisfaction with even such an expansive classification will remain.
Which, perhaps, is one of the key strengths of A State of Freedom: Its militant resistance to neat classification may be seen as a deft reflection of the world it evokes, a jumbled mash of poverty and privilege jostling contrarily sans determinable consequence. It is, of course, our own world, the lives not as much of others as our own selves in cities and villages across the length and breadth of our country. Hunger, desire, and power, all play with each other to create a simulacrum of the lives we live: Existence — at times survival — with no clear, clean lines.
This repudiation of lines, of linearity, seems to be central to the narrative framing of A State of Freedom. Six individuals — characters — may be gleaned: A father, who loses his son; a son, at home and homeless in the world; two brothers, both man and beast; a daughter, turned a woman before her time; and an aunt, aged by the burden of love. Gossamer threads of circumstance, curiosity, and care, invisible yet adamantine, link all of these to each other, their destinies speaking to each other. Milly, from rural Jharkhand, is able to leave her fate as Manglu by the accident of her family’s conversion to Christianity. lakshman, abandoned by his elder twin Ramlal, leaves his own wife and children to find absolution in the antics of Raju, an orphan bear cub. Renu, ‘cooking-aunty’ in many comfortable bourgeois homes, denies herself even the modicum of ease to support her nephew Dulal as he goes through a doctorate in Heidelberg.
These are hard lives, lives eked to their limit by the crushing weight of history and circumstance, and Mukherjee’s narrative does justice to the blinding heat of necessity and want acting upon them. The first section of the book leads to a bizarre note of tragedy, the surreal death of a child. Cloaked within this is another death, the death of a nameless labourer in a construction site just across the luxury hotel wherein father and son spend their last night together. The last, fifth section brings the narrative full circle to this release, labourer and child fused in death, except that namelessness hangs now only on the child, the son of a well-heeled NRI: In life and in death, both father and son remain unnamed, undistinguished save for the comfort and privilege which cushions them — but only so far — from the blows of fate.
Significantly, fate seems inextricably linked to hunger throughout the text. Hunger in A State of Freedom is as much a framing device and trope as an actual, corporeal presence: Eating, hands and mouths, and food and its lack abound as tangible presences. The narrator of the second section anchors yearly visits to his parental home in Bombay in food: A book comes out of this preoccupation with taste, and cooking. For Milly, their domestic help, food is still a luxury to be consumed in hasty quantities, even as Renu, the ‘cooking-aunty’, is unable to separate the turmoil in her heart from the quality of her cooking. Far away, in the villages, deprivation is a stark norm, and lakshman and Ramlal break under the pressure of penury, the gnawing inability to feed their families. Some, like lakshman, turn to animals to find a living, while others, like Soni, turn into jungles to hunt and be hunted like animals.
There is, then, no freedom: Not from hunger, not from want, not from the shadows of need and desire which haunt all of us. To those familiar with Mukherjee’s magnum opus, The lives of Others, A State of Freedom will appear surprisingly fresh. Such readers will be tempted to trace continuities in references and names which both texts share, but, to Mukherjee’s credit, this appears a completely fresh work. Too often authors adopt a register which informs much of their work, and the divergence between Mukherjee’s second novel and this, his third book-length publication, is a healthy sign of the push and press of innovation which characters and stories demand from their authors. Searing and uncanny in equal measure, A State of Freedom is not a saga of unmitigated despair: There is struggle, there is strife, and there is the shimmering ghost of hope.
The reviewer is a doctoral candidate with the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia