Abstract
Neel Mukherjee’s novel A State of Freedom (2017) tells excruciating tales of poverty, violence and pain suffered by his protagonists whose lives count as “nothing” in an India characterized by crushing social and economic inequality. At the same time, the novel displays its author’s keen awareness of the power politics of narratives and of the particular aesthetic and ethical challenges posed by the representational appropriation of disenfranchised groups. This chapter explores the formal arrangement of the novel, its politics of perspective, its negotiation of Otherness and epistemic authority, as well as its complicating of discourses of victimhood—all of which serve to form a highly self-reflexive engagement with the complexities of representing precarious lives that seeks to address the pitfalls involved and open up a site of contestation between authorial appropriation and a non-coercive narrative forum to explore the condition of precarity.
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Notes
- 1.
“I consider myself an Indian writer who lives and works in London and spends part of the year in the USA” (Joseph 2017).
- 2.
See Judith Butler in Precarious Life: “There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others” (2004, xii).
- 3.
Mukherjee, Neel. 2018. A State of Freedom. London: Vintage, 216. All parenthetical references are to this edition.
- 4.
See, for example, Korte and Zipp (2014, 3-5 and 12-15); Korte (2014, 7-8); Korte and Regard (2014, 10-11); Christ (2014, especially 36-47); and Lemke (2016, 6-9); see also Shameem Black (2010) on imagining alterity and representing social difference, especially the introduction, “Towards an Ethics of Border-Crossing Fiction”, 1-18. In postcolonial studies, the classic text to examine the challenge that subaltern subjectivities pose to representational form is, of course, Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988).
- 5.
See also the epigraph to the novel quoting a Syrian refugee at the border of Austria, August 2015: “Migrants? We are not migrants! We are ghosts, that’s what we are, ghosts”.
- 6.
- 7.
See also Klein (2022) on the short story cycle as addressing and effecting “relationality”.
- 8.
Butler seems to use the terms “precariousness” and “vulnerability” synonymously, while precarity, as defined above, is sharply distinguished from precariousness.
- 9.
Das argues: “A central takeaway from this beautifully written novel is that if one is born in middle-class, relatively privileged, urban India (a member of the English-medium class) one can only imbibe democratic and human values, and develop the ability to look critically at oneself, if one lives in the West; remaining in India dooms one to continue one’s horrifically solipsistic middle-class existence, treating everyone who is one’s social inferior with contempt and brutality” (Das 2017). Mukherjee, thus, is another example of the habitual criticism of contemporary Anglophone Indian novelists “for producing ‘negative’ representations of India for their readerships in the global North” (Davies 2016, 121).
- 10.
Naipaul’s eponymous novella In a Free State, which features a road trip, might have provided a model, as might the epilogue to Naipaul’s novel with the narrator, a tourist in Egypt, ruminating on “[his] stranger’s eyes” (Naipaul 1978, 246) and his driver’s attitude towards the tourists: “I couldn’t tell what he thought” (ibid., 244). In Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger (2008), the car also is a prominent trope of social and spatial segregation; see, for example, Adiga (2008, 112, 116).
- 11.
See also the narrator’s extensive description of the lighting and colours when he watches Renu queueing at the tap because there is no running water in the slum where she lives (41). It is usually his mother who provides the information he lacks, such as why Renu has to queue at the tap.
- 12.
See Butler in Precarious Life: “Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” (2004, xiv-xv).
- 13.
Mukherjee takes care not to homogenize the poor. The narrator learns from Renu that she comes “from a family of rice farmers. They owned the land they cultivated, so they were not poor, or certainly not the kind of poor one associates with the term ‘Indian farmer’” (60).
- 14.
His name derives from the Hindu epic Ramayana, in which Lakshmana is the younger brother of Rama and the twin brother of Shatrughna.
- 15.
Qalandar, or Kalandar, is the generic term for a Muslim ethnic community, recognized by the Indian government as an economically deprived tribe, who used to make a livelihood with performing bears and monkeys until hunting and capturing bears was outlawed in 1972. The debate about the cruel treatment inflicted on the bears, on the one hand, and the need to offer alternative livelihood options to the qalandars, on the other, continues until the present day; see Radhakrishna (2007).
- 16.
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Schmidt-Haberkamp, B. (2022). Imagining the Lives of Others: Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Precarity in Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom. In: Dwivedi, O.P. (eds) Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_11
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