In 1903, during a torrential and deadly flood in monsoon season, an Englishman and an Indian woman both seek shelter in a cave beside a raging river. With death hovering, they find themselves carried away by the moment. When the Englishman comes to his senses and realises he has done something no honourable, upright Englishman of the Empire should do with a native woman, he flings himself into the river and drowns. The woman, Amrita, is rescued and continues on her journey to her arranged marriage, keeping secret that she is pregnant with the Englishman’s child. She dies in childbirth but the child, Pran, lives, growing up as the pampered and spoiled son of a rich man. Everyone admires his beautiful pale skin, almost as white as the whites. But one person knows the secret of his origin – Amrita’s maid – and when Pran, now a teenager, attempts to ravish her daughter, the maid tells Pran’s “father” the truth about him. A few days later the father dies of the influenza which is sweeping the world, and the family eject Pran from the home he expected to inherit, leaving him destitute and alone. This is the story of Pran’s life, and through him a satirical look at the impact of colonialism and the position of the “blackie-whites” – the mixed race Anglo Indians, caught between two cultures, not fully accepted by either.
The book is written in a series of separate sections, which is how Pran lives his life. The pampered rich kid becomes a desperate beggar, who is taken in by a brothel-keeper and forced into male prostitution. From there he is sold to a rich Indian as a Hijra – a transgender eunuch, more or less – which is not an identity he chooses for himself. Fortunately for him, this phase of his life is over before the eunuch bit is carried out. I’m not going to go through all the phases since that’s the story really, so too much detail would be spoilery. But in essence, he eventually ditches his Indian identity and embraces his Englishness, becoming Robert, then Jonathan along the way. He is intelligent, resourceful and chameleon-like, able to seem as if he’s fitting in by a process of learning and mimicking the manners of those around him wherever he happens to be.
I found some of the sections more successful than others, which I feel is probably down to my subjective preferences rather than any unevenness in the book. It is satire, and my track record with satire is distinctly wobbly. Sometimes while I could see the humour in situations Pran found himself in, the darkness of them made me unable to feel amused. Pran starts out distinctly unlikeable and while I grew to have a lot of sympathy with the way he was treated by both cultures, I never fully got over that initial dislike.
However, in every section it’s a wonderful portrayal of a different part of society, be it among the sex-workers of India, the missionaries of the Raj or the students of Oxford. In the lighter sections, I could fully enjoy the humour and appreciate the insight into each culture. For me, the Indian sections were the more interesting, although also the darker, because the book goes well beyond the familiar territory of most British colonial fiction into the worlds of the immensely rich and the devastatingly poor of the “real” India of the time, living alongside but not part of the world of the Raj. Kunzru mocks the Raj pretty mercilessly, though subtly, but he also mocks the rich and powerful Indians, so it doesn’t ever feel like a polemical anti-British rant. As a result, it is a much more effective critique of the impact of colonialism on individuals, both colonised and colonisers, than most of the unsubtle post-colonial diatribes we’ve been subjected to in recent years. The divide here, as it always is in life, is between the rich and powerful, whether British or Indian, and the people they exploit.
But the main subject he is examining is identity and belonging, and how intertwined and inseparable those two things are. Pran/Robert/Jonathan is a shapeshifter, a permanent outsider who is skilful enough to appear as an insider in any setting. But who is he? If there comes a point when his wardrobe-full of identities falls away and leaves him naked – who is he then? And Kunzru makes this question wider – can the identity of a culture survive intact when subjected to old-style colonialism or the newer colonialism of enforced capitalism, or will it break and be lost? He doesn’t give us answers – he simply makes us ponder the questions.
Another excellent, entertaining and thought-provoking book from Kunzru, one of the most intelligent authors of our time. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.
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