The Outraged, authored by
Aditya Sudarshan, is a novel in two parts. The first, “Times of Ferment”, was
published in 2018, and the second, “Times of Strife” in the subsequent year. The Outraged ought to become essential
reading for all Indians familiar with the English language, because Sudarshan
skillfully addresses, with great philosophical depth, the questions that
currently plague the Indian republic.
Set among the
cinema hopefuls who populate Yari Road in Bombay’s Versova district, the novel
plots the three distinct trajectories employed by three characters drawn from
the so-called English-speaking middle class. Emphasizing reason and the role it
can play in liberating the country from the grip of godmen and other social
ills, is Abhishor Frances, a film-maker, who chooses to lead what he and his
companions see as a liberal revolution which will free the country from its
problems. Maithili Krishna, on the other hand, surrenders herself to the
attraction of a godman, while Sasha offers a more nuanced option, a middle
ground as it were, between the two routes adopted by these members of the film
community.
Locating the
novel among cinema professionals in Yari Road is a brilliant move because it
neatly captures the conundrum currently facing the Indian middle class. To
begin with, while ostensibly English-speaking and middle class, Sudarshan
highlights the various groups that constitute this section of society. Not all
of them can speak English with equal ease, nor do they inhabit a similar
cultural world. Rather, large segments of this group are only recent entrants,
and the resulting lack of a common cultural world sows the seeds for the many
disagreements that populate the pages of this novel. Indeed, it is these
disagreements, among the various, largely North Indian, characters that depict
distinct types of the Indian middle class, that give flesh to the narrative arc
of The Outraged.
Perhaps the
relationship between Bollywood and the ongoing collapse of the Indian republic
is the reason why The Outraged
focuses on the community on Yari Road. Even though they seek to make
independent, meaningful films, the members of this fraternity must necessarily
feed the beast that is Bollywood. The
novel throws up vignettes of the dirty underbelly of this industry, which is
India’s claim to international fame. However, the novel does more than simply
speak of the abuse of women, and men, which constitutes part of Bollywood
culture. In keeping with the philosophical musings that animate this book, The Outraged also points to the manner
in which, fed on a steady diet of films that glorify gangsters, consumerism,
and the growing cult of the item number, the Indian population, or at least
that segment that consumes these offerings, has actually lost the ability to
discern what it is that constitutes the life of a healthy society and republic.
Via its narrative, The Outraged
affirms that the film industry, which had the opportunity to animate the life
of the republic, has outright failed it and indeed contributed to the crisis
that India is staring at in the face.
The film world
of Bombay is not the only community that this novel depicts. Firmly within its
crosshairs is the larger Indian middle-class that sees itself as liberal.
Through the character profiles, Sudarshan speaks several home truths. That the
liberalism that Indians believe they embody is, in fact, nothing more than a
superficial performance of Western manners that masks the traditional
injustices that the Indian polity has sustained and continues to sustain.
Liberalism in India, this novel suggests, is a cultural performance, rather
than the lived commitment to a philosophical practice. It is as a result of not
fully comprehending or living within a genuinely liberal framework that some
collaborators in Abhishor’s revolution utilize strategies that ensure that this
movement comes to a grinding halt. Similarly, it is because Indian liberalism
was/is about natives asserting their
caste cultures in western guise, that characters like Maithili, who come from
pedigrees that we would identify as embodying the best of the Nehruvian secular
elite, eventually succumb to the charisma of smooth-talking godmen. This
collapse comes about, it appears, because these elites have never critiqued
native dominant caste traditions, or indeed, Hinduism itself. As Abhishor,
seemingly channeling Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s critique, points out, “as long as we
do not attack the core doctrines of Hinduism, we cannot rid ourselves of the
God-man menace. The two are completely related.”
But neither is
Abhishor Frances, the archetypal liberal, free from fault in Sudarshan’s
telling. The author demonstrates the terrifying violence that lies at the heart
of the modernist, and therefore liberal, project. Once convinced of the truth
of their cause, the liberals in this novel occupy the moral high ground, and
then begin to descend into a chaos not dissimilar to the blood feuds that mark
most modernist utopian revolutions. Seeing the world in black and white, people
are either good, or bad, and if bad are prosecuted by a ferocious public
opinion, that forces even the state and the forces of law and order to upset
the rule of law. Indeed, one senses in Sudarshan’s novel that the outrage of
the chattering classes and the fury which descends on the scapegoat is often no
different from the recent lynching of Christians, Muslims, and Dalits that have
the same classes muttering in shock.
Into this
fraught universe the figure of Sasha cuts an almost Buddhic figure, though I am
inclined to believe that Sudarshan sees this protagonist as a Christ figure:
“…this strange young man with shining eyes and a haunted past, who aimlessly
walked the broken pavements, yet went like an arrow to the broken people and
could not seem to count the cost”. Sasha’s conversations with Abhishor and his
friends, where he suggests that liberalism and secularism will simply not be able
to halt the tide of terror, sound remarkably like the critique that the
Catholic church has systematically mounted since at least the rise of
communism. Sasha offers a Catholic critique of modernity and the liberal
project of equality by pointing out that people are “equal only before God, and
not in any other sense”. While defending the value of the spiritual against the
rage of the rationalists, and even making a place for god-men and mystics in a
society, Sasha also affirms that, “it matters a great deal what God one
believes in”.
Those used to fast-paced novels will find reading The Outraged somewhat taxing. But this
is the strength of the novel because it’s easy pace, with no apparent
direction, offers one the time to contemplate its philosophical musings. And
these pertain, not just to the on-going collapse of the Indian republic, but
also the larger crisis within modernity. The
Outraged ought to be a welcome addition to Indian bookshelves because it is
a novel that engaged in an auto-critique and is thus a rare gem among this
country’s literary offerings.
The Outraged: Times of Ferment, Aditya Sudarshan, 2018, Rupa, New Delhi.
The Outraged: Times of
Strife, Aditya Sudarshan, 2019, Rupa, New Delhi.
(A version of this text was first published in Scroll on Aug 10, 2019.)
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