States of Unrest

NEEL MUKHERJEE LIVED the first 22 years of his life in south Calcutta. Diagonally opposite his home stood a cowshed run by a Bihari couple. They provided the milk—which arrived warm, frothing and reminiscent of all things bovine— to the Mukherjee household. A young Neel hated the glass of milk he was forced to drink—the smell, the taste, the texture. But as a child who would skip in and out of the cowshed in his free time, he soon learned how to milk a cow, poorly at first, and better with practice. As an adventurous seven-year-old he even asked a woman to teach him how to make cowpats. When his mother found out about his cow dung activities, he was thrashed, not for reasons of hygiene or truancy, but for transgres­sion; he had crossed a class line. For forty-plus years these memo­ries stayed with Mukherjee (now aged 54), before making it into his fifth book, Choice (Hamish Hamilton; 311 pages; ₹699).

Choice is a triptych of a novel with three sections, where each stands on its own, while also being connected. In the first part we meet Ayush and his economist and wealthy husband Luke, and witness their battle over morals and values, and how life is to be lived. The second tells of Emily who witnesses a hit-and-run and then makes a series of choices (which to some readers might be unconscionable). And in the third we move to rural West Bengal, and the gift of a cow. Mukherjee explains, “I was very interested in seeing a triptych work within the novel form, where each tells a story that is complete in itself. But when you put the three together and step back, they do not have a different meaning, but they have a more amplified, richer, deeper meaning. I hope.”

The third section about Sabita, mother to six and eight-year-old Mira and Sahadeb, and their most recent acquisition, Gauri the cow, is where Mukherjee’s memories of the cow­shed make it to page. The cow and its milking are so detailed with precise descriptions of the “one-two rhythm”, the pull­ing of teats, the cupping of udders, the squatting on haunches that any reader would ask the author (“an Indian who lives in Britain”) if he has milked a cow in real life.

While some parts of Choice, of course, arise from memory, the novel is much more philosophical than actual. The first two sec­tions are set in London, the third is entirely based in India. As the title gives away, here is a book that interrogates the role of choice in determining our lives. Choice focuses a magnifying glass on a range of issues, from vegetarianism to climate change to econom­ics to appropriation to the urban-rural divide to migration to speciesism to the white saviour complex to colonialism. When so many hot-button issues are packed into a single narrative, it can often seem heavy handed. But to Mukherjee’s credit, the first two sections make for compelling stories. These sections are page turners where the reader wonders how the moral world of the characters will square off with reality. The story on the indigent family in West Bengal, however, lacks the same brio, and its removed tone often makes it ponderous.

This cramming of themes (done so well in the first two parts) can be explained by Mukherjee’s desire to write a “thick” novel. He says, “One of my great fears is writing a thin book. By thin I don’t mean page extent, but thin as in the meanings it contains and the kind of argument it makes about the world.” It is a concern echoed even by Virginia Woolf. When he read about her attempts to “thicken” To the Lighthouse, he felt a “chime in his chest”.

When I speak to London-based Mukherjee, he is in Boston where he teaches a course in Creative Writing at Harvard University. It is morning in his side of the world, and he apologises that while he has “tried to be a lark,” he is an “owl,” to explain his grog­giness. But in his answers, Mukherjee is fully awake. One could even say he is woke. His previous novel A State of Freedom (2017) laid bare the contrasts and inequalities of Indian society. His novels tend to be philosophical explorations of wealth and privilege, the haves and the have-nots. His novel, The Lives of Others (2014), was even shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

With a PhD in 16th-century literature and cultural history, Mukherjee refers to John Milton’s Lycidas, JM Coetzee and VS Naipaul with equal ease. He has often said that his novels are in conversation with books that have come before. This becomes apparent even in his speech. He is both eloquent and emphatic. Speaking about the “rage of carnivores,” when they are gently chided that vegetarianism is better for the planet, he gets especially impassioned. But laughter accompanies his fervour and so as a listener/reader one pays heed to him.

“One of my great fears is writing a thin book. By thin I don’t mean page extent, but thin as in the meanings it contains and the kind of argument it makes about the world,” says Neel Mukherjee, author

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His path to writing came with its own plot twists. As a patri­otic Bengali, influenced by the cinema of Satyajit Ray, he at first wanted to be a filmmaker. While he did get admission into film studies at top universities in the US, fate had other plans. As he enjoyed reading, he enrolled at Jadavpur University, which was a 15-minute walk from his Calcutta home. On the insistence of his professors, he applied to Oxford University and went on to earn a MA from Oxford University and a PhD from Cambridge University. Mukherjee sums up his journey, say­ing, “I came to writing by a series of failures. I have failed to become a filmmaker. I have failed to become a Renaissance academic. And writing is my last chance.”

Even with the publication of his fourth novel and having been recognised by top awards, Mukherjee does not see himself as a “successful” writer. He says, “I constantly think of giving up writing, and I feel alienated from the writing world. Success is measured by market values, by which my success is zero or even negative. Or you can measure it by other values, which will only appear in time.”

Mukherjee’s discontent with the publishing industry is voiced by Ayush, an insider to the publishing industry, in Choice. Ayush knows well that “publishing hides behind the myth of the nobility and indispensability of literature to con­duct what is ultimately business.”

Choice is essentially a battle cry against capitalism and the commercial value we accord to all of life. Capitalism promises endless choice. By succumbing to unbroken consumption, by riding the train of development to the station of progress, what do we risk losing? In our search for creature comforts and material wealth are we morally compromised as citizens? Mukherjee explains, “Choice is a great buzzword for economics, and I wanted to look at that idea of choice closely and how the idea of choice is inseparable from the idea of constraint. Is choice always a good thing? It can have terrible ramifications in the lives of people. We make bad choices all the time. I want to look at the micro effects capitalism has on the interiority of the soul.”

This comes out best in the first section where we enter the life and mind of Ayush. In a series of incremental ways, Ayush tightens the screws on his husband Luke and twins, believing that they are living the wrong life. He fixes a timer on the taps and lights at home so that he can control the use of resources. He takes money from his children’s education fund (without the knowl­edge of Luke) and donates it to climate change charities. As he tells Luke, “I’m at war. I can’t explain very well. I feel we’ve taken a wrong turn at some point and it’s too late now and we can’t get back to the right path. …We are in the wrong life.”

“Choice is a great buzzword for economics, and I wanted to look at that idea of choice closely and how the idea of choice is inseparable from the idea of constraint. I want to look at the micro effects capitalism has on the interiority of the soul.” says Neel Mukherjee

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Choice warns us that as a society we’ve taken a wrong turn. We operate on the premise, “Economics is life, life is economics.” It is a line that appears with the frequency of a mantra in the first section of the book. Mukherjee heard that sentence from the wife of a famous economist. She was a paediatrician, and her husband often espoused this sentiment. When the wife told Mukherjee this, he thought, “Oh, you sad, sad man.” He adds, “I wanted to write about it in as ironic and as caustic a way as possible. What happens when life is economics and economics is life. I wanted to measure it in the life of an individual who pushes against it, and the results are not great.”

As a reader one feels both compassion and frustration with Ayush, as he struggles to reconcile his beliefs with reality. He is a character with “fewer skins,” “fewer filters” who marches to the beat of a drummer only he can hear. To box him, one might say he has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. But Mukherjee pushes against such medical terms and while describing Ayush’s tics, he never names them. He says, “When you medicalise the interior­ity of any character, you instantly close down the resonances. People are all very complex. I would like my readers to see his symptoms as something larger going on inside his soul. He’s trying to impose some kind of organisation or control on a life he can no longer have any control over because—to make a very big statement about it—late capitalism has done some­thing to the way we make choices and the way we always have to be feeding into a certain kind of utility value.”

If Mukherjee’s concerns, through his novels, are the big philosophical issues of the day, such as capitalism, he is also invested in keeping the novel novel. He is tired of linear plots and conventional storylines. Reading Choice at times feels like the opening of a Matryoshka doll, where one doll nestles within an­other. Similarly, here we have stories within stories.

The writing of the book, over five years, as well, was anything but linear. He first wrote the second sec­tion on Emily, an early modernist with a love for literature. He started writing this section on the blank back page printout of an assignment by his brightest student, named Emily. He then wrote the Ayush and Emily section almost simultaneously. He completed the tale about Gauri the cow over six weeks in the summer of 2022.

Animals often people Mukherjee’s novels. A State of Freedom featured a bear and a bear keeper. Choice has pigs, a thinking dog and a sentient cow. While he has tried to turn vegetarian, he has failed to do so and “continues to be fallen”. In the novel’s opening scene, Ayush shows his five-year-old twins a violent and blood-soaked movie about the meat business, which has incensed some readers. With his writing, Mukherjee is not trying to convert readers to veganism, or to anything for that matter, but as he says, “We pretend that something is the norm and the thing to be done, whereas there is another way of look­ing at it.” The life we lead is, after all, about the choices we make and those we don’t.

About The Author

Nandini Nair

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