Untitled
N E W Y O R K R E V I E W B O O K S
C L A S S I C S
E N G L I S H , A U G U S T
UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE was born in in Patna,
India. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in
and at present works as a civil servant in Bombay. He writes
novels on the side—when no one is looking, as it were. His
family comprises one wife and two daughters. He enjoys
diverse solitary occupations.
AKHIL SHARMA was born in Delhi, India, and grew
up in Edison, New Jersey. His stories have appeared in The
Best American Short Stories anthology, The O. Henry Award
Winners anthology, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New
Yorker. His novel, An Obedient Father, won the Pen
Hemingway Prize.
E N G L I S H , A U G U S T
A n I n d i a n S t o r y
U PA M A N Y U C H AT T E R J E E
Introduction by
A K H I L S H A R M A
n e w y o r k r e v ie w b o o k s
n y r b
N e w Y o r k
T H I S I S A N EW YO R K R EV I EW B O O K
P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E N EW YO R K R EV I EW O F B O O K S
Broadway, New York, NY
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © by Upamanyu Chatterjee
Introduction copyright © by Akhil Sharma
All rights reserved.
First published by Faber and Faber Limited,
Quotations from the Bhagavad-gita are taken from the Penguin Classics edition
() translated by Juan Mascaro. Quotations from the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius are from the Penguin Classics edition () translated by Maxwell
Staniforth.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chatterjee, Upamanyu.
English, August : an Indian story / Upamanyu Chatterjee ; introduction by
Akhil Sharma.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books Classics)
--- (alk. paper)
. Young men—Fiction. . Civil service—Fiction. . City and town life—
Fiction. . India—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
..
'.—
-: ----
-: ---
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
SALMAN Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was the first Indian
novel to be widely perceived as a vital contribution to literature
in English. Since that happened many Indian writers have gone
on to become household names not only in England and
America but all around the world: Arundhati Roy; Amitav
Ghosh, with his historical novels; Vikram Seth, whose A Suitable
Boy is a marvelous thousand-page-plus social comedy about
arranged marriage. These famous authors, though, only begin
to suggest the range of excellent English-language literature be-
ing produced in India.
To me, as an American writer of Indian ancestry and an
avid reader of Indian fiction, one of the most striking things
about so much contemporary Indian fiction is the way it pre-
sents itself as being representative—of the historical moment,
of the social situation, of the cultural climate, of, above all,
India. And perhaps it is this strange, but not unusual, idea that
every Indian novel is, or should be, THE Indian novel, that
Upamanyu Chatterjee had in mind when he gave the subtitle
of “An Indian Story” to English, August, his extraordinary first
book. A story and not the story, even if English, August tells a
story that could only be Indian. Whether or not that was
Chatterjee’s intention, there’s no doubt that his book stands
apart from other Indian fiction by virtue of being so attentive
to the particular. English, August is a story about a young man
in a small Indian town, who has a very particular job in the
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
civil service. It’s a book about doing paperwork (or avoiding
doing paperwork), going to teas with your boss’s wife, and
overseeing village well-digging projects, as well as smoking pot,
masturbating, and reading Marcus Aurelius. And if by the end
of the book it turns out that English, August does indeed have
much to say about India, that’s almost a happy accident. Be-
cause it’s the particularity of the book that makes it a work of
art and gives such pleasure.
English, August does two things that are central to what nov-
els have always done. It brings us news—about the way we live
now; about the way others live now—and this is deeply satisfy-
ing. Almost as important, English, August offers us the pleasure
of seeing what Upamanyu Chatterjee can do with language.
Chatterjee is one of those rare writers who can be as funny as
sad, as lyrical as plain. Let me quote a few passages:
Funny:
Kumar remained adamant about finishing the booze
while watching the [pornographic] films. They [two men
traveling for work] settled down in bed, with mosquito-
repellent cream on their skins and incense in the air.
Kumar was giggling with alcohol and the promise of titil-
lation. The first shot of the first film showed a thin
American black man with painted lips and white bikini,
gyrating. He was cajoled into stripping by five white
girls, demented with lust. They all licked their lips and
one another until the black, with horrendous coyness,
displayed his penis. Then the girls got to work. “See, see,”
squeaked Kumar, trembling with adolescent excitement,
“lucky black bastard . . .” Throughout the ogling he shifted
in bed and intermittently muttered, “. . . this kind of
thing never happens in India . . . Indian girls are too
inhibited . . . bloody shame . . .”
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
Sad:
[The protagonist, a government official, goes to a distant
village to examine complaints of a well that has become
silted.] He was relieved to see more people around the
well. But something was odd, and he realized in a
moment that it was the muteness of the village, there
seemed to be no laughter and no conversation. The
village did have children, but they were all busy. Women
were tying them to ropes and letting them into the well.
After a while the ropes were bringing up buckets. He
went closer. The buckets were half-full of some thin mud.
The only sounds were the echoing clang of the buckets
against the walls of the well, and the tired sniveling of a
few children on the side. He looked at them. Gashed
elbows and knees from the well walls, one child had a
wound like a flower on his forehead. The woman who
had come to the office was looking at him in a kind of
triumph. He looked into the well. He couldn’t see any
water, but the children were blurred wraiths forty feet
below, scouring the mud of the well floor for water, like
sinners serving some mythic punishment.
Lyrical:
Then the rains came to Madna . . . Suddenly a roar and a
drumroll, as of a distant war. . . The world turned mono-
chromatic . . . Cloud, building, tree, road, they all dif-
fused into one blurred shade of slate.
-
I said to a friend, also an admirer of English, August, that
the book was, of course, a coming-of-age story. My friend
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
countered, not at all, it was a slacker novel. Both descriptions
are in fact true.
We meet Chatterjee’s hero, Agastya Sen, at night in a car. He
is driving down an empty street in New Delhi with a friend
who is getting ready to roll another joint. Much is signaled and
set up by this brief scene. To be a young man driving a car in
India implies meaningful wealth, while the marijuana suggests
rebelliousness and lassitude at the same time. These are chil-
dren of privilege, young city sophisticates. We soon learn, how-
ever, that Agastya is going to be leaving Delhi: he has been
accepted into the Indian Administrative Service, or IAS, about
which he has very mixed feelings, and will have to start living
in the sticks.
The town Agastya soon finds himself in is Madna, and
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s portrait of it is one of the great imagi-
native achievements of recent Indian literature. Probably Ameri-
can readers will have never seen a small town quite like this,
one that by American standards would hardly qualify as small.
The population could easily be in the high tens of thousands
or more; the congestion and racket more akin to that of an
American city. Its remoteness from the rest of the world, its
claustrophobic self-containment, cannot be exaggerated.
Readers of this book will come to know Madna intimately.
There is the dust, of course, which seems present in most books
about India, but there is also the badly constructed statue of
Mahatma Gandhi that is common to many town squares
(often the statue is sculpted so blockily that Gandhi looks
like a muscle-bound wrestler with glasses and a shaved head).
The bedraggled country club that Chatterjee introduces us to is
usually the social center of the town elite, a place where every-
one seems aware of very fine distinctions in status. There is this
and there are the local characters: the town doctor, the journal-
ist who prints gossip, the police chief who loves pornography.
Agastya is more at a loss in Madna than he ever imagined he’d
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
be, and he soon finds himself devoting much of his time to
hunting for wild marijuana plants.
Agastya is one of the funniest characters in Indian fiction
and one of the saddest. His mother died when he was a child,
which may have helped to make him the deeply lonely person
he is. Part of the reason that he cannot bear Madna is that his
isolation there makes that loneliness unignorable. Talking to
colleagues, Agastya even invents a wife for himself, and this stu-
pid, conceivably self-destructive falsehood is not just pointless
but poignant. Because Agastya’s life is littered with missing
people: the dead mother, but also an absent father (off in
Bengal, being the governor, it turns out; the father communi-
cates with Agastya through letters that are both aloof and dis-
appointed), a possible girlfriend gone off to graduate school in
America, and a Hindu saint. Unsettled and restless in Delhi,
Agastya is almost paralyzed with misery in Madna, where his
colleagues repel him as grotesque, while such friends as he finds
there strike him as even more to be pitied than himself. Because
of all this, and for all his wisecracks, the question Agastya is
struggling to put to himself is, Why am I so unhappy?
The way the question is raised and the way it is resolved
connect English, August to the Western coming-of-age novel (it
has been described as India’s Catcher in the Rye) while also
marking it as distinctively Indian. The sense of inauthenticity
Agastya suffers from feels very Western (so much so that one
might be tempted to dismiss it for a while as a citified affecta-
tion). This inauthenticity, by the way, is what is captured by the
novel’s somewhat puzzling title. Agastya is an old-fashioned
kind of name—it comes from a mythological Hindu guru—
which is why Agastya’s friends have taken the liberty of
Englishifying it into August, or even, going a step further,
simply calling him English. Agastya, in short, seems un-Indian
to them, and to himself as well at times. That hardly makes
him English, though, as he is perfectly aware. Inauthentically
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
Indian, inauthentically Western: in Madna this crisis of iden-
tity comes to a head.
What feels oddly and specifically Indian to me is the resolu-
tion of the crisis. The resolution is not the breaking away that
Agastya has been contemplating all along, and it’s not a recon-
ciliation. It’s not a renunciation either. It’s not even exactly a
decision. In any case, Agastya does not surrender his independ-
ence or his native wit. But there is a change, an acceptance, that
the reader cannot miss. An acceptance of necessity by virtue of
which Agastya is set free.
-
There’s an Indian saying that if you want to keep a secret you
should put it in a book. It’s all the more amazing, then, that
when English, August was first published in India in it was
an enormous best seller.
The reason English, August was such a popular success
probably has to do with the Indian Administrative Service. In
India to belong to the IAS is a little like being a movie star.
Each year approximately two million people take the exam for
eighty entry-level IAS positions. One of the lowest rungs of the
IAS is district collector. Agastya is an assistant to a collector,
though it is assumed that in time he will become one himself.
A district is the equivalent of an American county, and the
district collector runs or has great influence over the district’s
judicial, police, and administrative functions. The IAS is
considered to be honest for the most part, though there is a
joke that if you become an IAS officer you can earn so much
money through corruption that your family will have enough
to eat for seven generations.
The first time I read English, August, I was living in a small
town in India and working with various IAS officers. The book
was so spot-on that it didn’t surprise me in the least that many
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
of them complained about it. I read the book over and over and
found comfort in Chatterjee’s observations of the world I was
living in, the sound of lizards plopping off the ceiling and
falling to the floor, the squabbling among adults as to who gets
to sit in the front passenger seat.
Chatterjee has followed English, August with three further
novels (The Last Burden, which was published in , The
Mammaries of the Welfare State in , and Weight Loss in
) while continuing to pursue his career in the civil service.
A character in English, August talks about how each language
has a “tang” and that it is hard to translate this very specific
flavor. That, of course, is true of the work of our best writers as
well. Upamanyu Chatterjee has his own “tang” and it is like
nobody else’s.
— A K H I L S H A R M A
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E N G L I S H , A U G U S T
To my parents
THROUGH the windshield they watched the wide silent
road, so well-lit and dead. New Delhi, one in the morning, a
stray dog flashed across the road, sensing prey. “So when shall
we meet again?” asked Dhrubo for the eighth time in one hour.
Not that parting was too agonizing and that he couldn’t bear to
leave the car, but that marijuana caused acute lethargy.
“Uh . . .” said Agastya and paused, for the same reason.
Dhrubo put the day’s forty-third cigarette to his lips and
seemed to take very long to find his matchbox. His languorous
attempts to light a match became frenzied before he succeeded.
Watching him Agastya laughed silently.
Dhrubo exhaled richly out of the window, and said, “I’ve a
feeling, August, you’re going to get hazaar fucked in Madna.”
Agastya had just joined the Indian Administrative Service and
was going for a year’s training in district administration to a
small district town called Madna.
“Amazing mix, the English we speak. Hazaar fucked. Urdu
and American,” Agastya laughed, “a thousand fucked, really
fucked. I’m sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and
spoken with such ease.” The slurred sounds of the comfortable
tiredness of intoxication, “ ‘You look hazaar fucked, Marma-
duke dear.’ ‘Yes Dorothea, I’m afraid I do feel hazaar fucked’—
see, doesn’t work. And our accents are Indian, but we prefer
August to Agastya. When I say our accents, I, of course, ex-
clude yours, which is unique in its fucked mongrelness—you
U P A M A N Y U C H A T T E R J E E
even say ‘Have a nice day’ to those horny women at your tele-
phones when you pass by with your briefcase, and when you
agree with your horrendous boss, which is all the time, you say
‘yeah, great’ and ‘uh-uh.’ ”
“Don’t talk shit,” Dhrubo said and then added in Bengali,
“You’re hurt about your mother tongue,” and started laughing,
an exhilarated volley. That was a ten-year-old joke from their
school-days in Darjeeling, when they had been envious of some
of the Anglo-Indian boys who spoke and behaved differently,
and did alarmingly badly in exams and didn’t seem to mind,
they were the ones who were always with the Tibetan girls and
claimed to know all about sex. On an early summer afternoon,
in the small football field among the hills, with an immaculate
sky and the cakelike white-and-brownness of Kanchanjanga,
Agastya and Prashant had been watching (Agastya disliked
football and Prashant disliked games) the usual showing off
with the ball. Shouts in the air from the Anglos (which in-
creased whenever any Tibetan female groups passed the field,
echoing like a distant memory, “Pass it here, men!” “This way,
men!” “You can’t shoot, your foot’s made of turd or what men!”
(Agastya had never heard any Anglo say “man”). He and
Prashant had been lazily cynical about those who shouted the
most and whose faces also contorted with a secret panic in the
rare moments when the ball did reach them. Then some
Tibetan girls had come together and taken out a fucking guitar.
“The Tibs and the Anglos always have guitars,” Prashant had
said. Football had been abandoned. Then laughter and twang-
ing. “It’s the colour of the Anglo and Tib thighs,” Prashant had
said, “not like us.” Agastya’s envy had then blurted out, he
wished he had been Anglo-Indian, that he had Keith or Alan
for a name, that he spoke English with their accent. From that
day his friends had more new names for him, he became the
school’s “last Englishman,” or just “hey English” (his friends
meant “hey Anglo” but didn’t dare), and sometimes even “hello
E N G L I S H , A U G U S T
Mother Tongue”—illogical and whimsical, but winsome
choices, like most names selected by contemporaries. And like
most names, they had paled with the passage of time and place,
all but August, but they yet retained with them the knack of
bobbing up out of some abyss on the unexpected occasion, and
nudging a chunk or two of his past.
A truck roared by, shattering the dark. “Out there in Madna
quite a few people are going to ask you what you’re doing in the
Administrative Service. Because you don’t look the role. You
look like a porn film actor, thin and kinky, the kind who wears
a bra. And a bureaucrat ought to be soft and cleanshaven, be-
spectacled, and if a Tamil Brahmin, given to rapid quoting of
rules. I really think you’re going to get hazaar fucked.”
“I’d much rather act in a porn film than be a bureaucrat. But
I suppose one has to live.”
“Let’s smoke a last one, shall we,” said Dhrubo, picking up
the polythene bag from the car seat. “In Yale a Ph.D wasn’t a
joke. It meant something. It was significant. Students thought
before they enrolled. But here in Delhi, all over India,” Dhrubo
threw some loose tobacco out of the window, “education is bid-
ing time, a meaningless accumulation of degrees, BA, MA,
then an M.Phil. while you join the millions in trying your luck
at the Civil Services exam. So many people every year seem to
find government service so interesting,” he paused to scratch
his elbow, “I wonder how many people think about where their
education is leading them.”
“Yet you returned from Yale,” Agastya yawned.
“But mine is not the typical Indian story. That ends with the
Indian living somewhere in the First World, comfortably or
uncomfortably. Or perhaps coming back to join the Indian
Administrative Service, if lucky.”
“You’re wrong about education, though. Most must be like
me, with no special aptitude for anything, not even wondering
how to manage, not even really thinking. Try your luck with
U P A M A N Y U C H A T T E R J E E
everything, something hopefully will click. There aren’t unlim-
ited opportunities in the world.”
They smoked. Dhrubo leaned forward to drop loose to-
bacco from his shirt. “Madna was the hottest place in India last
year, wasn’t it. It will be another world, completely different.
Should be quite educative.” Dhrubo handed the smoke to
Agastya. “Excellent stuff. What’ll you do for sex and marijuana
in Madna?”
