2023-05-06 22:59:58
Er shouldn’t let his life be determined by the past, his friend had told him time and time again, more than that: you really have to trample on your own history, even if at first it felt like stepping on a garden. “At the end of the day, it’s just the ground you walk on.”
One cannot blame Aseem, who in Pankaj Mishra’s novel Golden Jackal adopted this recommendation from a VS Naipaul novel, for not following the advice himself: perhaps he is among the three young men who enrolled in the first semester at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi shared a dormitory room and the initiation experience of common ritual humiliations by the higher semesters, the one who stepped in with the greatest determination.
In the case of Virendra, who came from the caste of the untouchables the longest way to the IIT and from there to the billion-euro business of American hedge funds, it was rather ignorance. And with Arun, the narrator in Mishra’s book? Not that the former mechanical engineering student, who eventually turned to translating Hindi literature, didn’t trample on his origins. But he looked at it. His sometimes well-placed, sometimes helplessly set steps and missteps as he loses the ground under his feet form the core of the thirty-year-spanning novel.
Excursions into the analysis and the essay
It is no wonder that Arun places himself at the center of his story: Mishra conceived his writing as a kind of letter to his former lover, as an explanation, justification, reconsideration after the initially wordless breakup of a relationship, noted after Arun left the the London home of the very wealthy Indian-Muslim beauty Alia fled back to the slopes of the Himalayas.
Image: Publisher
This construction allows the author, twenty years after his first and so far last novel “The Romantics”, uninhibited – and for his readers extremely fruitful – excursions into the journalistic areas, with which he has since become a much respected interpreter, commentator and critic of the of today’s India: the analysis, the image of society, the essay.
A departure
The love story between the reclusive translator and the cosmopolitan and media-savvy, much younger woman is written by Pankaj Mishra without any particular originality. To offer religion and gender, to take an intellectual and activist complementary position to Arun’s former companions and to give him the opportunity to do so on his own with her own book project, a “secret history of globalization”, for which she traces the careers of Indian-born economic and financial giants to supplement the view that Alia can hardly reconstruct from conversations and notes.
The childhood memories of Arun, the different perceptions of poverty in life on the railroad tracks, the rituals with which the mother and the lies with which the father organizes his life are among the most haunting passages in the novel. Later his father will leave the family and Arun will bring his mother to the mountain village. There, the old neighbor Naazku becomes her confidante, a woman battered by malnutrition and hard work who lives in her mud hut in a forest clearing by cutting the grass on the hillside with a sickle and selling it to the area’s cow farmers. When Arun leaves the village for the first time with Alia, for a few days in Pondicherry, the mother dies and Arun does not return home even for the mourning rites.
A village loses face
Why is it that these scenes – at least to the western reader – have so much more to say than anything that happens in the much more familiar settings of the novel, in the south Indian beach hotel, at international ideas festivals or London parties where the guests are caring , sense of justice and attitude for the whole world? Alia introduced Arun to this world without having to fight for a place like Aseem and Virendra. The narrator does not have to tell the addressee of his writing anything. It’s different with the poverty that Alia never got to know herself.
How could the poor know what is happening to them? “Owning a hill made her potentially a multi-millionaire in an economy driven by real estate speculation,” says Arun soberly about neighbor Naazku. He has to watch as the old woman, unable to understand what is her due, is ensnared and exploited. Building land is created. The village loses face. People lose their footing.
For the generation of the three companions, two of whom end up in prison, Pankaj Mishra paints a picture of helplessness, of the impulse to flee in view of the living conditions of the parents – with Aseem it is open contempt – with their hope that the children could do the whole thing with their expensive education lead family out of misery. His counterpart of today’s youth is no less disturbing: Arun at least sees them “deprived of their original homeland, their modest but stable livelihood and their fatalistic but comforting religion”. She even misses the small advantage that Arun uses at the end of his path, “a place where they could run back to hide there”.
Pankaj Mishra: „Goldschackal“. Novel. Translated from the English by Jan Wilm. Verlag S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2023. 416 pages, hardcover, €26.
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