Depiction of Indian Society, Culture and Politics in the Novels of Upamanyu Chatterjee: A Critical Review

Abstract

Novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee combines both the insider knowledge of the Indian Administrative Service and his satirical eye for the absurdities of the postcolonial state and therefore has a unique place among contemporary Indian English writers. The present review paper concentrates on how English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), Weight Loss (2006), Way to Go (2010), and Fairy Tales at Fifty (2014) and Chatterjee’s later fiction depict Indian society, culture and politics. In total, the review references more than 50 scholarly, journalistic and archival sources. The criticism of Chatterjee can be grouped under three main themes – Indian society – including the role of the joint family system; class difference and the bureaucratic hierarchy – linguistic hybridity and westernisation as a result of colonialism, and postcolonial constructions of identity; political awareness – Satire of the welfare state, corruption, and the stagnation of India's administrative systems. Moreover, a few areas of research in Chatterjee's work remain underdeveloped as well as gaps in current scholarship have emerged from this review, such as a lack of a single comprehensive treatise on the interaction between Society, Culture and Politics in Chatterjee's writing; lack of sufficiently developed theoretical frameworks, in particular those of necropolitics and affect theory; and the relative neglect of his later works. Collectively, Chatterjee’s fictitious literature can be read as one of the most comprehensive critiques of the Indian bureaucratic state and the Indian middle-class family found in contemporary Indian writing in English.