A Fitting Requiem for the Life of a Bureaucrat Who Served the Country

The slim novella, The Revenge of the Non–Vegetarian, is Upamanyu Chatterjee’s sixth novel, all of them written over a period of roughly three decades. Seen together, these become a record of sorts of his years in the civil service, since every other novel is a sequel to an earlier one. I haven’t read them all, but thoroughly enjoyed the first one (English, August), an endearing account of his encounter with mofussil India, because it was such an honest account of the experiences of what could be labelled as the beat generation of administrators.

These young men and women who entered the IAS in the 1970s and 80s were mostly products of a renowned university or college, many were children of civil servants with only a distant and rudimentary knowledge of the rough and Hobbesian world that lay beyond the boundaries of their own Civil Lines kind of life. Their deracinated, free (vaguely pink) way of life and a healthy disdain for the protocol of the civil service was quite incomprehensible to the residents of the small subdivisions they found themselves in.

In turn, the bovine life of the boondocks was funny, suffocating and often irritating beyond words to these new recruits. I was somewhat familiar with that alienation and loved the honest portrayal that Chatterjee had managed to capture. Later, it was also made into a film that won several accolades.

To be honest, I was never able to finish any of his subsequent novels, partly because I had become pretty cynical about the class of writers who wrote in English of an India that has another rhythm and vocabulary, and their glib opinions about small towns and small minds started to grate on me. Compared to the searing post-modern writing that was available in Hindi and other regional languages (seldom read by people like them), these sahib-log type of writers now sounded trite and shallow to me. However, as I grow older, I realise that my illiberal attitude towards them was equally a symptom of a similar inability to enter and understand the world of those who only spoke and read in English.

Today I can understand better Chatterjee’s dilemma of being trapped in a world that he both loved and hated. Equally, it is a revelation of why even after long years in the government, and several novels and short stories on this theme, he remains on the outside of an India that grew out of another idea, and why many like him became so disenchanted that they gave up trying to change it. Some of them now write impassioned pieces and preach to the converted, and are often jeered by the right-wing trolls as ‘libtards’ and ‘Macaulay putras’. A mutual contempt and inability to understand and tolerate the other is a central theme of several such literary offerings and critiques.

The incident that forms the core of this novella is surprisingly contemporary even though it takes place within a couple of years of 1947. In a sleepy subdivision, a Muslim family is burned to death after a gruesome murder. Eventually, Madhusudan Sen, the young subdivisional officer (a member of the ICS, no less) helps to trace the murderer, but revolted by the crime and indifference of the police and judicial system, vows to resume eating meat only after the survivors of the dead family receive justice.

In the background are a holy Hindu temple on a hill and a taboo on eating any non-vegetarian food in its periphery. Sen discovers that his cook refuses to violate this fatwa, so he arranges that his mamlatdar, a gentle Muslim called Nadeem Dalvi – a brother of the dead family’s patriarch – will supply him with beef curry furtively delivered in a tiffin carrier. The book ends with the resolution of the Dalvi family murder case several years later after it has gone through the entire judicial process, including a mercy petition to the president of India. This happens almost on the eve of Sen’s retirement from service and neatly rounds off the beginning and end of the saga of justice. It also reads as a rather clunky, Biblical parable where crime, punishment and a debt of honour repaid are all produced in a hurried narrative, with occasional twists and asides.

Chatterjee’s prose is dry and his humour drier. There are no nostalgic flashbacks here to an idyllic pastoral life or romance and love to lighten or embellish the story. His novella is a straightforward telling of life as it is: the wretched crime and its perpetrator viewed with an almost clinical detachment and a surprising change of heart at the end.

Given the terrifying cycle of communal and caste violence in our land, it is also a fitting requiem for the life of a bureaucrat who served the country for the best part of his life but kept his core human values intact.

Ira Pande is a freelance writer, editor and translator.