Devoured in quick time, one puts down Shashank Kela’s debut novel with a sense of eerie disquiet. What have I just read? How is it that without using one strong or strident adjective, consistently maintaining an even, distant tone, he’s able to transmit a sense of suppressed fury? Is this an exercise in ‘fiction’ or in ‘faction’—a stringing together of hearsay, newspaper reports, police records, enquiry committee documents and eyewitness accounts into a meta-fiction of the effete, if rampaging, crony capitalism that has captured and dismantled all arms of the Indian state?
It is a thick choreography of police, judiciary, administration, politicians, priests, corporates, parties, informers, lawyers, media, activists—all emerging from the shadows and returning to the shadows even as they dance the charade of a barely functional state. Shashank Kela’s is a brave effort to write fiction in the face of facts.
Hardly 10 languid, matter-of-fact paras into the novel, a rag-tag police party somewhere in a jungle has already encounter-executed two suspected Maoists in cold blood. From here, we are swiftly sucked into the geography of a predatory state, which is real because it is surreal. Yet the narrative resists any tendency to slip into Kafkaesque metaphors and stays chillingly ‘normal’ in its narrative of the banality of evil. Kela has deftly put his finger on the rot.
The location has names that sound vaguely familiar but are unconnected—Kakrana, Badalpur, Sirkhedi. As the author says in his Afterword, “The setting has deliberately been left unlocalized, imaginary—it could be any state or region in India at any time in the past 15 or 20 years. And not just India either—the book can (I hope) be read as a fable about power and corruption, and the complicity that shapes their perverse labyrinths anywhere.” Of course, we only need to switch those names with more newsy ones like Dantewada, Chintalnar, Sukma, Malkangiri, or Abujmarh to evoke the pastiche of a relentlessly brute state at war with its own people.
In his last book, a work of non-fiction, A Rogue and a Peasant Slave—Adivasi Resistance1800-2000 , Kela had comprehensively charted this territory.
In the novel, this is Middle Country. Close to the centre of our map, but light years away from the centres of power, finance, media. Thickly forested; light hardly peeps in through the foliage. The colour scheme is sombre and dark, except when an aquamarine flycatcher hovers as a blur of blue or a morning sun splays silver and gold over distant hilltops. Education, healthcare, governance are fantasies here. Democracy is a rumour; the Constitution an obscure word of Latin/French origin.
Most palpable here, though, is the silence. The total silence around incalculable infamies, victimisations, plunder, violations and the sheer impunity of daily abuse. The comfortable silence middle-class nations love to live with and gloss over in their plush parties, even as a large percentage of their indigenous populations are scrubbed out of time and history. In the deep jungles, the silence simply settles with a sound of its own.
Sitting on riches
It is an India that India is ashamed of—an inconvenient reminder of its primitive, non-Vedic, non-Aryan, dark-skinned past; of dasyus of yore who squeaked in via a time-machine to embarrass our present. They are also an annoying sign of historic and natural injustice—that these relics, with their absurd bows and arrows and raw, uncivilised passion, sit atop untold mineral wealth which can overnight catapult national and international corporates into the multi-billionaire club.
Iron, coal, bauxite, manganese, mica—all the spicy ingredients needed to garnish and flavour metropolitan capital. And all these adivasis do in the name of being traditional custodians of this largesse is to merely worship it as their god instead of exploiting it, even stopping companies as piously named as Vedanta from mining it.
Enterprising money-bags might yet have got to it, but for the unacceptable intervention of an unspeakable band of allies the adivasis picked up in the 1940s, called ‘Leftists’, who have over the past 70 years morphed into armed Maoists.
Now, these are deadly adversaries because they have learnt to give back as good as they get. They know their terrain, they are shielded by the locals, they are trained in the use of lethal weapons and, being ideologically motivated, are strategically more intelligent, unlike the foot-soldiers of the police and para-military who usually don’t have a clue why they are targeting their own people, except that for them too ‘power flows from the barrel of the gun’.
Both sides are scared of each other (‘Cruelty derives from fear’, as the author quotes Montaigne) and the human costs of this war are high. The two alleged Maoists shot down, away from the readers’ eyes, early in the novel, have names that resonate familiarly—Roshan Ghandy and Stephen Murmu. The rest of the story is pure fiction as an investigation (what’s that?) is actually ordered into the incident and a conscientious cop Dayanidhi is sent by a central agency to get to the bottom (or to the top) of it.
Of course, it is a venture doomed to failure and the narrative, in the genre of a crime fiction, runs us through the dystopia that converts “justice and the rule of law [into] inconceivable abstractions” for a people who had “only experienced the arbitrary exercise of power.”
A mordant masterstroke on Kela’s part is to make a powerless cop the hero of his narrative who, even as he unpacks the crime clumsily executed by a nexus of political, law enforcement and corporate forces supremely confident of their own invulnerability, lacks the agency to bring to book any of them. As he ruminates despondently at the end, “Justice had been within reach, before vanishing like a mirage as the impunity of crimes reasserted itself.”
The Other Man is, then, a silent biometric image of the ugly picture of Dorian Gray our country has become. It could easily be read as the unauthorised biography of the nation.
The writer explores the charged space linking politics and culture through his work in media, pedagogy and the arts.
