He should not let the past determine his life, his friend had told him over and over again, and even more: you really have to trample on your own history, even if at first it felt like you were trampling on a garden. "At the end of the day, it's just the ground you're walking on."
Fridtjof Küchemann
Editor in the feuilleton.
- Follow I follow
One cannot accuse Aseem, who in Pankaj Mishra's novel "Golden Jackal" adopted this recommendation from a novel by V. S. Naipaul, for not following the advice himself: Perhaps he is among the three young men who shared a dormitory room and the initiation experience of common ritual humiliation through the higher semesters in the first semester at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi, the one who stepped in with the greatest determination.
In the case of Virendra, who has traveled the furthest way from the caste of untouchables to the IIT and from there to the billion-dollar business of American hedge funds, it was rather naivety. And what about Arun, the narrator in Mishra's book? It's not that the former mechanical engineering student, who eventually turned to translating Hindi literature, didn't trample on his origins. But he was looking. His steps and missteps, some well-set, some helpless, while he loses the ground under his feet, form the core of the thirty-year novel.
Excursions into analysis and essay
It is no wonder that Arun uninhibitedly places himself at the center of his narrative: Mishra conceives his writing as a kind of letter to her former lover, as an explanation, justification, reconsideration after the initially wordless breakdown of a relationship, noted after Arun has fled from the London apartment of the heavily-rich Indian-Muslim beauty Alia back to the slopes of the Himalayas.
Twenty years after his first and so far last novel "The Romantics", this construction allows the author at the same time unrestrained – and for his readers immensely productive – excursions into the journalistic fields with which he has since become a much-respected interpreter, commentator and critic of today's India: the analysis, the image of society, the essay.
A departure
Pankaj Mishra depicts the love story between the reclusive translator and the worldly and media-savvy much younger woman without any particular originality, Alia recognizably has only the function of luring Arun back into today's world, offering him enlightened discourse occasions on the topics of class, caste, religion and gender in retrospect, taking an intellectual and activist complementary position to Arun's former companions and providing him with her In her own book project, a "Secret History of Globalization", for which she traces the careers of Indian-born business and financial greats, the occasion to add from her own point of view what Alia can hardly reconstruct from conversations and recordings.
Arun's childhood memories, the different perceptions of poverty in life on the train tracks, the rituals with which his mother, and the lies with which his father arranges his life, are among the most haunting passages of the novel. Later, his father will leave the family and Arun will take his mother to live with him in the mountain village. There, the old neighbor Naazku becomes her confidant, a woman marked by malnutrition and hard work, who lives in her mud hut in a forest clearing by cutting the grass on the hill with a sickle and selling it to the cow farmers of the area. When Arun leaves the village for the first time with Alia, for a few days in Pondicherry, her mother dies, and Arun does not even return home for the funeral rites.
A village loses its face
Why is it that these scenes – at least to the Western reader – have much more to say than anything that takes place in the novel's much more familiar locations, in the South Indian beach hotel, at international ideas festivals or London parties, where the guests exhibit care, a sense of justice and attitude for the whole world? Alia introduced Arun to this world without having to fight for a place in it like Aseem and Virendra. The narrator does not have to tell the addressee of his writing. This is not the case with poverty, which Alia has never experienced herself.
How could the poor know what was happening to them? "Owning a hill made her potentially a multi-millionaire in an economy driven by real estate speculation," Arun says soberly about neighbor Naazku. He has to watch as the old woman, unable to understand what she is entitled to, is ensnared and exploited. Building land is created. The village is losing face. People are losing 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 impulses to flee in the face of the living conditions of the parents – in Aseem's case it is open contempt – at their hope that the children could lead the whole family out of misery with their expensive education. His antithesis of today's youth is no less disturbing: Arun, at least, sees them "robbed of their original homeland, their modest but stable livelihood and their fatalistic but comforting religion". She even lacks the small advantage that Arun uses at the end of his path, "a place they could run back to hide in."
Pankaj Mishra: "Golden Jackal". Novel. Translated from English by Jan Wilm. Verlag S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2023. 416 p., born, 26,– €.