Book Review: 'The Light At The End Of The World' By Siddhartha Deb

The Light at the End of the World by Siddhartha Deb

Publisher: Context 2023

MRP: Rs 799

Siddhartha Deb’s commitment to deconstructing ‘India’ has been an abiding one. His depiction of India in ‘The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India’(2011), known for the controversy around the ‘expunged’ excerpt titled ‘Gatsby in New Delhi’, had ruffled many feathers by unearthing the fallacy of free-market capitalism and its insatiable hunger. His recent work is also a nuanced meditation on India - the politics of identity, dangers of cultural dissoluteness, the paranoia of fear-mongering, victimization and recovery of Indian syncretism.

As a renewed contact with history, Siddharth Deb’s The Light at the End of the World (Context 2023) emerges from a historian’s inner vision of India’s nightmarish socio-political truths. Combined with a luminous rhythm of lyricism and a haunting reality of the loathing of humanity, the novel is a refreshing exposé of India’s blighted past and strives to render searing insights into ethical questions that mortgage the present and the future of a nation. Deb’s magic realism dredges up a nation’s subterranean reaches to identify the maladies and the grace of syncretism to soothe India’s scarred, tormented consciousness.

The novel begins with the invading nature of fog, a metaphor for intimidating oddity of realities. As I write this, the decision of the University of Kashmir to remove the works of Indian-American poet Agha Shahid Ali and Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer from MA English and BA courses is bound to jolt radical minds to the rude awakening of Bob Dylan’s prophecy: ‘We live in a political world/ In the cities of lonesome fear.’(Political World). Deb’s nature imagery raises a moral scaffold around the demon of fear induced by the politics of identity.

Deb’s tongue-in-cheek humour in dedicating the novel to ‘all ghuspetiyas everywhere’ is an endearing intimacy with humanity that foregrounds India’s vision of inclusion. It is also a satire aiming at those forces that relentlessly push Indian democracy into a black hole of power wielded by the cultish faith in majoritarianism. Blending fictional and non-fictional narratives, the novel confronts the chronic imperialism of ethnocentric culture that slots dissenting voices into the framework of seditious ‘othering’. Alluding to the Hindi poet Shrikant Varma’s reference to Hastinapur, the Kuru Kingdom of the Kauravas in The Mahabharata, the chapter ‘Claustropolis:1984’ weaves two parallel narratives -India's first major industrial Bhopal gas tragedy and the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. Both narratives are grotesque in evoking the magnitude of uncertainty, fear, animosity, and carnage. Amidst the gravity of human condition that smells of ‘burnt meat’, Deb’s dark humour hits hard as the narrator is enticed by his ‘aashiqui spirit’ (romantic spirit) and hears the iconic Kishore Kumar Bollywood song ‘Chingari koi bhadke’(When a spark flares up). A few pages after that one encounters the ‘naya zamana aayega, aayega’ (The new age will come), a reminder of the euphoric proclamation of the BJP government ‘achhe din aane waale hain’ ('Good days are coming’). Deb’s juxtaposition, showing the rupture between ideology and deficiency, brings out how individuals feel psychologically vulnerable and can ill-afford to keep their sanity against a steady diet of the ultra-hyped India where, ironically, the poet and former Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee vents out the ordeal of fair governance: ‘Faces are unmasked, /the stains are very deep,/ the magic is breaking, today I fear from the truth./(I) don’t sing a song.’

Readers can discern the left-wing perception in the allegorisation of major political events. Though it underscores the tragic irony of democracy, Deb’s imagination seems to revel in the feverish passion of political ambition and the drowsy indolence of democratic truth in the ruling political party. One cannot rule out the intrusion of a left-wing journalist and his crisscrossing of diurnal and political, real and surreal realities in uncovering the ironies of political deception that thrives in a climate of ideological decay. What appears journalistic in the fiction is reactionary though Deb cherry-picks events. His esoteric guise of events, aimed at the Hindutva ideology, unravels the open-minded liberals subjected to cynical hostility. What Deb contests is the danger of ideological homogeneity eroding the ethos of India. What his narrative intends is the recovery of cosmopolitan tolerance.

In the last section of the novel, India drifts into an apocalyptic world. What pervades is a sense of quest that coexists with multiple incompatibles. Against the all-pervading forbidding atmosphere, what Bibi registers is a luxuriant depiction of irredeemable desolation and impending nothingness. However, amidst the lingering sense of emptiness, Deb employs impeccably the symbols of irrepressible yearning for regeneration through ‘peacock’s tail’, ‘cephalopods’, and ‘Buraq’. The cryptic ending to the novel recalls John Keats’ sensuous perception - ‘The poetry of earth is never dead.’(On the Grasshopper and Cricket)

Siddharth Deb’s The Light at the End of the World claims its relevance and authority from the radical scepticism of a historian committed to re-envisioning the pluralistic ethos of India, the neurosis of regressive, ideological primitivism, and the savagery of intolerance. Deb time-travels in his sprawling narrative with his tools of cultural signifiers. The novel creates a sense of enlightened recognition and invites a reappraisal of India’s chequered past and present to foretell the ways of the future.

(Sudeep Ghosh is an independent writer based in Hyderabad. He can be reached at sudeepmailsu@gmail.com)