CHENNAI: After reading Manu Joseph’s 2010 debut novel, Serious Men, one of the questions on my mind was: why isn’t the book 10 times more popular as it is? A novel as entertaining as this one is rare to find — add to that the fact that it also makes cogent remarks about Brahminism, about Indian parents’ outsized ambitions for their children, and about illicit love.
Serious Men doesn’t read like the work of a debutante. Perhaps Joseph’s long experience in print journalism explains that. The novel won the Hindu Literary Prize in 2010, but if one took this information to mean that it is a dead serious work of literary fiction, one would be wrong. Serious Men is a fun novel about serious themes, with the fun aspect clearly given greater priority.
Synopsis: Ayyan Mani, a Dalit man raising his family in a Mumbai chawl, is witness to (and somewhat contributes to) great upheavals at his workplace. As a secretary to the director of the government-funded Institute of Theory and Research (located somewhere in the south of south Mumbai), Mani sees the professional and personal life of the incumbent director, Arvind Acharya, dismantle. This dismantling is soon followed by the rise of another character, Nambodiri, to the same post. Towards the end, Mani forms an alliance with the beleaguered Acharya and orchestrates his resurgence at the expense of Nambodiri. Mani has his reasons.
The above synopsis explains only one of the narrative threads inside the novel. After Serious Men was out, the most immediate responses were directed at its desire to showcase the Dalit point of view in English. Joseph has indeed done well in penning Ayyan Mani’s states of mind and his interactions with various characters, most notably his wife, Oja Mani, and his 11-year-old son, Aditya Mani. Also, his deep contempt for caste-based privilege in his heart and his view of Dalit oppression as having a 3,000-year continuity drive home a point. At first, as the power struggle between the top scientists heats up in the institute, Mani sees it only as ‘the battle of the Brahmins’, one that he should only observe and be entertained by.
There is another thread that is as central to the novel and as well-managed: the love story between Arvind Acharya and his younger colleague, Oparna Gosh Maulik. For me, Joseph’s narration excelled the most in the slow development, denouement and dismemberment of this relationship. At first, the two share coy signals, perhaps even inadvertently. Then the shadowy game of seduction begins. Acharya resists and resists, until he relents. Then there are the first two weeks of passion, after which Acharya suddenly decides to terminate the affair. The curve of this relationship is so painstakingly and patiently drawn that it assumes a reality for us readers. After that point, it’s only the consequences of that termination play out.
I secretly hope someone makes a movie based on the novel.
(The writer will publish his first novel Neon Noon in July 2016)