Love, loss and the grip of the past
The turbulent modern history of West Bengal comes alive through tale of two estranged brothers
When Jhumpa Lahiri's second novel, The Lowland, was long-listed for the 2013 Booker Prize before it had even been released, nobody was exactly surprised.
Lahiri, a 46-year-old Bengali-American writer, is one of those rare talents who seems to do no wrong on the page. In 1999, she became one of the youngest authors ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and her two subsequent books, debut novel The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth, another short story collection, have confirmed her status as the world's pre-eminent chronicler of the Bengali immigrant experience.
In some senses, The Lowland is a continuation of this, the abiding theme of all her writing. But in other ways, it is an altogether more ambitious undertaking, weaving the history of India's Naxalite movement and the brutal excesses of its paramilitary into the fabric of a more intimate story, a haunting tale of love, loyalty and estrangement, guilt and dislocation that spans generations and continents.
It begins in a leisurely, measured fashion, in the swampy Calcutta terrain "east of the Tolly Club", the exclusive country club where, in the early 19th century, Lahiri reminds us, "the British East India Company imprisoned the widows and sons of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, after Tipu was killed in the fourth Anglo-Mysore war".
It's this swampy lowland that brothers Subhash and Udayan use as a shortcut to a field on the outskirts of their neighbouring Tollygunge enclave, where they play soccer. By the novel's end, the lowland no longer exists, yet it remains etched in the consciousness as a potent mythical heartland. A powerful motif of lost, broken lives and an all but forgotten history - yet a history whose legacy continues to play out upon untold lives in modern India.