An Outline of the Republic

I had throughly enjoyed Siddhartha Deb's first book: Point of No Return, but since it was during the period that I was reading a whole cluster of Indian authors I wasn't sure what my response to his second book would be. Having just finished his latest book, I can say, unequivocally, that this is a wonderful writer! with a very distinguished and impressive style. I really felt that I was with the narrator Amrit as he travels the Northeastern border of India in his quest to uncover the story of the woman in the photograph. I had the pleasure of hearing Deb read from his first book awhile back and recently heard him on NPR discussing his research and goals with this latest book and can heartily recommend it and feel quite confident that you will not only enjoy it but agree with me that we are reading someone who will become an importnat writer of our times.

Amrit, a journalist from Calcutta, now in his thirties and disillusioned with his life which leaves him little room to grow, takes off on an assignment for a German magazine to uncover the story of a porn star, supposedly executed by militants. He has found her photo in his newspaper's morgue and she at once takes hold of his imagination. To find if she could still be living, he travels deep into the lawless hill states between China and Burma. Slowly he enters a world where nothing is at it seems: deserted buildings, rusty signs, buses that hardly creep along roads which are hardly passable. In shabby hotels strangers knock on his door, or accost him at his table, each insistent on spilling forth their stories over quantities of whisky. Every encounter is illusive, half conclusive, the falsehoods so deftly mixed with truth that even the speaker cannot break them apart. Pushing deeper into the hostile and harsh land, Amrit encounters officials with suitcases spilling open money, large hotels entirely stripped of furnishings but for a few rooms, hearing always of a great and altruistic man who has started something called a Prosperity Project which will help everyone in need. Amrit still steadfastly seeks the missing girl in the picture and as he travels on crowded buses, or jeeps, hearing contradictory stories of her, he begins to feel in some way that her journey is his own. The India portrayed in An Outline of the Republic is different than any other I have encountered: neither Bollywood nor the shanties of Calcutta, the memories of the glittering princes of the Raj; no temples, comfortable middle classes, arranged marriages, or religious fervor on the shores of the Ganges, but a world utterly apart, forgotten. It is a corner of India where people's souls have been so thoroughly scraped out that they no longer consider them, but exist somehow in this violent world, struggling hand-to-mouth for existence. Deb writes of one town: "It was a town dissolving bit by bit into a state of nothingness, crumbling into an ocean of absence, with each one of us in the town seceding in his or her own way from the blinding presence of the republic." "It is the only way to live in the region," someone says. "To conceal surfaces under other surfaces is necessary." But as the story continues, the benefactor of the Prosperity Project is not as he first seemed to Amrit, nor is the girl in the picture, and indeed, once Amrit has gone as deep as he can go and still remain safe, he is also no longer what he thought he was. A compelling novel from a sensitive writer with a remarkable journalist's eye to capture this obscure, unsettling corner of India.

Deb captures the contingent nature of life in the Indian republic by taking us to it's very edge, the Northeast, where many lies come together to form the truth, or many truths coalesce into one big lie, depending on which way you look at it. The central quest in the novel is fragmented and uncertain, riddled with falsehoods, and is undertaken by an imperfect hero who needs to go further in so that he can get the hell out. In the end it the book is not just about a faraway place where no one needs to go, it's also about the flawed nature of democracy wherever you might live. This book is important, worth reading, and totally different from most contemporary South Asian fiction.