SynopsisFor over three decades, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s has been an utterly distinctive and daring literary voice, with few equals among contemporary writers of fiction. In the twelve long stories that comprise this volume, he investigates, as only he can, the absurd comedy and the grand horrors of the human condition.
The book opens with his most recent story, written in 2018, which follows Thomas Roe, the much feted English Ambassador to the court of Jahangir, as he bumbles through a subcontinent far larger than his imagination can accommodate; and it concludes with the title story, written in 1985, in which a young Sikh sequestered in his parents’ home in Mussoorie, and debilitated by jaundice and ennui, listens disinterestedly to news of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. In the pages between the two, a variety of lives and situations unfold: a middle-class family in New Delhi makes some surprising discoveries about Shakespeare, race, wealth, and its youngest daughter; mystery killings in small-town Madna teach an innocent civil servant some lessons about the Indian state; the classmates of a thirteen-year-old girl learn of her brutal murder; a boy has his revenge on a sexual predator, while another, far away, seeks release from the job of cleaning the dry latrine in his school; a single man in Bombay brings home a pair of sparrows; a European woman gives up on life in a South Delhi barsati; one hundred and thirty children disappear from a German village visited by a rat-catcher.
A magisterial collection of stories—each as rich as a novel—The Assassination of Indira Gandhi is destined to become a classic of Indian literature.
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Binding: HardBack
About the author
Upamanyu Chatterjee, born in 1959 at Patna, Bihar, is one of the new talented Indian writers of the contemporary generation. After studying English literature at Delhi University, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. In 1990, he lived as Writer in Residence, at the University of Kent, U.K. In 1998, he was appointed Director (Languages) in the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.
Chatterjee has written a handful of short stories including The assassination of Indira Gandhi. His best-selling novel, English, August : An Indian story (subsequently made into a major film), was published in 1988 and has since been reprinted several times. A review in Punch described the book as "Beautifully written … English, August is a marvelously intelligent and entertaining novel, and especially for anyone curious about modern India". The novel follows Agastya Sen a young westernized Indian civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women, literature and soft drugs. This vivid account of "real India" by the young officer posted to the small provincial town of Madna is "a funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen's year in the sticks", as described by a reviewer in the Observer.
His second novel, The last burden, appeared in 1993. This novel recreates life in an Indian family at the end of the twentieth century. It is a fascinating portrayal of the Indian middle class. Mammaries of the welfare state was published at the end of 2000 as a sequel to English, August.
The Library of Congress has acquired all three of his books.
