My Name is Not Devdas

Book Review

Title: My Name is Not Devdas

Author: Aayush Gupta

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2022

Pages: 155

The original Devdas story was written a century ago when the world was quite different. In today’s post-truth world, where nationalism and many other similar isms are nothing more than political gimmicks, where every slogan has an equally engrossing anti-slogan, and where love is little more than veiled selfishness, old-style romance has no place. Love becomes all the more an alien thing on the campuses in the country’s overly political capital city.

Aayush Gupta’s slim novel is set in Delhi and most of the story unfolds on the campuses of Delhi University and the Jamia Milia. In the background, we can hear the slogans of both the nationalists and the anti-nationalists: Goli maaro saalon ko! and Azaadi! Azaadi! The 21^st-century Devdas, Paro and Chandramukhi belong there on those campuses.

Devdas came to Delhi from Kolkata where his father, Professor Narayan Mukherjee, was teaching in Jadavpur University until a female student filed a sexual abuse charge against him. The prof is a Marxist, feminist and an eminent scholar. His son has inherited most of his qualities. But Devdas will turn out to be pseudo of everything: pseudo-feminist, pseudo-Marxist, and pseudo-poet. After all, he lives in a country of pseudos.

Paro hails from a poor family in Haryana. But she was adopted by Prof Mukherjee when his wife ran away with a local cable guy. The Prof wanted to prove to the society that he was indeed a good man. One of the good services he performs is to adopt a poor girl. The poor girl becomes a live toy for Devdas. The Communist Devdas becomes a possessive Communist. But Paro knows how to get on in life in spite of the two fake men in her life: her adoptive father and her adoptive brother. After all, she lives in a country of millions of fake men.

Chandramukhi is from Kashmir. Like many people do in that state, her parents too disappeared. She studies in Jamia Milia and meets her expenditure by selling her body in the red street. Prof Mukherjee is one of her many clients. Devdas too will be one in due course of time.

Devdas can be anything anywhere because he does not have an identity of his own. His name is Not Devdas. So are the other two major characters. They are Not Paro and Not Chandramukhi. How many people in this country, where the everyday voter has to ignore truths easily in order to survive, are really themselves today? Can we afford to be ourselves?

Devdas burnt the Manusmriti when he was in Kolkata. He called the upper caste people pigs. But in Delhi, when the regime changes and the caste does matter, Devdas displays his Brahmin’s sacred thread proudly. The erstwhile feminist Devdas will now become an assaulter of women. India is now different and it changes Devdas too. “The chaddis have begun a Swadeshi movement. Buying only Indian products. To protect our culture.” And Bushy Baba, a “monk who sold everything and became a billionaire” is the flagbearer of this new India. [All quotes are from the novel.]

The novel is narrated from the points of view of the three major characters. They tell their own stories and the reader puts them together. The denouement is superb and fast-paced too. Aayush Gupta is a screenwriter and this little novel has the gripping quality of a thriller movie especially in the second half.

The India we witness in this novel – though only Delhi is seen mostly – is not the kind of place we would like to live in. Somewhere in that India, in the red streets, you can see a better place probably, a place where “a Nepali, a Bangladeshi, a Kashmiri, a Sikh and a Hindu live in the same house, work for the same pimp – united by the fact that each of them needed to eat, and by their willingness to get screwed every day to be able to.” There is hope still!

There is more sarcasm in the novel. Go ahead and read it if you want to see India through a different lens. It is worth a read, no doubt.

Buy your copy of the novel here. 

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