Skip to main content

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 21st-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

PS. This review is powered by Blogchatter Book Review Program

 

 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    I doubt I would select such reading - so thank you for taking the time to do so and 'thumbnailing' it for us! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is a highly publicised book. There's a lot of hype in various media.

      Delete
  2. I don't know whether I will go for this book but your review is very explicit and one can make out what the book encapsulates.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Some angry young men are needed in the apparently subhuman 21st century India.

      Delete
  3. I read this book recently and loved it. And well reviewed!

    ReplyDelete
  4. What a wonderful review. It will motivate many to pick up the book.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...

Roles we Play

When I saw the above picture of Narendra Modi in the latest issue of India Today , what rushed to my mind instantly was a Malayalam film song Veshangal Janmangal … Life is a series of roles dressed up for the occasion. There are different costumes for celebrations and mourning, and there are people who can shed one and move into the other instantly. Are your smiles genuine? Do your tears mean sadness? Or, are they all costumes that suit the occasion? Are you just an actor who plays certain roles? Is the entire cosmos just a gigantic theatre for you? Where can we find the real you beneath all the costumes you keep changing day in and day out? Have you relinquished dharma in favour of cravings? Truth over expediency?