A dark novel of 1960s’ Bengal
The Lives of Others is set between 1967 and 1972 in West Bengal. Most of the action takes place in Kolkata.

The Lives of Others is set between 1967 and 1972 in West Bengal. Most of the action takes place in Kolkata. The novel is about a middle class family who live in one of the quiet, leafy streets of south Kolkata. It is a joint family of about 15 people which include the ageing patriarch Prafullanath Ghosh and his wife Charubala, their sons and wives, the grandchildren, one unmarried daughter and Purba, the widowed wife of Somnath, the youngest son of Prafullanath.
The family lives in a large, three-storey building in a decent, genteel neighbourhood. Perhaps the faithful servant Madan should be included in the Ghosh family because of his long years of unstinted service.
The Ghoshes, though reasonably solvent, are no longer as prosperous as they were. Prafullanath’s paper manufacturing business is declining rapidly. Labour unrest, some injudicious investments, Prafullanath’s own failing health and the inability of the sons to manage its affairs are some of the reasons for its decline.
To compound their misery, the oldest grandson Supratik who is 21 and a student at a premier college, has left home leaving behind a cryptic note for his tearful mother, which, apart from suggesting that he feels stifled by the consumerist environment and needs to breathe some fresh air, says little else.
But the reader feels a sense of foreboding because this is 1967 and the Naxalite movement has begun to gather momentum.At this point, it is worth mentioning that the novel begins with a brief Prologue: In 1966 a year before Supratik leaves home, a landless farmer Nitai Das in drought blighted rural Bengal kills his starving family and himself to escape their cursed fate. The description is graphic and sets the tone of the book.
There are two parallel narratives in The Lives of Others. The first voice is that of the author. Early one morning, wearing his cloak of invisibility, he enters the Ghosh household and roams from room to room introducing the reader to the characters who live in it.
By the end of the day, we have become familiar with most of them. It is not at all a happy household. One noticeable feature is its shameful hierarchy. In a dark and dingy room on the ground floor lives Purba, the widow with her two children. She is banished from the family mainstream as if she had something to do with the death of the beloved son and sibling Somnath.
Later, when we read about the actual circumstances of his death, we are filled with shame and disgust at the treatment the family has meted out to her. Detail by nuanced detail, Mukherjee builds a complex picture of this dysfunctional family. The Ghoshes are cruel people; the women are acquisitive and selfish, their dark souls clawing at one another; their men incompetent, impotent and some of them with twisted desires which thrive in such a fetid and claustrophobic environment.
The Lives of Others is a dark novel and at times a savage indictment of a social class. It is as if Mukherjee is deliberately chipping away at the proud heritage of respectability so lovingly cherished by the Bengali bhadralok.
The other voice in the narrative comes from within the book. It is part diary part letter addressed to an unknown recipient. This is the voice of Supratik and it is an account of his transformation from a disillusioned urban youth to a committed Naxalite. This is how he writes: ‘I left the city to work with landless peasants, sharecroppers, and impoverished tenants who were the backbone of our movement. My job was to go to the villages and organise them into armed struggle....’
The prose is direct. The reader can sense the purpose and the passion. Supratik’s narrative counterpoints the intricately layered chronicle of the Ghosh household. His diary takes us into the barren heart of village Bengal. In its initial stages, he immerses himself in the harsh life of the landless farmer and as his narrative gathers momentum, violence explodes across the pages of the book. It is not hard to predict that fierce reprisals would follow.
With Supratik’s return to Kolkata, the narratives merge and Mukherjee gathers the threads of the lives of the Ghosh family. He has woven the past into the present in this long and complex book: how Prafullanath built his paper manufacturing empire, family marriages, births, deaths and the rituals which define the Bengali middle class, ‘ the entire opera of Bengali life’.
Supratik’s return does not augur well for the family because he is not the prodigal son; he is the urban guerrilla preparing for ‘action’. It is necessary at this stage to mention the moral ambiguities of Supratik’s radicalism. It is told to him clearly by his drug addict younger brother Suranjan. He reminds him how his hands are soaked with innocent blood and he has lost his moral position to lecture Suranjan about life’s choices.
Supratik has also betrayed the faithful servant Madan to further his radical cause. He has stolen his aunt’s jewellery and craftily put the blame on the weakest, defenceless person in the household. His justification: one life can be sacrificed to continue the struggle of the masses. Never for a moment does it strike him that Madan belongs to the same class.
It is as if Neel Mukherjee wants to make sure that we don’t begin to believe that Supratik is the protagonist of the book. He is no hero. He can make terrible moral compromises just like the rest of them. It is the family that is the protagonist and the antagonist of the novel.
As we approach the closing pages of the book, there is this one final agonising description of the torture that Supratik has to suffer in the hands of the police. It continues for almost ten pages, horrific and graphic.
This reviewer had to stop several times, gasp and return to the book and in the end could hear the soundless song through the white heat of pain coming from deep within Supratik’s soul ‘Lift up this body of mine/ Make me the burning lamp in your temple...’ Two epilogues end the book. After the searing climactic episode, the first holds out a faint ray of redemption. Swarnendu Ghosh, the reclusive Indian Professor of Pure Mathematics at Stanford University has been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honour for a mathematician.
All calls to his home where he lives with his mother have gone unanswered. Swarnendu is none other than Sona, widowed Purba’s son. That he was a boy with great promise was known to the family. But he was a withdrawn child and his silence led to all kinds of conjectures. Now, he has found sanctuary in the beauty of numbers in a distant land.
The second epilogue brings us crashing back to a different reality. It is September 2012. A group of Maoists are removing fishplates from the railway track near the Hehegara Halt in Jharkhand. According to Maoist lore, this method of spilling innocent blood was a Bengali invention; long ago a man now remembered as Pratik da started it, a gift to his future comrades.
The darkness that pervades The Lives of Others lingers long after the reader has finished with it. Some recurring questions continue to haunt this reviewer: Is it a true depiction of the society of the times that the author has chosen to present Or is it his dystopic imagination at work Such questions do not detract from the quality of this masterly creation. It is a many layered novel exquisitely blending ideas and themes.
But above all, it is a book about the lives of people and that is what makes it such an absorbing literary work. PS. This reviewer belonged to Supratik’s generation and feels his pulse quicken as he remembers the sudden police cordon of a lane between Entally and Sealdah and the black van waiting. And sometimes waking in the dead of night, hears the sound of running feet, perhaps a rifle shot and a car receding as silence tiptoes back.