Oh Brother Alexander Dumas Oh Brother Where Art Thou

The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri

Knopf Publishing, Toronto, 2013, 340pp.

Reviewed past Don MacLean

February 2014.

A scene in the early pages of Jhumpa Lahiri's marvelous novel The Lowland is formative for the story's two principal characters. Suhhash and Udayan are young brothers, separated by only xv months, growing upwards in India not long subsequently the land achieved independence. Later on learning of the location of a private golf game club not far from their home, they decide to scale its walls and walk along its fairways and greens. They are struck by the astringent contrast between the cramped space in which nigh Indians live and the golf course's manicured lawns and lush, open up expanses. As the two sneak out under the cover of darkness they are confronted by a police officeholder who knows they take trespassed. He takes the older blood brother aside. The chirapsia is short merely punishing enough to teach the intended lesson: the golf game club is a identify to which they do not vest and cannot enter. Although it is but Subhash who suffers physically, the episode is virtually significant for Udayan. He is appalled by the sight of his brother at the mercy of the officer, wilting under the blows. Privilege in India, Udayan now understands, is protected by violence.

Although The Lowland explores many themes, at its heart information technology'south a story almost the human relationship between two brothers. Udayan and Subhash strike the reader as archetypes, created by Lahiri as a way of exploring competing responses to India's predicament. They are shut and, when immature boys, inseparable. Both are brilliant science students whose academic success will give them choices not bachelor to near of their contemporaries. Yet every highlighted feature of their respective childhoods is meant to illuminate their differences. From a very immature age, Subhash is uninterested in challenging authority. He is content to respect his parent's wishes, even as he senses information technology's Udayan they prefer. He is older than Udayan and yet information technology is he who oft follows his younger blood brother's pb. Uduyan, by contrast, is rebellious, a risk taker. He loves his parents but grows scornful of their conservative tendencies. The brothers' divergent dispositions fuel unlike personal choices, the effects of which ripple long into the future.

Through Udayan especially, Lahiri explores the complex connections between philosophy and the world that discipline attempts to understand. Despite his gift for the subject, Udayan cannot fathom committing himself to physics. Not when India is coming autonomously at the seams. The land is rife with sectarian violence. Economical injustice fuels landlessness, poverty and even starvation. When landless peasants in a remote Indian hamlet try to organize the state'southward response is ruthless in the farthermost: people are shot to decease, the protest squashed. When say-so is challenged elsewhere the consequences are even more severe: women are raped, dead bodies left on the road for others to see. Udayan is revolted past the needless suffering, by the horrible injustice of it all. Philosophy – and not physics - allows him to sympathise the world, provides a framework with which to make sense of India'southward colonial past and its authoritarian, unjust present. Equally Marx one time famously wrote, however, the point of philosophy should not exist to simply understand the earth, but to modify information technology. It is a proverb Udayan takes to eye. He is intoxicated past the instance of those who, inspired by the promise of a better globe, set out revolutionize information technology. Chairman Mao is an inspiration, and then also is Castro and Che Guevera. Mao has been at the vanguard of revolution in China, he tells his skeptical brother. There's no good reason, he insists, something similar can't happen in India.

As for Subhash, he is sensitive to the suffering and injustice that so enrages his younger brother. Still, he remains detached from the earth of clandestine meetings and revolutionary fervor. Like his parents, he is wary of blueprints for wholesale social, political and economic transformation. He takes exception to how Udayan'due south revolutionary politics puts their parents at chance. And unlike his brother, he believes he should pursue a career in scientific discipline. He excels at it, after all, and what he's spent his youth preparing to do. He enrolls in graduate studies at a prestigious American university located on Rhode Island. The isle is small, but to Subhash the world now seems vast. India'south political turmoil recedes from view. Only the occasional letter from his brother asking him to someday return acts as a reminder of what he's left behind. He begins a relationship with a woman. He knows his parents would not approve, simply does not care. So long as he lives on the other side of the planet, he is untroubled by such considerations.

Subhash's choice to written report in America is important for a number of reasons. It's the basis for the sprawling quality the novel somewhen assumes. At some point, the reader feels, the story becomes less most two brother'southward contrary responses to Indian politics and more than of a family drama played out in two countries and spanning generations. A kid is born, a dysfunctional family started. A daughter-in-law grows estranged from her in-laws. Resentments build and tears are shed. Secrets are revealed. Lahiri's luminous prose sustains our interest throughout. Nevertheless the transition is jump to disappoint some readers. Indeed, the story has a more urgent quality in its earlier stages. The palpable threat of political violence gives it an ominous, suspenseful quality that fades besides shortly. We want more.

Still Lahiri is always conscientious to draw the reader back to a fourth dimension when Subhash and Udayan are either young boys or young men and India is politically charged in a way difficult to imagine today. Lahiri'due south indicate seems clear. No matter how divergent their paths and temperaments, the 2 remain inextricably linked past their shared upbringing and brotherly honey. Similarly both are touched past the tragedy of India's zero sum politics. Udayan expects equally much: for all of his idealism, he is acutely aware of the lurking threats to his well beingness. Subhash believes otherwise: the globe of scientific discipline and the promise of America was to exist his deliverance from the sectarian, unequal and authoritarian world in which he grew upwardly. Only even half a earth away, he cannot escape the pull of family and the dangers of radical political hope.

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