TheDaak review

English, August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee, London: Faber & Faber, 2018; 352 pages, 192x126mm, ISBN: 978-0571345892 (paperback)

by Snehal Jog

 Even before you meet the book’s  protagonist, Agastya Sen, its title, English, August, hands you a clue: this man is not fully at home anywhere. He is a man split in two. ‘English’ comes from the way Agastya was shaped by colonial education, his love of Western books and habits, and the feeling that real sophistication was always somewhere else. ‘August’ is just the anglicised version of the name ‘Agastya’. The more you read, the more you see how he isn’t really English, but he isn’t really August either. He has just put on a fragile disguise, underneath which lies the habit of measuring everything against some imagined idea of a finer world. Funny how a name can become both an alibi for the privilege one holds and at the same time a reminder of how far one has drifted from anything real.

Published in 1988, English, August was Upamanyu Chatterjee’s first novel and quickly became a landmark in Indian English literature for its unflinching look at bureaucracy. Chatterjee spent decades in the Indian Administrative Service himself, which is why every detail in the book- the paperwork, the power games, the inertia- feels so true. 

As you dive into the book, there is this sense of lingering lethargy. You don’t start reading the book with full enthusiasm, it builds a certain kind of resistance in you. At times, you feel like shaking him out of his stupor, to tell him to do something, anything other than just drifting. And mind you, he himself is aware of his apathy. “He occasionally marvelled at how little attention he was paying.” (p. 63) 

Eventually, I found myself acclimatised to the sticky inertia of Agastya Sen’s new life in the Indian Administrative Service. I felt I needed a cup of chai to fight the sense of  dissolving myself into the dull, lifeless atmosphere created by endless paperwork and useless routines.  I kept wondering whether I was projecting my own dread of monotonous work onto Agastya, or if Chatterjee had deliberately written him in this way to mirror our collective fatigue. Because, deep down, isn’t this the fear of every working person even today? The dull horror of realisation that what you do, all the filing, documentation, rituals – truly counts for nothing in the end, as Chatterjee writes, “we are men without ambition, and all we want is to be left alone, in peace, so that we can try and be happy.” (p. 275) But the problem? Our imagined peace never arrives.  One morning you wake up to discover you are only working for the sake of it, with no real spark or  conviction.  Agastya seems like a living example of that. Chatterjee puts it quite simply, “he had never had any ambition, perhaps because he had never before been unhappy.”  (p. 146)

To lack ambition is to be also spared the unhappiness that comes when your ambition isn’t fulfilled. The friction of unhappiness serves a purpose: it provokes you to introspect and decide what to live for. And when no such decision is ever made, the result is often what Victor Frankl called an existential vacuum: “the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of [our] lives” (1959). This vacuum can’t be endured indefinitely; it demands resolution. When a person doesn’t make the effort to fill that empty space with something chosen, it fills itself with something unchosen. This is what Frankl called the inevitable collapse into nihilism or distraction. Agastya drifts helplessly between the two. And later, that vacuum crystallises into something even darker, taking him on a downward journey. 

There are passages of the book that are funny but in a tired, end-of-the-day way.  It shows you, among other things, how ‘performance’ becomes the only reality. Agastya is forced to attend official functions where he  ‘performs’ respect, productivity, and  sincerity– basically everything except for ‘meaning’.  

In the story, as Chatterjee writes, “one’s importance as an official is gauged by how long one could keep a concert (to which one was invited) waiting” (p.24). This shows how power does not need to announce itself when it has been normalised so thoroughly. This is the theatrics of power; keeping an entire room hostage just to feel significant. And isn’t this what we see everywhere: in the meetings that could have been emails and the reports that are never read? Doesn’t matter if you’re clocking in at a government office like Agastya, making presentations in an AC cubicle or packing orders in a warehouse – so much of modern work is designed just to measure your compliance. 

Moreover, Chatterjee talks about education as “binding time,” where one accumulates degrees without any meaning. He implies that these degrees aren’t milestones; they’re simply placeholders at best. Ways to defer choice, ways to delay the terror of self-definition. This highlights Marx’s idea of ‘alienation’ (2007; 1844)- the way people become strangers to their own labour, when their work loses any connection to purpose or meaning, and becomes something they perform out of habit or fear. So, even the academic journey here becomes just another performance, another polite ritual to keep ‘meaning’ at bay for a little longer. 

In that sense, the theatrics of power and the theatrics of education are part of the same empty spectacle. Rituals everyone agrees to pretend are important, while quietly suspecting they mean nothing at all. Now this dynamic has only intensified in today’s age and time – the global market of online certifications, the endless training modules, this excruciating need for upskilling – not out of genuine curiosity but to stay employable in a system that prizes performance over substance. You are rated by an app, congratulated on LinkedIn, recorded by surveillance. Visibility is ensured; recognition is optional.

Chatterjee’s writing style simply lets such absurdities reveal themselves. The bureaucracy that crushes the poor with rituals and paperwork, also gives our protagonist a steady paycheck, a title, and of course, the privilege to complain. He doesn’t just satirise the system, but, in fact, reminds you as to how easy it is to lose yourself in it. There are no attempts to destabilise the hierarchy. It’s merely rendered absurd, and then left intact. It’s too easy to find Agastya’s boredom tragicomic. A young man, rather, a privileged young bureaucrat, stifled by the heat plus the hierarchy, rolling a joint to escape the absurdity of institutional authority. With no one to talk to and nothing to do, his evenings are spent, Chatterjee puts bluntly, in alcohol, cannabis, and half-hearted masturbation (p.89). It’s like a parody of an escape that leads to no liberation whatsoever. 

Agastya walks through Madna (setting for the book) like  an anthropologist who has lost the desire to write field notes, making no efforts to know his new world. After a point, even to see how far his ignorance could extend becomes a perverse challenge for him. This is the most uncomfortable part of the book because you start to see how privilege can become a shield against any obligation to understand people, their circumstances, or anything for that matter. Because Agastya is smart enough to see the bureaucratic absurdity, yet not curious enough to look beyond it. 

Agastya notes pretty early on that everything in bureaucracy is designed to look important, to distract everyone from the fact that nothing gets done. Agastya has no illusions whatsoever about the system he’s become a part of, but he doesn’t have the energy or the conviction to rebel because the cause of Agastya’s alienation is not just the bureaucracy per se, it is also cultural. Since childhood, what taught him to admire Western sophistication also taught him to look at Indian life as something slightly embarrassing. That is why he moves through Madna with some kind of a permanent reservation, as if connection to Madna itself might be a kind of failure. His cultural split becomes another excuse to stand back, to perform detachment instead of risking any conviction. 

It is the same detachment that makes Chatterjee’s satire feel more like a helpless sigh than a weapon. Satire is not used as mockery, it has this flavour of melancholy. It doesn’t make you laugh out loud, but smirk in recognition. Chatterjee says – sure laugh if you must, but remember that you are laughing because you recognize yourself. You, too, have played along at your workplace because it felt easier than resisting.

In this way, English, August makes you wonder: is Agastya’s constant detachment a kind of honesty? Or just an easy way to avoid taking responsibility? The satire in the book exposes the ridiculousness of power, but it also makes it easier to do nothing about it. As you read, you start to see how laughing at the system can at times be a way of giving up on changing it. After all, not everyone is called to heroic resistance. Sometimes, survival itself is the only available politics.

Bibliography 

Chatterjee, U. (2018). English, August: An Indian Story. Faber and Faber.

Frankl, V. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

Marx, K. (2007). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (M. Miligan Ed. & Trans.). Dover.

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Snehal Jog is a qualified Psychologist