My Beloved Life review: Amitava Kumar’s self-aware novel shows what good fiction can achieve

There’s a lot of Gandhi (both the film and its illustrious subject) in Kumar’s latest novel My Beloved Life, published in India by Aleph. The protagonist Jadunath “Jadu” Kunwar, is a historian who looks, sounds and behaves like a classical Gandhian, fond of repeating Gandhi’s line about simple living (“what are the things you can go without?”). Even his writing style is described using markers of abstention: there is very little sentiment and the language, to his daughter’s eyes at least, is stiff and overly academic, shorn of emotions or outright moral judgment.

Born in 1935 in a hut in a Bihari village, Jadu’s childhood poverty “defines him utterly” even when he’s a visiting scholar at Berkeley. Being a professional historian (Jadu shares his first name with the real-life Indian historian Jadunath Sarkar), he is deeply invested in a linear, structured, old-school retelling of the past. His daughter Jugnu, being a TV journalist at CNN, is equally invested in the urgency and the momentum of the present, in the way modern journalists imbue factual reports with personal feelings, opinions and insecurities.

Across the 85 years of his life, Jadu crosses paths with some of the most important Indians of his time. By the time you’re a hundred pages down, you won’t be blamed for thinking this is one of those ‘male-protagonist mirrors his homeland’ stories. But ultimately, My Beloved Life’s great subject is the tension between competing modes of storytelling: history books vs. oral narratives, fact vs. fiction, the trajectory of a nation vs. the lives of its people. For me, this is Kumar’s finest novel yet, one that brings together his favoured themes in a much more satisfactory manner than The Lovers (2017) or A Time Outside This Time (2021).

A life in the margins

Kumar’s method here is deceptively simple: the novel’s first half follows Jadu’s life in a detached, third-person narration while the second half follows his daughter Jugnu who narrates in the first-person voice. It’s almost as though we’re reading a revelatory, annotated version of the same text, one that transforms its meaning and provides all-new punch lines for familiar episodes. Jadu’s life, with Jugnu scribbling in the margins, a tough-to-please editor laying down difficult truths. Significantly, the first time we see Jadu assuming the first-person voice is towards the end of Part 1, when he is arrested during the JP movement and finds himself in jail, a political prisoner. He finds himself wanting closure over the question of his mother’s painful death — so far, we have only been told that it was an accident and that Jadu avoids speaking about it:

“After four or five days, he felt the need to find a different way to mark time’s passing. He once again entertained the idea of writing about his mother’s death. This time he wrote a paragraph. And then he kept it aside. It was painful to remember everything. He had much preferred the distance of writing national history: mass movements, the confluence of events and characters, and the vast, invisible forces bigger than any individual.”

The tonal shift that happens because of Jadu slipping into first-person is rather the point — Kumar is showing us not only what Jadu has withheld from the reader, he is also showing us the limitations of Jadu’s style as a writer and a historian. And while this is an idea only hinted at in Jadu’s section, Jugnu’s section sees the thought being expanded upon in real earnest.

This is a novel preoccupied with the idea of bookish knowledge vs. lived reality, and therefore there are literary encounters aplenty throughout. Early on, there’s a charming little aside about translating Agyeya. Jadu sees Mahadevi Varma and Firaq Gorakhpuri speaking on anti-war themes at a Patna University gathering. During his time in prison, Jadu also has a brief encounter with the writer Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’, one of the most-read Bihari writers of all time. Later, young Jugnu writes a letter to the German writer Günter Grass during the latter’s visit to India — and receives a thoughtful, handwritten reply. One of Jadu’s student goes on to translate Manto while the young Jadu himself is shown entranced by a desi production of the Chekhov play The Cherry Orchard. TS Eliot, Daya Pawar, Harishankar Parsai, Isaac Babel…the literary asides and allusions come thick and fast and this is very much on purpose, underlining the abiding nerdiness of father and daughter.

This also allows Kumar to pull off a kind of ‘three-card monte’ with the reader, especially when it comes to the most emotionally vulnerable moments in Jadu’s life. We see how even at his most unguarded, Jadu still uses literature and art as intermediaries in his ‘real’ life. The one time he feels like he may cheat on his wife is when he reconnects with an old classmate Ananya, a Bengali woman who all the boys at college had a massive crush on. And even here, the fledgling would-be romance is sparked by Ananya introducing Jadu to The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham:

“Fiction, or the idea of the imagination enlivening the narrative of life, was alien to Jadu the historian. However, it was from a novel that Jadu had borrowed feelings that he felt in his heart about Ananya. Perhaps his own life was becoming novelistic. Like the people in the novel Jadu was reading, Ananya represented worldliness: she had traveled to other places, she had crossed the ocean and lived in a foreign country, she had had relations with other men.”

At first, Dostoevsky said, art imitates life. Then, life will imitate art. Then, life will find its very existence from the arts.

Fact vs. fiction

That line about Jadu’s “own life becoming novelistic” is extremely significant in the larger context of the novel. By now we know that Jadu prefers writing with the “distance of national history”. And, therefore, his feelings towards Ananya are described using Jadu’s feelings towards fiction. In Jadu’s worldview, fiction is messy and involves considerably more heartache than the relatively straight-lines world of history. He might enjoy reading novels every now and then, but he has absolutely no intention of letting his life be overrun by “the novelistic”— the book even hints that Jadu’s decision to not cheat on Maya is guided by this principle (and not his inherent loyalty to his wife).

The powers wielded by good fiction can, of course, be used to accomplish monumentally evil things, too. Jugnu’s section is a demonstration of this fact and by the end of the book (2019-2020), even the scholarly, pacifist Jadu is praising the country’s rabble-rousing strongman prime minister. Despite being a skilled historian, he is “at the mercy of television” and therefore, fooled by unscrupulous demagoguery. This sucker-punch is foreshadowed by an earlier scene in the novel when Jadu is admonished by a doctor for using the slur ‘Jai Bangla’ to describe conjunctivitis — as the doctor reminds him, the practice originated from people ascribing the disease to refugees from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). You are a historian, the doctor says, you should know that this has nothing to do with science. Alas, if only learning and erudition were sufficient guardrails against late-onset bigotry.

Kumar lost his own father (an IAS officer) last year and it’s tempting to insert this fact into the book’s plot. Indeed, the universal and yet inscrutable grief of losing a parent and the games we play with our childhood memories, are big parts of the novel’s architecture. My Beloved Life, however, is much more than the sum of its visibly impressive parts. It is a highly sophisticated, self-aware novel from a writer operating at the peak of his powers.