Hunt for Mr Biswas

Arun Joshi8217;s extraordinary novel was the English, August of the Seventies

Arun Joshi8217;s extraordinary novel was the English, August of the Seventies
Arun joshi 1939-1993 was part of the 8220;Before Midnight8221; generation of Indian writers in English. Of the five novels he wrote between 1968 and 1990, The Last Labyrinth 1981 won the Sahitya Akademi Award, while the eponymous hero of The Strange Case of Billy Biswas 1971 remains his most memorable creation.

Whatever did happen to Billy Bimal Biswas? Joshi8217;s novel about the restless rebel, who leaves his affluent urban life to go and live in the other India, ends in tragedy. It begins as one of those stories that everyone has come across, about some college hostelmate or the other who suddenly reaches burnout 8212; but Billy8217;s story is more enigmatic. 8220;What happened to Billy was, perhaps, inevitable; as inevitable as the star-constellations in which he came so absolutely to believe,8221; muses the narrator Romi Sahai at the beginning of the novel. 8220;I know of no other man who so desperately pursued the tenuous thread of existence to its bitter end, no matter what trails of glory or shattered hearts he left behind in his turbulent wake.8221;

Romi first meets Billy Biswas when they room together one summer in New York; at that time, Billy is introduced as 8220;engineer, anthropologist, anarchist 8230; and thoroughly crazy, even by Indian standards8221;. This brief biography serves almost as a prediction. Billy, comfortably cosmopolitan, chooses to live in Harlem because white America is 8220;much too civilised8221; for him; he is studying anthropology although his father, a Supreme Court judge, thinks he is doing engineering; and Billy8217;s eyes, even when they laugh, are always serious. To add to this, we are informed that a Swedish student of psychiatry finds in him a 8220;great force, an urkraft 8230; a primitive force8221; waiting for self-expression.

Both Billy and Romi return to India: while Romi joins the civil service, Billy takes up a teaching position at Delhi University. Meeting him after his marriage, Romi finds that Billy has put on weight, wears expensive suits and can no longer hold his drink.

One day, during a field trip to the sal forests of central India, Billy disappears. The logical explanation is that he has died. It is Romi who finds Billy again 8212; Romi who, as district collector, becomes the link between the well-heeled, gin-drinking Delhi society and the drought-ridden devastation of inner India. It is Romi to whom Billy tells the story of how he is transformed from an elegantly dressed urbanite living in a house with old crystal chandeliers to a loincloth-wearing forest dweller with only his accented English as a link to his past. That story involves a woman, a forest and a deep and primitive yearning for something more essential than his superficial life will allow him. God perhaps?, suggests Romi with what we may imagine is the faintest touch of dryness. 8220;There, there, old chap, that is too big a word.8221; 8220;Something like that?8221; 8220;Yes, something like that.8221;

The drama that soon unfolds lapses into something melodramatic and close to the absurd, with the entire district administration setting off in chase of this poor man, who only wanted to escape his Delhi life and find something he can8217;t quite name. But, presented to us through Romi8217;s more or less straightforward narration, the case of Billy becomes less strange and more believable. He is now a sort of tribal healer, a wise man among the adivasis with whom he lives 8212; almost, Romi thinks, 8220;one of the numerous man-gods of the primitive pantheon8221;. The novel is eventually more Heart of Darkness than The Guide, as it traverses the distance from the Capital to the heart of tribal India about two decades after Independence.