Collective suffering and the possibility of empathy in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Abstract

This article argues that Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss depart from conventional literary representations of the suffering of neoliberal subjects because they focus on collective rather than individual experiences of abjection. Emphasizing the breakdown in state services, the rise in insurgent groups, and the monetization of human life, the novels consider the possibility of empathy in a society structured by self-preoccupation and extreme inequality. The article compares how the two novels imagine coping with the condition of abjection, and focuses on their shared narrative technique of free indirect discourse as a means of encouraging empathy with characters.

Several recent Anglophone South Asian novels such as Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008), and Vikas Swarup’s Q&A/Slumdog Millionaire (2008) have featured the decay of mind, body, and community, representing the Indian landscape and the slum in particular as stagnant and decomposing. One critical interpretation of this genre is that these novels present slums, as Mrinalini Chakravorty puts it, as “the derelict spaces of modernity” (2014: 106), thereby erasing the agency, entrepreneurship, community, and familial bonds of those who live there. According to Chakravorty, they reproduce an Orientalist stereotype and become popular internationally precisely because they adhere to a narrative that fits into and indeed celebrates individuated heroes who are able to progress out of the quagmire of their origins through their adoption of neoliberal values, and that mourns those who cannot. Another critical perspective understands these novels as critiques, in the forms of satires or picaresques, of the neoliberal order in which the hero, as Rob Nixon puts it, “serves as the symbolic condensation of the vast army of the economically orphaned, abandoned to their fate by the merciless logic of the neoliberal marketplace” (2009: 450). The diverging interpretations of Chakravorty and Nixon serve to interrogate the possibilities of critique when using a single character as either the embodiment of an entire class or as an exception to it.

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs (2016) focus not on the progression of an individual slum-dweller protagonist but on an array of characters who belong to different ethnicities, classes, and religions and are often located in various spaces, including slums, in their cities and indeed around the world. These novels by Desai and Mahajan take a different narrative approach to neoliberalism, one in which a breakdown in society and state produces a collective experience of depression. The novels use the technique of free indirect discourse to convey the inner emotions of the characters who undergo the social upheavals of neoliberal India in vastly differentiated ways, but who all feel some form of suffering. This diffusion of perspective and space is more suited to countering the tendency toward stereotype cautioned against by Chakravorty. It permits an exploration of neoliberalism’s impact on diverse bodies, minds, and communities and promotes empathy with a range of characters.

The Association of Small Bombs follows the characters impacted by the 1996 bombing at the Lajpat Nagar market in Delhi. The perspectives in this third-person narrative shift between the middle-class Hindu Khurana family, whose two sons Tushar and Nakul are killed in the blast, the upper middle-class Muslim family whose son Mansoor is injured, the friends he makes during his recovery including a working-class man named Ayub who proceeds to become involved in a terror group, and Shockie, the pragmatic bomb-maker of the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force, who views religion as a distraction from political matters.

The Inheritance of Loss tells the story of an adolescent girl, Sai, the orphaned granddaughter of a retired judge, who lives with him on his decaying estate with a servant cook. She has the trappings of an upper-class life including a convent school education from which she withdraws for lack of funds, but her household has few resources. She falls in love with her mathematics tutor, Gyan, a member of the Nepali underclass whose entire family has sacrificed to give him an education and who joins the insurgency. A parallel narrative relates the trials of the cook in the judge’s household, whose son Biju is working a series of exploitative jobs in New York as an undocumented migrant.

Both novels are adept at bringing attention to the following qualities of neoliberalism in India: first, the moralizing of wealth in which those who are unsuccessful in the economy are derided as lazy; second, the powerful transnational movements of people and goods and the vulnerability of those who move at the bottom of the class hierarchy; and third, the weakness of the state in the face of economic forces as well as bombings and insurgency and its inability to provide the basics of sustenance, food, water, housing, and health care. John and Jean Comaroff have pointed to neoliberalism’s effort “to intensify the abstractions inherent in capitalism itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions” (2000: 305). Characters in both novels assume that people’s worth equates to their economic success, and they come up against those who have been disenfranchised or have not found a place for themselves in what the right wing nationalist BJP party in the 2004 general elections called “India Shining”. The result is a violence that is often ineffectual in creating systemic change and instead produces trauma and loneliness.

The psychoanalytic concept of abjection is helpful in understanding the novels’ presentation of the impact of neoliberalism. Abjection, according to Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, involves the breakdown of boundaries between self and other, human and animal: it is that which “disturbs identity, system, order” (1982: 4). Kristeva links abjection to violence: “Any crime because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility” (1982: 4). In the novels, the fragility of life in the face of insurgent violence mirrors the violence of the state and police for many within the movements and renders life precarious for all. Kristeva argues that literature has a unique capacity to reflect upon abjection:

On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so — double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject. (1982: 207)

Death or pain from violence is unpredictable, and victims are on their own in coping. A stable sense of security within characters’ class, ethnic, or religious communities breaks down. The blurring of boundaries between subjectivities in both novels through free indirect discourse counters the narcissism of the characters’ world views and the widespread abjection in the novels.

Linking the psychological and the socio-economic, Ashis Nandy has traced contemporary experiences such as depression and anxiety to the breakdown of networks of social support. Nandy’s work on violence emphasizes that “unprecedented prosperity and technological optimism in many countries have as their underside utter penury, collapse of life support systems brought about by ecological devastations, threats to cosmologies, and non-specific hopelessness” (2013: 122). Nandy describes an epistemological crisis in which minoritized visions of society are silenced by dominant structures of power (2013: 124). As a result, a sense of alienation emerges that feeds hate groups, which then target civilians as a means of promoting their cause, producing more hopelessness and physical pain.

In Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, neoliberalism manifests itself through a profit-minded approach by government, media, resistance groups, and family members. The Indian Government, which Mahajan has said in an interview can do a great deal to alleviate the suffering of bombing victims but rarely does so, is harshly critiqued in the novel as being unwilling to offer compensation and accusing victims of filing false claims (Mahajan and Perlin, 2016: 4). After being injured in the Lajpat Nagar bombing and witnessing the death of his two friends, Mansoor bemoans: “The government had let them down repeatedly. The prosecutor had been arrested for sexual assault. One session was called off because a stray dog had wandered into the court and bit a policeman. Worst of all — ‘No word about the compensation’” (Mahajan, 2016: 131). Beyond the fact that the government incites persecution of Muslims, Mahajan characterizes it as incompetent and corrupt when it comes to caring for its citizens following attacks.

The terrorist group Jammu and Islamic Force operates along the same profit-minded lines as the government. As we get to know the Kashmiri group with which Ayub gets involved, we see that they too are organized by get-rich principles. According to the bomb-maker Shockie, the leaders “were siphoning money to build big houses for themselves and sending their children abroad but not providing even the minimum for blasts in Delhi” (Mahajan, 2016: 52).

The well-to-do Mansoor and the impoverished Ayub meet at a function held by a non-governmental organization (NGO) called Peace For All, which is arguing that innocent men have been arrested for the Lajpat Nagar bombing. They are unable to gain traction in the media with nonviolent protests, and Ayub becomes persuaded of the need for violence: “The media reveled in sex and violence — how could nonviolence, with its graying temples and wise posture, match up?” (Mahajan, 2016: 185). Nonviolent movements require a media attentive to their strategies, but the sensationalist sensibilities of the media and its consumers inhibit the success of such strategies, and activists turn to mirroring the strategies of their oppressors to gain public attention. The NGO itself is comprised of mostly well-heeled young people and seems at times like a social club rather than a serious organization with a mission of redressing anti-Muslim sentiment in the subcontinent. Ayub’s embellished story about his parents’ organic farm belies their bleak existence as subsistence farmers, and he invents it in order to conform to the class identity of the group.

The Association of Small Bombs links terrorism to the militarization of the state, the breakdown of social services, and the collective despair of the novel’s characters. The “minor” terrorist attacks of “small bombs” are intended to be in retaliation to organized violence by the state against Muslims, but the reality is that the terrorists act as much out of personal grievances and life-long economic disenfranchisement as out of ideological conviction. The bombings trigger abjection for their victims but there is no causal link to terrorism. A broader breakdown in the social fabric produces both terror and a sense of despair about individual and community identity. The fact that everyone is on their own and networks of family and friends are highly structured by wealth are the true causes of the breakdowns among the characters in the novel.

Within this context, Mansoor is particularly vulnerable. Still injured from the Lajpat Nagar blast, Mansoor finds himself studying in a California college during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The pain from Mansoor’s original injury sustained in the blast blurs with the pain of the carpal tunnel syndrome that emerges out of his obsessive programming on the computer until his body collapses.

Mahajan writes: “People discussed the hijackers, who were all Muslims. He wanted to tell them about his own experiences with terror” (2016: 124). What he encounters is suspicion and indifference: “People did not care about a small bomb in a foreign country that had injured a Muslim, and why should they?” (Mahajan, 2016: 126). The novel questions whose lives matter to the community of characters. Communal breakdown is connected to the problems in Mansoor’s body and mind. Wendy Brown situates the collapse of empathy to the neoliberal concept of individual entrepreneurial actors: “It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’ — the ability to provide for their own needs and service their ambitions” (2005: 42). No matter how severe the obstacles to emotional and physical recovery, the subject is on his or her own. This expectation of autonomy is differentiated based on who the subject is. As a Muslim, Mansoor cannot be identified as a victim of terror in need of support for his recovery. Mansoor is caught between the persecuting state and an organization that injures him and kills his friends, only to be detained by the state at the end of the novel. Mansoor reflects, “He didn’t want to be in India or the U.S. He wanted to be in a place free of pain and tragedy” (Mahajan, 2016: 154), but no such place presents itself.

Shockie the bomb-maker experiences a different kind of breakdown of identity as he becomes sceptical of his organization. He comes from a poor family, and his mother develops a tumour from her life as a presswali or laundress. It is redress for her, for the conflict in Kashmir, and anger at Narendra Modi’s fostering of communal violence that drives him, but he begins to doubt whether his actions help any individual or cause. Ayub also chooses Narendra Modi as his target because Modi embodies for him a capitalist avarice that is bound up with the violence against Muslims in Gujurat: “There had been so many killers in Indian history but none as unrepentant or shameless as this capitalist politician pig” (Mahajan, 2016: 196). Ayub too wonders about whether Shockie had achieved anything through all of his bombings: “How many people had this man killed over the course of his life? Ayub wondered. Had it achieved anything? Kashmir, where he started, was as ravaged by violence as before, with little shift in the needle of negotiation” (Mahajan, 2016: 224). The ragtag Hubli faction of Keralan Muslims talk of “Marxism, revolution, Naxalites, water politics” (Mahajan, 2016: 59), but accomplish nothing. There is a nihilistic thread to the novel arising out of the lack of meaningful structural change coming out of organizations and institutions.

In the case of Vikas Khurana, the angst results from working as a film-maker within a capitalist society that devalues the arts and in which cut-throat competition for wealth situates characters in a rigid social hierarchy. After the bombing, he diagnoses the problem: “He felt his entire life had been a failure and that it was this failure, particularly the failure to make money, that had brought him to this point: if they’d had a driver, how could this have happened?” (Mahajan, 2016: 28). Vikas Khurana further dissects his own predicament as follows: “Descending into bitterness, surrounded by the braying, pointing, mocking audience of his family, he had become attached to his own pain” (Mahajan, 2016: 83). What separates Khurana from the bomb-maker Shockie is not the condition of abjection, which they share, but the interpretation of the cause. Nandy writes of the difference between those who are able to find a cause and those who have a more diffuse sense of depression: “The social flux and moral anomie that we see around us have condemned large sections of the humankind to live with a vague sense of loss, anxiety, and anger” (2013: 129). For those who do “identify an agency, rightly or wrongly, they end up with free-floating rage perpetually looking for targets or embrace ideologies that promise to supply them with readymade targets of violence or breakdown” (Nandy, 2013: 129). Vikas’s habitual pain results in acute isolation, whereas Shockie turns to bombing attacks on civilians. Nandy calls for empathy in the face of this widespread desperation, but Mahajan’s characters are unable to take this step.

Most often, forms of collective organization in the novel fail to bring about the empathy Nandy is calling for because they evade deep-seated structural problems via indiscriminate violence or escapism. The latter occurs when Vikas and Deepa’s work with a support group for bombing victims results in the neglect of their daughter, who states that she could understand how neglect could drive someone to “go to a market and blow themselves up” (Mahajan, 2016: 249). The shared experience of the characters remains abjection, self-absorption, and loneliness.

This is not, however, a completely nihilistic novel. While isolation, disconnection, and apathy can fuel violence, and large-scale efforts organized by the state, NGOs, the media, and terrorist organizations are ineffective at creating meaningful change, connections between characters can restore social stability. Shockie argues that people become their true selves during bombings, as these people push aside loved ones to save themselves and loot stores. However, Vikas observes remarkable instances of courage, as shopkeepers help each other and auto-rickshaw drivers transport the injured to hospitals for free:

But there were also instances of out-and-out heroism in this capitalist scramble. One of the shopkeepers, half his face blown off, had picked up a megaphone and warned customers to keep away. The assistants risked their lives to pull other assistants from the rubble. Mansoor ran away in fright but someone, some kind person, never to be named or found out, had taken the boys to the hospital; auto drivers, god bless their souls, had lined up outside the market, transporting victims to Moolchand and AIIMS for free. (Mahajan, 2016: 79)

In these moments, people help strangers based on a sense of shared vulnerability and experience. The novel embraces the view that repairing society and self requires not bringing more people into the neoliberal economy, as Chakravorty suggests is the case in novels about abjection, but improving interpersonal relationships.

The role of literary representation in repairing the social fabric is crucial. The style of the novel with its multiple perspectives, suggests that literature fosters a sense of intimacy between the reader and a range of people with diverse perspectives. Yet, the characters in the novel rarely value literary and artistic expression. Shockie describes Malik, the non-violent, Gandhi-quoting writer of pamphlets for the extremist group as “effeminate, confused, contradictory, ineffectual, eccentric” (Mahajan, 2016: 56). Vikas was working on a film about divorce prior to the bomb and is similarly looked down upon by his relatives. The film proves difficult to continue precisely because it requires making connections: “He couldn’t look at footage from Scenes from a Marriage, listen to the complaints of married women, try to carve a meaningful narrative from their frayed individual stories. To make a documentary out of many stories was to make a family out of inmates in different cells of a jail” (Mahajan, 2016: 75). So many characters, like Vikas, are alone in their trauma, but the work of the novel is akin to that of the documentary film-maker, weaving impossible connections amongst isolated and disparate individuals.

This involves an approach antithetical to the exploitative mass media interested in covering spectacles. Presented with Mansoor’s abjection, we also encounter the bomb-maker’s experience. Shockie reflects on the futility of his work: “Fighting for Kashmiri independence, he hadn’t seen Kashmir in two years; he was an exile, and in those two years, he feared (with the unreasonable worry of all exiles) that Kashmir would have changed. What if it had become like this after all the warfare?” (Mahajan, 2016: 37). Mahajan connects bomb-maker and bomb victim’s perspectives in complex ways. Both men are aware of social injustices and feel a sense of futility about social change.

Prior to the bombing, Vikas takes his two sons to a slum so that they can appreciate what they have, and instantly regrets it: “Something very strange about pointing out poor people in their natural habitat to children like they were zoo animals” (Mahajan, 2016: 105). He takes an approach resistant to spectacle and turning subjects into symbols. The aesthetic of the novel emphasizes the mundane amongst all of the characters. The terrorists spend time travelling and waiting for instructions in squalid hotels for weeks at a time. The wealthier characters have privileges but also live rather precarious lives. Although they are differentiated, Mahajan renders each character’s experience ordinary and accessible.

In an interview with Guernica, Mahajan has said that “the only solace can come from the state” (2016), but the state is an unreliable source of hope in the novel. Redress comes from the characters’ ability to connect rather than isolate themselves from each other. Mahajan deliberately avoids turning characters into symbols of abjection, choosing instead to explore the varying costs of neoliberalism to people across cultural boundaries. We end the novel with Mansoor shutting himself up in his parents’ home. The novel itself acts as a link to the world from which he has turned away. This acknowledgement of the value of human life is different from a humanist-based critique of terrorism and is based not on the preconceived rights of the individual but the notion of interdependence and the sense of connectedness and collectivity that presumes equality. As Judith Butler puts it, “The ‘I’ is thus at once a ‘we’, without being fused into an impossible unity” (2009: vii).

It is with this paradigm in mind that I turn to Kiran Desai’s novel, The Inheritance of Loss, which presents collectivity and equality as both painfully lacking and nearly impossible to achieve. Whereas Mahajan’s form and characters allow for the imagining of possible solidarities across social boundaries, Desai has a rather bleaker world-view in which the characters refuse to acknowledge interdependence or equality and are enmeshed in a “habit of hate” (Desai, 2006: 86). Like The Association of Small Bombs, Desai’s novel deals with individuals vulnerable to violence from state and non-state actors who seek redress sometimes in families and groups of friends and at other times in larger organizations or associations. Desai traces hate to contemporary and historical patterns of inequity. To evoke the terms of anthropologist David Harvey, Desai presents a pattern of “accumulation by dispossession” that links neoliberalism to colonialism (2003: 147). Desai’s characterization of Kalimpong is shaped by what Harvey refers to as the privatization of land, the suppression of indigenous economies, and the commodification and exploitation of labour (Harvey, 2003: 145). In Kalimpong, the indigenous and Nepali populations have been exploited on tea plantations for generations, and the violence that emerges between the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) forces fighting for an independent state and the army and police has reached an impasse. Caught in the middle are civilians brutalized by the police, particularly in the case of working-class characters like the cook, and Nepalis coerced into joining the fight for a cause that holds minimal prospects for success, or restitution for historical labour exploitation and systemic poverty.

The affective legacy of centuries of inequality is visible in the life of the judge, who has studied in England and appears successful. While in England, he endured housing discrimination, physical violence, and daily racist taunts, which he internalized into a searing self-hatred. When he returns home, he inflicts his anger and hatred upon his wife as he abuses and then abandons her. For a character like the judge to enter a community is impossible because he has been indelibly marked by self-hatred and fear. “Thus Jemubhai’s mind had begun to warp; he grew stranger to himself than he was to those around him, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar” (Desai, 2006: 45). His situation is hardly distinctive. The cook endures a vicious and humiliating beating by the judge, who blames the cook for not finding his kidnapped dog. The cook admits to pilfering household items, despite the fact that when the police came to trash his home, Sai observes that he has nothing to show for a lifetime of work (Desai, 2006: 352). Like many characters from the underclass, the cook exhibits internalized self-hatred.

The middle-class characters of Kalimpong maintain a facade of individual and economic identity by keeping to a suffocatingly small circle of family and friends and maintaining an Anglophile nostalgia in the face of gross inequity. This, of course, requires rendering invisible the labouring class of Nepali and indigenous tea workers. Set within the lifetimes of its main characters from the period of colonial rule to the post-colonial era, the middle-class characters seem puzzled at the rise of armed robberies, occupations of bungalows, bombings, and threatening marches in the name of Gorkhaland. A strict segregation of the community is necessary for maintaining the Anglophile identity of Sai, the judge, and their family and friends. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has discussed the importance of segregation to the maintenance of group identity. She writes: “[I]deas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience” (1966: 5). The characters are too ready to hate all of those outside their small circle of acceptable companions.

The friendship between Sai and the cook, the love of the cook for his son, Sai for Gyan, and even the love of the judge for his dog are significant but insufficient in countering their hate. After the first flush of their romance in which they can escape the realities of their environment, Sai and Gyan erupt into an argument over Sai’s Anglophile family’s celebration of Christmas, which according to Gyan is a mark of her social and class privilege, and over Sai’s dismissal of Gyan as unemployable. Later when she sees his shabby family home, she confronts him about the soldiers or his liberation organization breaking into her home to take guns. The problem in these characters’ relationships is not a lack of affection but a failure to grapple with difference. They have an exclusive rather than an inclusive notion of who, according to Judith Butler, “counts as a life, who can be read or understood as a living being, and who lives, or tries to live, on the far side of established modes of intelligibility” (2009: iv). The collapse of communication continues as Biju leaves Kalimpong for New York City. While working in a New York bakery, he meets Saeed Saeed, a young man from Zanzibar. Saeed becomes “the man he admired most in the United States of America” (Desai, 2006: 59) and yet the fact that he is black, African, and Muslim clashes with Biju’s engrained prejudices about those communities. Biju reflects on his inability to connect with Saeed and others: “They nodded kindly at him, sometimes they even offered him a beer, but Biju did not know what to say to them, even his tiny brief ‘Hello’ came out wrong: too softly, so they did not hear, or just as they had turned away” (Desai, 2006: 108).

In contrast to the characters’ difficulty in forming and maintaining relationships across boundaries of class and ethnicity, Desai’s narrative approach of free indirect discourse fosters empathy with even the most abusive of characters. This technique contextualizes their inner experiences. It allows the reader to do what the judge cannot, by recognizing commonalities in the experiences of Biju in the United States and the judge’s loneliness in England. Though it is a source of extreme hardship for the poor undocumented migrants and a different source of pain for the more affluent migrants, fantasies of an affluent Western life and disenchantment are common experiences across classes. Yet Desai makes this empathy difficult to sustain. Biju’s racism and the judge’s abuse, in particular, make this a fraught act for the reader, who may empathize with the judge for his hardships as a young man in England while condemning him for his treatment of the cook or abuse of his wife.

The social divisions become unsustainable in the novel, and the sense of an orderly, segregated community breaks down as GNLF loyalists occupy the colonial-era bungalows. Abjection is manifested in the breakdown of community identity in addition to the physical environment, as the once elegant colonial bungalows suffer from failing plumbing and decaying wood. The homes of the poor have always been decrepit, according the novel, contrasting with the grandeur of mountains and rivers of the Himalayan region. The very country is described as being in a state of disintegration — “coming apart at the seams” (Desai, 2006: 118) in the case of Assam, Nagaland, and Mizoram — which coincides with the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the Sikh separatist movement. Along with this external degradation is an experience of internal abjection, which manifests itself through self-loathing, domestic violence, and cruelty to animals and people.

The violence at the heart of the novel is the result of generations of inequity that has reached the point of no return for Sai’s family friends, Lola and Noni. Lola reflects on the origins of the recent violence in longstanding practices of dispossession: “The anger that had solidified into slogans and guns, and it turned out that they, Lola and Noni were the unlucky ones who wouldn’t slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others over many generations” (Desai, 2006: 266). Lola understands the causes of the social turmoil but finds it unfair and inexplicable that she and her sister should bear the consequences. If the privileged are not immune to abjection, Desai makes it clear that the poor experience a much more grim and inflexible reality. Gyan’s home is falling apart and his family lives in poverty for the sake of his education, despite the fact that engrained prejudices mean that he cannot get a job.

Biju tries to come home to his father only to be robbed by GNLF soldiers. He returns penniless, forced into wearing women’s clothes, and embraces his father. Desai chooses to communicate this reunion from Sai’s perspective, rather than that of Biju or his father. As Sai watches them, Desai writes, “The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with [a] kind of luminous light” (Desai, 2006: 357). The external illumination coincides with maturation in Sai’s world-view: “The simplicity of what she’d been taught wouldn’t hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness and live safely within it” (Desai, 2006: 355).

While many scholars have focused on the novel’s critique of colonial-era borders and the legacy of colonialism for contemporary migration and globalization (Jackson, 2016; Sabo, 2013), David Spielman has approached the novel with an eye to the epistemology evoked in the prior passage. He asserts that the novel endorses “flexibility, assimilation, and multiculturalism” (2010: 75) over more rigid notions of culture. The novel certainly critiques “solid knowledge” (Spielman, 2010: 74), but I argue that it is through empathy between reader and character that the epistemological alternative of flexibility emerges. Empathy is not accessible in the same way to the characters.

The question of resistance is different in Desai than it is in Mahajan. If in the latter, the affective work of the author and individual generosity can help to overcome the context of abjection, Desai asks whether it is possible to create any change when “accumulation by dispossession” has been a precondition of life for many generations. There is a tension in the novel between the hopefulness of the reunion and the empathy of Sai for Biju and the cook, and a nihilism expressed by Sai before the happy ending: “Uncivilized voluptuous green would be unleashed; the town would slide down the hill. Slowly, painstakingly, like ants, men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash away again” (Desai, 2006: 355).

The nihilistic undertones of Desai’s novel arise not only from this insufficiency but also from the fact that as those who have been historically rendered invisible seek to assert themselves, they do so using the nationalist frameworks of the past. They are astute in diagnosing historical wrongs but are presented by Desai as clumsy in both their vision and their actions. The novel opens with a home invasion in which the rebels take food but also Lux Soap, Ponds Cold Cream, and alcohol. When Gyan joins a protest march, he himself has this doubt: “Were these men entirely committed to the importance of the procession or was there a disconnected quality to what they did? Were they taking their cues from old protest stories or from the hope of telling a new story? Did their hearts rise and fall to something true?” (Desai, 2006: 173). After he hears a stirring speech detailing the historical marginalization of the Nepali people and the denial of an independent Gorkhland, the result is not a stirring of solidarity and agency but hate: “And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the anger remained, distilled, liberating” (Desai, 2006: 177). However justified the cause, the movement is unable to move beyond the old unworkable paradigm of an independent Gorkhaland and a desire for revenge.

By contrast, when Judith Butler describes a protest by undocumented migrants in California for the right to petition to become American citizens, she highlights that their singing of the American and Mexican national anthems was a “way of articulating a right to free expression, to freedom of assembly, and to the broader right of citizenship by those who do not have that right, but exercise it anyway” and also of giving “voice and visibility to those populations that are regularly disavowed as part of the nation” (Butler, 2009: vi). This might be true of the protest in which Gyan is participating as well, but Desai drains away the other possibilities of the march and distills it down to a sharpening of hate.

Desai’s free indirect discourse offers empathy with each character, but the characters do not seem to be able to experience it in the way that is possible in The Association of Small Bombs. It is problematic to offer to the reader a kind of empathy that the characters cannot maintain, as if readers were outside the processes of exploitation highlighted in the novel. In both novels, most characters feel a narrow sense of empathy with people similar to themselves. This is part of neoliberalism’s preoccupation with the individual as a self-sufficient agent of profit. Desai and Mahajan’s emphasis on the collective experience of social breakdown brings the reader into engagement with a variety of perspectives. In the diegetic world of the novels, everyone is implicated in and impacted by historically unequal structures of power, which in the narrative frame of the novels begin to implode. Amid the nihilistic tendencies, they engage with the capacity of literature to provide insight into the interdependence of individuals and to foster empathy with those who have been considered less than human.