“Another high-caste woman beyond his reach”: Cast(e)ing the sexual politics of Manu Joseph’s Serious Men

Abstract

Indian English Fiction has mostly portrayed Dalit characters from a humanist perspective. Manu Joseph’s debut novel Serious Men (2010) departs from such a convention by deploying sexist language to render subversive authority to the Dalit protagonist, Ayyan Mani. While Serious Men (2010) revises the passive depiction of Dalits in Indian English Fiction through its experimental usage of language, its subversion is undermined by its representation of women and lower-caste politics. This article is interested in exploring the intersections between language politics and the politics of caste in the novel, since it seems subversive in expressing the rant of an angry Dalit man, yet it also nevertheless reflects the overt sexualization of urban, upper-caste women. By interrogating the novel’s politics of Dalit representation and its critical reception, the article argues how despite satirizing casteist attitudes through the eyes of the Dalit protagonist, the novel inevitably undermines its critique of caste structures through its prejudiced portrayal of women and caste politics.

Introduction

Manu Joseph’s first novel Serious Men (2010) is a sardonic reflection on caste in contemporary India. Set in the urban milieu of Mumbai, it features a trickster Dalit man who ridicules caste-conscious Indian society with his grotesque imagination. Ayyan Mani, the Dalit protagonist, subverts power hierarchies by sexualizing people in power while also inviting the reader to participate in the subversion of these hierarchies through humour. The central conflict in the novel revolves around how Ayyan Mani, who works as a clerk in the fictitious “Institute of Theory and Research” (Joseph, 2010: 23) in Mumbai, attempts to transcend his humble circumstances by duping the general public into believing his ten-year-old son, Adi, to be a “Dalit genius” (Joseph, 2010: 317). ¹ In order to propagate this blatant lie, Ayyan Mani plays devious games and fosters strategic alliances, while also framing the media, (mis)using caste politics, and triggering mob violence to punish the “casteist” mindset of his employers. Such is the extent of Ayyan Mani’s rampant individualism that he objectifies women, cheats society, and ultimately goes unpunished for his conduct. This article is interested in interrogating the politics of caste in the novel, especially since it is also one of the few novels that challenges the largely passive portrayal of Dalits in anglophone Indian writing. By exploring the relationship between Serious Men’s politics of caste and its usage of insensitive, sexist language, this article contends that the narrative makes strategic linguistic choices in order to construct a subversive Dalit protagonist who can interrogate and satirize the caste privilege prevalent in Indian society. While the linguistic techniques of the narrative empower the male Dalit subject, they do so by undermining women characters as well as by discrediting the political potential of lower-caste politics. By studying the modes through which the novel revises the passivity of the Dalit protagonist in the Indian English novel and the political repercussions of such methods, this article aims to unravel Joseph’s caste politics.

Since the novel articulates the rantings of an angry Dalit man whose anger is not only misplaced (mostly channelled by sexualizing urban, upper-caste women) but eventually leads to mob violence, critics stand divided on the politics of the novel. Two noteworthy critical responses to have emerged on Serious Men are by the acclaimed Indian English novelist Shashi Deshpande, and by the cofounder of Navayana publishing house, S. Anand. Their divergent responses make manifest the interpretative dilemma caused by the novel because of its language politics. Shashi Deshpande — who was also one of the jury members for the Hindu Best Fiction Award which was won by Serious Men in 2010 — praises the novel for its authenticity. Meanwhile S. Anand interrogates its ideological repercussions.

According to Deshpande, Serious Men deserves appreciation for reconstructing a Dalit man’s psychology in a language (English) that may alienate his experiences:

In Indian writing in English we haven’t yet approached the novel in the way this man has done. He has spoken about caste. We are ignoring reality, but he has straightforwardly plunged into the mind of a Dalit man and has done it with style and panache. To have a Dalit man speak in English and make it authentic is very difficult — but Manu Joseph has done it very easily, without making it grotesque. (Deshpande, qtd. in Page, 2010, n.p.; emphasis in original)

Almost two decades ago, Meenakshi Mukherjee (1993: 2607) assessed how the “anxiety of Indianness” pervades the Indian English novel to a much greater extent than its bhasha (regional language) counterparts because critics continue to doubt the suitability of English language for portraying Indian experiences. As such, Deshpande’s observation suggests that Joseph’s novel surpasses this “anxiety” to reach a state of authenticity with its experimental usage of the English language. However, her analysis is limited by not considering the issue of the textual representation of caste and gender but only focusing on the novel’s aesthetic significance. S. Anand, on the contrary, has criticized Joseph’s novel for its adverse representation of Dalits: “The garb of satire — where almost every character cuts a sorry figure — gives the author the license to offer one of the most bleak and pessimistic portrayals of urban Dalits” (2011: 1). From Joseph’s strategic use of the satirical form to the exaggerated characters in his text, S. Anand interrogates the novel’s politics as well as its target audience. Moreover, since Serious Men has also won awards and acclaim despite its questionable politics, he goes on to speculate that the success of the novel reveals “how a section of the elite has decided it’s okay to enjoy jokes at such [political] correctness” (Anand, 2011: 1). The critical responses by Deshpande and S. Anand identify particular and significant issues in the novel; nevertheless, their observations are only partially true since they do not reflect on counterarguments to their claims.

While it is self-evident that Deshpande’s criticism is premised on the novel’s linguistic inventiveness and ignores its gender politics, Anand’s criticism, despite pointing out significant problems in the novel, hinges upon self-representation in literature. Therefore, he conveniently disapproves of the representation of Dalits not just in Serious Men but in the entire canon of Indian English fiction. Such is the structure of Anand’s article that it does not consider the possibility of a comparative framework wherein literature about caste, whether written by Dalits or non-Dalits, could together form a critical discourse on caste. Instead, the argument pivots on the authenticity debate in Dalit literature, wherein on ethical grounds it is believed that only Dalits can authentically write about the Dalit experience. According to Gopal Guru, non-Dalit scholars “theorize Dalit experience while standing outside the Dalit experience” (2012: 26). Anand’s criticism of Joseph’s novel also emerges from a similar position to favour the dependability of caste experience, and it does not give much attention to the form of the novel. What both Deshpande and Anand overlook is how the novel’s ideological positioning is inextricably linked with its language politics. Whether it comes to the question of Dalit representation or the biased portrayal of female characters that are reduced to mere objects, both issues connect to the narrative’s usage of satirical language for rendering subversive agency to the Dalit subject. Hence, by unpacking Joseph’s usage of language, this article aims to address the critical divide as well as situate the novel’s position vis-à-vis caste politics.

To study how the novel departs from conventional depictions of Dalits in Indian English writing, in my first section I outline ways in which the canon has engaged with the issue of caste. Since Serious Men departs from the sentimental mode of portraying Dalits, this section also assesses how its linguistic technique challenges the “reformist-liberal” (Limbale, 2004: 27) mode of Dalit representation, and how critics have responded to such experimentation in portrayals of Dalits. The second section focuses on the novel’s critique of caste consciousness through the interplay of sexist humour and Ayyan Mani’s gaze. By politicizing the tricky relationship between the functioning of humour and the objectification of female characters in the novel, this section interrogates how the novel’s critique of caste structures functions through a skewed gender politics. Unlike the first and second sections, which argue how the “politically incorrect” language enables the representation of an empowered Dalit with “subversive power” (Anand, 2011), the third section studies how the novel undermines its critique of caste not only by a dubious representation of women and lower-caste politics but also by failing to envision an effective counterpolitics of caste.

Dalit representation and the Indian English novel

The relationship of the Indian English novel to the issue of caste has been full of contradictions. In his article, “Caste of Indian English Novel” (1991), Makarand R. Paranjape elaborates on the ambivalent ways in which Indian English writing engages with caste, and argues that the canon either accepts caste indifferently or, more frequently, totally ignores the issue: “In a majority of Indian English novels, caste and community are merely incidental, often never even mentioned or discussed” (1991: 2300). Extending Paranjape’s argument, Toral Jatin Gajarawala has claimed that the Indian Anglophone novel participates in “casteless modernities”, since it usually conflates caste with class in depicting the movement into modernity — namely, the shift from the rural to the urban space (2013: 131). Both the above-cited comments underscore the problematic relationship between the Indian English novel and caste. While Paranjape’s remark hints at the possible erasure of caste, Gajarawala’s proposition foregrounds the way in which caste, even when it finds representation in a text, is often “depoliticized” (2013: 139). In her reading of the classic novel Untouchable (Anand, 1935), Gajarawala criticizes Mulk Raj Anand as he “glorifies and beautifies the labor of latrine cleaning and directs Bakha towards modernity via the innovation of the flush toilet and Gandhian reconciliation” (2013: 135). She argues that since the novel resolves the issue of caste by providing dignity to the Dalit man’s labour without addressing the endemic structure of the caste system, the novel’s position against caste hierarchies is not a political one but that of sympathy. Moreover, it is not only Mulk Raj Anand’s novel that romanticizes the Dalit subject, for an overview of the Indian English novel highlights that the predominant way in which the canon responds to the question of caste is in the form of empathetic representation.

Indian English fiction has primarily addressed the issue of caste by representing society’s caste structures through mimetic realism. Whether it is the early Indian novels in English or post-Independence writing, the canon has often explored victimhood amongst lower-caste characters more than any potential for rebellion. Thus, many Dalit characters demonstrate a sentimental story of pain and suffering and rarely resist. These inactive characters include Bakha from Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and the Dalit characters — Ishwar and Omprakash — from Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995). However, a novel like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) stands out in this analysis since it resists caste structures not through straightforward activism but personal politics. In response to Aijaz Ahmad’s (1997) criticism of Roy’s novel, Brinda Bose points out that the text is political in manifesting “erotic desire” as “an act of transgression”, which, she goes on to argue, “cannot be dismissed as a momentary lapse from the politicization of one’s being” (Bose, 1998: 59). Yet, even a narrative such as Roy’s that seeks an aesthetic resolution to caste is unable to do so without compromising the right to life of the Dalit subject, Velutha. Similarly, in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Fokir, the Dalit figure, dies in the storm to save the life of an American researcher, Piyali Roy. Such instances justify my argument that the Dalit character is mostly represented as a passive victim of caste atrocities — who is, ironically, forced into silence within the narrative. The closest Indian English writing comes to in imagining Dalit lives is through the portrayal of a romanticized Dalit character who is trapped in the social hierarchy. Tabish Khair shares a similar perspective when he argues, “it is not that the ‘caste other’ is completely ignored in Indian English fiction, but that his/her presence — in most cases — has been subsumed, rewritten and marginalised” (2001: 137). While the narrative techniques deployed by Indian English fiction are successful in gaining the sympathy of the bourgeois reader, making him or her conscious of the oppressive history of caste, they also result in silencing the Dalit character in question. In this regard, Sharan Kumar Limbale’s (2004) observation on Dalit representation in Marathi literature could also hold true for the representation of Dalits in Indian English writing:

In modern Marathi literature, Dalits have been portrayed from a middle-class perspective, which expresses sympathy for dalits from a reformist-liberal standpoint. Because the middle-class, upper caste writers’ world of experience is limited, there is no realistic representation of Dalits in their writing. (2004: 27)

Limbale infers the political endpoint in the upper-caste representation of Dalits: while this invokes readers’ sentiments, the Dalit character rarely emerges as an autonomous subject in such narratives. As upper-caste writers continue to dominate the Indian English novel, a notable technique with which they attempt to surpass their caste or class identity and represent the caste other is by creating a compassionate representation of Dalits. ²

Manu Joseph’s Serious Men departs from the compassionate portrayal of Dalits in Indian English writing through a mode which resonates with Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize winning debut novel, The White Tiger (2008). Much like Adiga’s novel, Joseph also depicts an antihero who is manipulative and conniving; however, the two protagonists — Ayyan Mani and Balram Halwai — remain quite different despite their structural similarities. While Adiga caricatures Indian society through the eyes of The White Tiger’s vindictive protagonist, Balram Halwai, the novel, unfortunately, endorses violence as the only substitute for the caste and class other to break free from the “Rooster Coop” (Adiga, 2008: 102). Balram Halwai wages a class war, murders his employer, Ashok, and goes on to appropriate his name and identity. By contrast, the Dalit man in Serious Men is a trickster who cheats to “have his little son accepted as a bonafide genius” (Shivani, 2010, n.p.). Ayyan Mani’s motivation to save his family from its trapped existence sets him apart from Balram Halwai even as the two characters appear strikingly similar. Ayyan Mani is, at best, a trickster who cheats his society to better his circumstances, and this is a fact that invites readers’ empathy as well as derision.

Serious Men stands out in comparison to other Indian English novels previously discussed because its linguistic approach does not idealize the Dalit subject. Right from the first line in the book, Ayyan Mani is caricatured in the same way as the rest of the characters in the text: “Ayyan Mani’s thick black hair was combed sideways and parted by a careless broken line, like the borders the British used to draw between two hostile neighbours” (3). By mocking Ayyan Mani’s “inexpensive” appearance just before he is about to poke fun at the “twilight walkers” (3) on the basis of their looks, Joseph creates an unusual situation where the other is in a position to challenge the self. In the dual process of Ayyan Mani being objectified in the narrative from a middle-class gaze to him sexually objectifying the upper-caste women at the beach, the narrative accords agency to the Dalit protagonist. Furthermore, Ayyan Mani also maintains textual control over the narrative, firstly, by sexually objectifying “modern” (17) women, such that the novel’s humour is established on this premise, and, secondly, by playing games that are significant to the movement of the plot. Although the novel’s linguistic treatment of the Dalit self is quite different from sentimental writing on Dalits, it is not an extreme counterpoint to them since it does not give up on the issue of empathy entirely. On the contrary, the novel maintains a constant tension between driving the reader to feel compassion for Ayyan Mani (and his abject conditions of living) and undercutting such readerly empathy through the deployment of sexual humour. For instance, the novel juxtaposes the portrayal of BDD chawl — that was once rejected even by the “homeless” (6) for resembling “an endless corridor of gloom” (6) and is presently a place of residence for the likes of Ayyan Mani — with sexual humour. As Mani returns from his office, the narrative oscillates between commenting on the degenerating, “cobbled ways” (7) through the buildings and describing “emaciated girls with hollow chests”(7) who spoke “to each other in English for practice” (7). From empathetically portraying the struggles and aspirations of the chawl dwellers to satirizing their lived realities, the novel resists sentimentalizing the socio-material conditions of their existence. To illustrate this further, the novel maintains a critical distance when it portrays life in the BDD chawl: while it appreciates how “mothers who had lost their sons […] were still capable of laughing” (7), it also hints that Ayyan Mani and his wife were “trapped here” (9) and he had to invent “new ways of escaping from it” (8). Such are the linguistic strategies of Serious Men that despite its contentious sexual politics it is able to render agency to the Dalit subject.

As was argued in the Introduction, critical responses to the novel have either failed to politicize its language politics or solely focused on the socio-material impact of its sexist language, ignoring how the text also empowers the marginalized subject. While the novel’s use of satirical language complicates its caste and gender politics, this language also gives away Joseph’s political position. Serious Men unabashedly adopts insensitive language to satirize modern India through the eyes of its Dalit protagonist — a technique which portrays an active Dalit subject with a modern Dalit consciousness but compromises on the issue of female representation. Through the figure of Ayyan Mani, the novel revises the passive characterization of Dalits by sketching a protagonist who actively takes control of his circumstances and is aware of the structural inequalities that remain the cause behind his oppression. Unlike Ayyan Mani’s fictional predecessors who were portrayed sentimentally, such as Bakha from Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), Serious Men depicts the Dalit man as a self-made “Buddhist” (51), whose struggle to break free of caste barriers is realistic. Ayyan Mani is “something of a legend” (7) in the BDD chawls and happens to be the go-to guy for those occupying the margins: “He somehow knew people everywhere who magically waived the requirement of difficult documents” (26). The narrative also informs the reader that Ayyan Mani is an autodidact who taught himself English by “read[ing] anything he could lay his hands on” (28). Furthermore, the novel constructs a backdrop to Ayyan Mani’s struggle, describing the painful history of his caste predicament:

Oja Mani came into his life after everybody else had departed. His three brothers had died of bleeding livers in a space of eighteen months, and a year later his father died of tuberculosis and his mother soon followed out of habit. (8)

While the information on Ayyan Mani’s history emphasizes his struggles, these never overpower the narrative and take away his subjectivity. Instead, Ayyan Mani is conferred with the subversive power to mock authorities, ridicule social situations, and, ultimately, foreground the subtle casteism at work in rapidly urbanizing India. Towards the beginning of the narrative, what Ayyan Mani tells his wife could also hold true for the novel’s political agenda: “[i]f you stare long enough at serious people they will begin to appear comical” (4). Since Ayyan Mani ridicules caste-conscious “serious people” (his upper-caste employers) and generates humour, it is pertinent to politicize the sexual dimension of the novel’s humour.

While Ayyan Mani becomes the mouthpiece for the novel’s satire, his subversion remains controversial due to its objectification of women. With comments such as “She had a haughty face that would be a pleasure to tame. With love, poetry or a leather belt, perhaps” (4), the novel’s criticism of how caste shapes the everyday is thoroughly undermined by its chauvinist humour. Even as the linguistic politics of Serious Men construct an active Dalit subject who is unprecedented in Indian English fiction, it compromises on the issue of female representation while bestowing agency to the Dalit man. ³ The next section, therefore, interrogates the sexist language used in the novel that imbues Ayyan Mani with disruptive power but reduces female characters to archetypical roles.

Humorously sexist: Satirizing caste-conscious India

Modern Indian spaces are plagued by the apparent invisibility of caste structures. Satish Deshpande has poignantly stated how the predicament of caste in modern India is “its hypervisibility for the so-called lower castes and its invisibility for the so-called upper castes” (2013: 32). While the middle class in India attempts to overcome caste hierarchies by refusing to acknowledge their very presence, lower castes address this issue by making anti-caste assertions. Anti-caste movements have not only politicized caste and used it to negotiate with power and claim dignity, but they have also subverted the invisibility of caste privilege in India. In Manu Joseph’s novel, the invisibility of caste among the privileged section of the society, as well as the excessive politicization of caste identity among the lower castes, are equally satirized. Through Ayyan Mani’s demeanour, the novel lays bare the invisible networks of caste structures by calling out on upper-caste privilege, casteism at the workspace, and by providing a powerful critique of lower-caste politics.

Ayyan Mani’s latent power is at work throughout the novel. Whether it is his conversation with the principal of his son’s Catholic school, infamously named Sister Chastity, or his prank of overhearing his bosses’ phone conversation, his control over the novel cannot be discounted. In dealing with Sister Chastity’s benevolent paternalism, as she urges him to convert to Christianity, Ayyan Mani performs his marginality. Mani pretends to be immensely angry over the history of caste oppression since that was what she expected from him: “‘In public, they call you “Dalits”, but in private they call you such horrible things.’ ‘I know,’ Ayyan said, trying to appear angry and moved, because that was what she wanted” (21). By making Sister Chastity talk about the public–private divide in matters related to caste, Joseph hints at the liberal pretensions of the society where casteist remarks only get erased from public spaces while they continue to dictate the private sphere. Additionally, Sister Chastity is an object of satire, for hiding behind her compassion is the agenda of religious conversion. By performing victimhood, Ayyan Mani is able to shift the seat of power and use it to his advantage. Along similar lines, Ayyan Mani also disrupts hierarchies at his workplace by rewriting uncomfortable Thoughts for the Day using invented false authorities. Twisting the scholarly quotes put up on the noticeboard into an anti-Brahmin agenda becomes Ayyan Mani’s mode of resistance: “A greater crime than the Holocaust was untouchability. Nazis have paid the price, but the Brahmins are still reaping the rewards for torturing others” (292). By mocking the authoritarianism of the Brahmin scientists with false analogies, Ayyan Mani continually displaces power, yet his disruptive power gets undermined due to his unchecked sexism in which the novel also seems to participate.

Frequently, the novel resorts to misogynistic comments on urban women in its agenda of satirizing modern India; moreover, it projects these views on the Dalit antihero, Ayyan Mani, thereby escaping criticism. Ayyan Mani’s thought process sexualizes and ridicules women more than men, revealing how he compensates for his caste victimhood by asserting masculine power. By titillating the reader with Ayyan Mani’s sexual fantasies, the novel further reduces women to mere objects for male gratification:

Unable to bear the promises he had to make merely to touch the breasts of girls who said they loved him, and the sudden sorrows of the broad-minded women after they had brought their legs back together, and the wails of undead whores, he finally decided to place a matrimonial in the expensive classifieds of the Maharashtra Times. And he found a virgin who had none of the memories he had given other women. (31)

In the above paragraph, the novel unapologetically narrates Ayyan Mani’s sexual escapades while also creating a masculinist narrative that operates by othering women. Even if the sexually loaded comments on women are meant for comic effect, they together constitute a Dalit man with perverse fantasies. Writer Usha K. R. has pointed out how the novelist “stands in danger of over-reaching himself” (2010: n.p.) through his satirical humour. Quite a few instances in the novel substantiate Usha K. R.’s claims. The novel grotesquely portrays Arvind Acharya’s walk on a rainy day by describing him as an old man “dribbling his swollen testicles on his frail thighs, like a footballer during a warm-up” (141). Similarly, the narrative describes the visuals of a rainy day by borrowing from pop-cultural references: “Young girls worried if their blouses had become transparent. But they took the rains on their uplifted faces. They giggled and skipped and ran, as if they were in a sanitary napkin commercial” (141). It is clear from these references that the novel sexualizes both women and men, but its sexual humour reduces women to mere objects for gratification and rarely allows them to surface above gender stereotypes. Instead, the novel colludes in Ayyan Mani’s gaze and the voice of the third-person narrator to denigrate women characters and generate humour.

The three female characters in the novel, Oja Mani (Ayyan Mani’s wife), Lavanya Acharya (Arvind Acharya’s wife), and Oparna Gousmaulik, Head of Astrobiology in the research institute, are hardly provided psychological depth when compared to the male protagonists, Ayyan Mani and Arvind Acharya. Oja Mani is portrayed as a highly superstitious, religious woman who worships Hindu gods to the disappointment of her husband, who is a Dalit Buddhist. Apart from a few sexual jokes involving her in labour heaping abuse on her husband, Oja Mani hardly finds a voice in the novel. Furthermore, Oja’s exclusion from the game played by Ayyan Mani and his son, Adi, reveals how the novel conveniently pigeonholes her as a naive, domestic woman without providing her character with any growth. Oparna Gousmaulik, whose strange spelling caricatures the Bengali pronunciation of the name, fits the “loose”, modern woman stereotype, who falls in love with the director of the Institute and betrays him professionally due to being rejected. Oparna Gousmaulik’s revenge is formulaic and seems to be a prerequisite for the movement of the plot and Acharya’s tragic downfall. In the words of Oliver Ridley, Oparna becomes an “unprofessional ‘liar’ for the sake of advancing the plot, which incidentally involves the lower-caste protagonist Ayyan helping the ‘good brahmin’ Acharya against the other ‘bad Brahmins’” (2014, n.p.). This further reinforces how the narrative sacrifices Oparna’s character for the higher goal of achieving Ayyan Mani and Arvind Acharya’s alliance. Inarguably, the novel gets away with an objectionable representation of women, and this is due to its satirical form. Its biased portrayal of women escapes blame because the depraved thoughts are transposed onto Ayyan Mani, empowering him with the ability to destabilize the social order, yet emerging as a result as a masculinist narrative.

In the major part of the novel, the voice of the narrator and Ayyan Mani’s gaze overlap to ridicule social situations. A greater problem than the insensitive humour is how the novel conceals its sexism by projecting it on Ayyan Mani’s character. Repeatedly, the narrative shunts its views onto Ayyan Mani, by pretending to narrate through his gaze. Not only does this result in the third-person narrator ventriloquizing for Ayyan Mani as he voices misogynistic opinions of modern women, but it also enables the narrative to evade criticism by distancing itself from the character. The opening scene when Ayyan Mani regards the passersby at Worli beach illustrates this point well:

He [Ayyan Mani] surveyed the twilight walkers. There were hundreds on the long concrete stretch by the Arabian Sea. Solitary young women in good shoes walked hastily, as if they were fleeing from the fate of looking like their mothers. Their proud breasts bounced, soft thighs shuddered at every step. Their tired high-caste faces, so fair and glistening with sweat, bore the grimace of exercise. He imagined they were all in the ecstasy of being seduced by him. (3)

In the above passage, when Ayyan Mani observes the walkers and is rapt in desiring “high-caste” women, the identity of the speaker of the sentences objectifying women’s bodies remains unclear. It seems a recreation of Ayyan Mani’s thoughts invariably verbalized by the third-person narrator. The entire novel is full of similar linguistic opacities through which Ayyan Mani’s sexual fantasies are articulated. While Ayyan Mani comes across as a male chauvinist, the novel is able to conceal its sexism by making Ayyan Mani voice “politically incorrect” opinions on women. Even as the narrative uses Ayyan Mani to sexualize women and evade responsibility for their misrepresentation, this process, unconsciously, results in focalizing the narrative’s power around Ayyan Mani as a character.

Caste matters: Representation of caste politics

Apart from the novel’s bias against women, it is the representation of lower-caste politics that invariably discloses its politics in matters of caste. In Ayyan Mani’s critique of urban India, he cheats the media and public alike, going unpunished and evincing no signs of remorse. The manner in which Ayyan Mani realizes his victory by using caste politics to his advantage reveals how the novel disregards collective politics while appreciating Ayyan Mani’s individualism. From publishing fake news in the Marathi newspaper, Yug, to conducting a live telecast of his son reciting the first thousand prime numbers, Ayyan Mani smartly dupes everyone into believing his son to be a genius by judiciously using his son’s disability of partial deafness. The central problem in the narrative is not only how the novel allows Ayyan Mani to emerge victorious and guilt-free by the end, but also how he could appropriate caste politics in his private game of justifying a lie, undermining real political struggles.

Although Serious Men provides subversive authority to the Dalit subject, Ayyan Mani, it remains deeply sceptical of lower-caste politics, which is vividly illustrated when Ayyan Mani turns the myth around his son into a political battle by involving a lower-caste politician who also uses their case as a breeding ground for his own ideological interests. The Dalit leader, S. Waman, is described as “a coordinator of freelance goons” with the ability of “raising armies of angry Dalit youth at short notice who could turn very violent at times” (280). By critiquing lower-caste politics as propagandist, the novelist offers insight into political opportunism and vote-bank politics integral to the Indian political situation. However, by showing Dalit politics in an unfavourable light, the novel also underestimates the way in which lower-caste political groups, even if pervasively corrupt, can enter into negotiations on behalf of the masses. Partha Chatterjee in his seminal essay “The politics of the governed” has made evident how population groups living at the edge of legality make their moral claims through the means of “political society as a site of negotiation and contestation” (2004: 74). Political society, therefore, is the strategic mobilization of disparate population groups to negotiate with bureaucratic structures and the government. In Serious Men, the ultimate image the reader sees of the Dalit agitation is of a group of men holding iron rods to beat up the “casteist” Brahmin researchers of the Institute:

The door finally burst open and about two dozen men rushed in with iron rods. They began to break everything in the room. […] There was the sound of men groaning and weeping. […] It took three hours for order to be restored in the institute. Police carried away happy rioters who waved at the cameras. (323–324)

By reducing Dalit politics to a violent, angry mob, Joseph only satirizes the popular bourgeois stereotype of politics as well as politicians without considering the complexity of subaltern politics. In this regard, it is worthwhile to return to my comparison of the novel with Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger, since both the texts favour individualism over collective politics. According to Megha Anwer, The White Tiger rejects “collective mobilizations and political solidarities” to participate in “unhindered celebration of individualism and exceptionalism” (2014: 310). While Adiga’s novel does not even envisage the possibility of a collective rebellion, as pointed out by Anwer, Joseph takes up the issue only to caricature party politics.

By satirizing lower-caste politics, the novel also undermines Ayyan Mani’s critique of caste structures, as the empowerment of the Dalit protagonist does not culminate in any real social change. Ayyan Mani’s transgressive conduct in his office space does not result in a political rebellion against caste structures, but only advances his individual pursuits. Moreover, the fact that the novel privileges Ayyan Mani’s personal politics over the politics of the collective also does not seem to suggest a radical alternative because it results in temporary alliances that are forged in order to accede to power. For instance, the novel concludes with the growing “friendship” between the Brahmin scientist and the Dalit clerk — Arvind Acharya and Ayyan Mani respectively — but perceiving their relationship as a kind of solidarity would be erroneous. Their “friendship” remains a strategic alliance required for their self-interest and remains as transient as the tricks performed by Ayyan Mani throughout the novel. The alliance restores Acharya to his former glory as the head of the research institute by replacing the casteist Brahmin, Jana Nambodri. However, it simultaneously enables Ayyan Mani to procure the answers to the question paper set by Acharya for the Joint Entrance Exam, which remains the final hurdle for him to legitimate the myth of his son being a “genius”. The novel portrays Ayyan Mani blackmailing Acharya into telling him the answers to the questions of the entrance exam, and in return, Mani performs his tricks to relaunch him back to power.

“Let’s talk about your future, Sir,” Ayyan said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you got your old job back? […] I know how we can do that.”

“How?”

“You leave that to me. I know what I must do. But you have to help me. I want the question-papers. Are you going to help me?” (307)

The rhetoric of “help” advanced in the above paragraph suggests that the text advances this “apolitical” relationship as a counterpoint to political activism. However, such an approach does not offer an alternative, even if it appears to, because it is essentially self-serving. By championing such an alliance, between a “Brahmin” and a “Dalit”, a “scientist” and a “clerk” respectively, the novel further proves that while it is still willing to lend its support to individual pursuits, however unethical they may be, it remains deeply sceptical of lower-caste mobilization.

By choosing to side with Ayyan Mani’s individualism, the novel also undermines its critique of caste privilege, since Ayyan Mani’s victory neither develops into a political solidarity that may foster the spirit of social transformation and nor does it become a personal politics which is radically disruptive. It is highly probable that just like the last scene of the novel where Ayyan Mani talks to his son about indulging in yet another game one last time, his tricks in the office premises might also meet a similar never-ending, cyclical ending. The conclusion of the novel, therefore, seems to represent the reestablishment of the status quo with only minor amendments. While the public might forget the myth propagated by Ayyan Mani sooner or later, a milder version of Arvind Acharya is back in his intellectual pursuits at the Institute. The underlying threat that the novel neither builds entirely nor dodges aside is how Ayyan Mani has undergone a visible change — from being emphatically critical of political opportunists like Waman in the middle of the novel to strengthening their political game towards the end, culminating in the form of a violent uprising. Whether Ayyan Mani actively pursues caste-based politics or keeps away from it, both the possibilities seem conservative given the political worldview of the novel. Moreover, the sexism embodied by Ayyan Mani is all the more heightened towards the conclusion of the narrative, further adding to the novel’s problematic politics.

The last part of the novel resonates with the opening scene where Ayyan Mani was desiring upper-class women. In the concluding part, too, readers witness Ayyan Mani in a similar situation, this time accompanied with his son and wife — an image suggestive of a “happy” family that has finally shaken up structural oppression if not entirely broken free from it. However, what has not changed is the sexist ideology Ayyan Mani stands for. He continues to observe the “walkers” and sexualize them:

Young women in good shoes walked in haste, as though they were fleeing from the fate of looking like their mothers; proud breasts bounced and soft thighs shuddered. Newly betrothed girls went with long strides to abolish fat before the bridal night when they might have to yield on the pollen of a floral bed to a stranger bearing K-Y Jelly. (325–326)

In the above reference, Ayyan Mani’s misogynistic comments about upper-class women from the beginning of the novel find reiteration since the first two lines are almost exact replicas of the second paragraph of the novel. By repeating Ayyan Mani’s thoughts, the narrative intimates that his ideological position has not altered, and he continues to take delight in sexually lampooning upper-caste and upper-class women, attaining power in the process. However, in keeping with most parts of the novel, the concluding section also uses Ayyan Mani’s gaze to conceal its overt sexism. From commenting on women’s bodies to constantly making them an object for male lust, sexually loaded comments, such as the paragraph above, are clearly directed at establishing male camaraderie and alienating women.

The major pitfalls of Serious Men are its troublesome gender politics that go unchecked as well as the text’s refusal to counter Ayyan Mani’s individualism. The only scene in which his Brahmin employers call time on his game turns into an epic battle between the upper-caste oppressors and the oppressed Dalit. Ironically, the factually unimpeachable men face public humiliation for their casteism while the ethically dubious Ayyan Mani plays the victim. Since the novel’s narrative justice is premised on the riot led by Dalit youths, the novel’s subversion of casteist attitudes gets coopted by its stereotypical representation of Dalit politics. While the narrative interrogates the casteist mindset in society, it does so at the cost of wreaking havoc on civil society. Moreover, the chief beneficiaries of the agitation are Ayyan Mani and S. Waman, the Dalit leader — two opportunists whose profound sense of individualism directly align with market capitalism. Although throughout the novel the writer subverted supremacist beliefs via Ayyan Mani’s character, the conclusion invalidates his subversion by presenting a scene of a violent riot causing disruption. The stereotypical representation of lower-caste politics in the novel chimes with Sharmila Rege’s observation about the different responses that caste assertions generate in the public sphere: “The elite savarna students who decried the reservation policy claimed that it was the ‘lower castes’ who reiterated caste identities and that the upper caste student was secular and did not observe caste practices” (Rege, 2006: 2). By capturing the popular response to caste politics, wherein the burden of caste resides entirely with the individual belonging to the lower caste, Rege’s argument highlights that the articulation of caste issues in the public forum often gets perceived as a reiteration of caste structures. Because the novel does not distinguish between caste assertion and caste violence, making them almost interchangeable, the violent outbreak portrayed towards the end of the narrative might also go on to legitimate the threat that the likes of Ayyan Mani pose to the modern society. By neither holding Ayyan Mani responsible for his conduct nor providing a glimpse of progressive politics, Joseph’s novel does not suggest any enabling alternative for the reader.

Conclusion

Serious Men deserves appreciation for bringing forth the dynamics of caste in urban spaces without portraying the Dalit self as a mere victim. With its strategic use of language, the novel constructs a Dalit protagonist who could challenge caste hierarchies while reducing people across caste, class, and gender into ridiculous objects at his disposal. Yet, the novel’s apparent bias against women characters that are reduced to mere “types”, as well as its critique of caste politics that does not provide any kind of narrative redemption for the reader, showcase how the novel’s politics of caste is evasive. Joseph empowers the Dalit man to critique caste forces but does not carry this forward into a political resistance that might bring about real political change. The novel’s caricature of lower-caste politics depicts the limitations of caste politics in India without providing the reader with a substantial alternative. Hence, Serious Men causes thought-provoking disturbances that unsettle popular casteist assumptions about Indian society, but such disturbances are also get coopted to fit into a narrative of Ayyan Mani’s individualism. Ayyan Mani destabilizes power structures only to replace them with old/new structures. Hence, the novel suffers from a disconnect between Ayyan Mani’s critique of casteism and its portrayal of anti-caste politics, and this becomes the novel’s ultimate reactionary impulse.