Hari Kunzru
My Revolutions is a significant departure from his earlier work. Where his debut, The Impressionist, was a meandering, satirical romp through the ridiculousness of Imperial India and his follow-up, Transmission, a pacy, three-track saga about how the internet connects all of us whether we like it or not, My Revolutions is a political work about anti-establishment revolutionaries. “One of the interests I had in writing this book was precisely to question the consumer version of the ’60s and ’70s counter culture that we’ve inherited,” said Kunzru in a telephone interview from London.
In a terse 277 pages, Kunzru relates the life of Chris Carver, a 50-year-old former radical whose carefully constructed life as Michael Frame, small-town father and husband, is in danger of disintegrating when a figure from his past reappears. Set in 1998, Kunzru switches between present day and the ’60s and ’70s, when Britain’s new left was at its peak. Carver is arrested at an anti-Vietnam protest in 1968. When he gets out of prison, he is quickly indoctrinated into a group whose activities rapidly go from social activism to subversive vandalism to outright terrorism.
Today, laments Kunzru, changing the world is a lifestyle choice, at least in the west: drink fair trade coffee, offset your carbon emissions with a donation to a forest in east Africa. “Twenty one-year-olds have a wish for a kind of radical shake-up of the status quo but whereas once they channelled this into an idea of political resolution, they have been domesticated,” he said. “Now you have green politics, which is something you do when you’re shopping.” Of course, in India, radical-left movements such at the Communist Party of India (Maoist) continue to thrive. In a startling parallel to Kunzru’s Carver, 50-year-old Sridhar Srinivasan, a former student of Elphinstone College, and 49-year-old Vernon Gonsalves, a one-time trainee with Siemens, were arrested in Mumbai last month for alleged ties with the far left.
This is an excerpt from Leo Mirani’s review in Time Out Mumbai, of Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, My Revolutions. The good folks at Time out Mumbai have just brought out their third anniversary issue. Vir Sanghvi, writing about Indian magazines, had this to say recently: “The single best magazine in India, across all genres, is the Mumbai TimeOut so I make a point of reading it. But as for the rest, I couldn’t be bothered.”
