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Change, Chetan Bhagat style

Game the system for love, money and a Bollywoodesque happy ending

 To the Chetan Bhagat hero, money matters, as does money-making.
To the Chetan Bhagat hero, money matters, as does money-making.

Unless you went to sleep in 2004 and woke up today, an Indian novel selling in lakhs would be utterly unremarkable to you. In these 10 years, Chetan Bhagat happened. He wrote books that had the reach of crowd-pleasing Bollywood blockbusters, and they had a similar grip on what matters to the crowd. There’s more to Bhagat, though, than the phenomenal sales or the many snide jokes that his prose inspires. The thing is, and snigger all you like: Chetan Bhagat wants to change his readers.

From Five Point Someone, which is a novel about the national fixation for engineers, to The 3 Mistakes of My Life, one of the few Indian novels to engage with the 2002 Gujarat riots, to Two States, about the hoary tradition of Indian parents refusing to let their children marry the people they want, the Chetan Bhagat novel maps many of the prejudices of the Indian middle classes —  but also nudges them towards a less constricted worldview. For that reason, it might be interesting to ask of his books: What do they say about his readers (many of them male)? What of their reality is affirmed in these pages? And what is the change that they confront?

To the Chetan Bhagat hero, money matters, as does money-making. Even if he realises that the best institutions (and he’s in them) are designed for mind-numbing conformity, or that the banking job (which he is qualified for) he needs is deathly boring, he knows he has to ace the system, earn enough and then become a writer. What’s stacked against him is, usually, an old way of life, from fuddy-duddy professors to stubborn parents. But, there are few mutinies in a Bhagat novel, his characters are pragmatic anti-rebels who know the world is what it is. In Two States, as in that other defining love story Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Krish and Ananya refuse to elope and do everything to win over their partner’s parents. But if Raj and Simran are traumatised by the thought of sex before shaadi, the lead characters of Two States are not afraid of pleasure. Individual choice is all-important in Bhagat’s books, but family and tradition need to be negotiated with —  and a good bargain struck.

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Like Indian engineering colleges, Bhagat’s novels are mostly male worlds. The Chetan Bhagat hero starts out clueless about women, but it is in learning to treat them as  equals that the hero finds love. Can an Indian man know how to accept a no? Madhav Jha from Half Girlfriend fails the test with the crassest of moves, but learns the lesson. At their best, the people in love in Bhagat’s novels spar in a happy, friendly banter. But the author is never really invested in the woman. In Half Girlfriend, Riya Somani, poor little rich girl from Lutyen’s Delhi, the love interest of our hero, Madhav from Bihar’s Dumraon, is not even half-realised as a character. She goes from being a free spirit trapped in an oppressive family to suddenly agreeing to drop out of college to marry a rich industrialist —  and then helpfully vanishes from the plot a few times so that Madhav Jha can chase her halfway across the world. She exists only to help Madhav on his quest from becoming a “non-English type” at St Stephen’s, Delhi — “where even the grass grows in English” —  to a global Indian.

So, why despite their liberal intentions, do Bhagat’s novels come across as half-liberal spaces? He is the storyteller who was scorned by the English-speaking, literary elite, but a generation of nouveau readers who will pause Candy Crush to read his books are where he draws his power from. With millions in book sales, newspaper columns and the right tilt in his politics, he is the half-rebel speaking from within the system —  and blind to quite a few of its inequalities. Madhav Jha, whom he describes as the victim of the caste system that looks down on people not fluent in English, is a former royal from Bihar. And from the brave basketball player who, despite his nervousness, will confront the snobbery of an interview panel at St Stephen’s with homespun wisdom spoken in Hindi, he becomes a cliche of a success story. There are no underdogs in this book, as much as an author in a hurry to set the wheels of success turning. Madhav returns to Dumraon, Swades-style, where his mother struggles to run a dilapidated school with paltry funds. With one corrupt politician, benevolent but poor royals and schools without toilets, this is a village defanged of all caste and religion. What are the school’s problems? Money. In rushes Bhagat with the answer: a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which Madhav wings with a speech delivered in — you guessed it — English.

Festive offer

Are you someone who picks up a book for solutions to your life? Or do you read it for your story to be reflected back at you, with all its incompleteness? Bhagat clearly believes he needs to sell himself to his readers as Mr Fix-it. That to read him is a way of figuring out a way to work any system that excludes them, to believe that it can be gamed to yield money, love and a Bollywood happy ending. In a country bursting with the eagerness to make a better life, is it any wonder that Chetan Bhagat, peddler of dreams, is a bestseller?

amrita.dutta@expressindia.com

First uploaded on: 23-10-2014 at 00:17 IST
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