LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 25:6 June 2025
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Joint Ventures: A Commentary on Health and Urbanisation and the Use of Marijuana in Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August: An Indian Story

Somreeta Dinda, Ph.D. Scholar and
K. Madhavi, Professor

Abstract

This paper locates Upamanyu Chatterjee's debut novel English, August: An Indian Story (1988) within a framework of critical health humanities and provides a commentary on the healthcare infrastructure prevailing in the "hottest town in India" - Madna. Healthcare provision in India is a multifaceted issue encompassing multiple challenges and opportunities and this is reflected in many of the casual conversations of the characters and through the technique of stream of consciousness in the novel. The fictional rural towns of Madna and Jompanna are scattered with a diverse range of population with remote healthcare access and insanitary practices, which serve as a sample for the degrading condition of healthcare practices in rural villages of India.
In this work of fiction which touches upon the aspects of existentialism, upper middle-class diaspora, autobiographical elements and corruption in the Indian Administrative Services, Chatterjee projects a controversial and absurd hero in the character of Agastya Sen, also known as August, who uses marijuana to escape from the mundane realities of his life in Madna. His use of marijuana creates a sense of numbness and euphoria amidst the monotony of his bureaucratic job and the suffocating conservatism of small-town India. The banal narrative and the frequent use of the word marijuana in the pages compels the reader to scrutinise the character?s reliance on this substance leading to an existential despair. This paper will explore the condition of health practices in the small town and the use of marijuana as a coping mechanism to deal with the monotony and disillusionment of the protagonist.

Keywords:health practices, marijuana, disillusionment, existentialism, cultural dislocation

Introduction

Upamanyu Chatterjee's 1988 novel English, August: An Indian Story, is a humorous and irreverent review of bureaucracy and its relation to the protagonist - Agastya Sen. In the novel, Agastya is a bureaucrat, a middle-class officer of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) stuck in small-town India. His character sparks significant criticism on account of the frequent use of the words "cannabis" and "pornography" in association with a person of his rank. Spivak's subaltern argument of an alternative vision of subaltern agency is offered through a close study of narrative voice. The tantalising subtitle enumerates the dialectic between "English" and "Indian", which dominates the narrative. In the opening pages of the novel, Chatterjee purposefully draws attention to the hybridity of his protagonist who desires to be English and hence earns the nickname August (Shandilya, 2014).

A distinctive feature of this novel is that nothing significant happens during his purgatorial year in the provinces of Madna and Jompanna. The readers do not find the usual pleasures of an unfolding narrative, and this is evident from the outset of the novel which reads - '[t]he district life that [Agastya] lived and saw was the official life, common to all districts, deadly dull'(27). This novel, full of its anti-proairetic tendencies, drives Agastya to enter a 'purely iterative existence ... where the direction and movement of plot appear to be finished' (Scott, 2012). Over the course of the novel, Agastya's life becomes progressively dominated by routine, further disrupting the narrative's forward trajectory. Everything he does, he does repeatedly, ritually, day in and day out, until it is not just the narrative's energy that comes under threat but its very narratability - for as Barthes observes, "to repeat excessively is to enter into loss, into the zero of the signified''. Moreover, the protagonist faces an identity crisis courtesy of his cultural dislocation. This cultural dislocation arises on account of alienation and displacement of the habitus of the protagonist. The stark contrast between his upbringing and his current rural environment highlights his cultural hybridity and confusion, pushing him more towards an existential angst. The predictability of this monotonous bureaucratic life in Madna leads Agastya to cope up with the aids of cannabis and pornography.

The stress and coping mechanism theory of Lazarus and Folkman focuses on the varying ways people manage a stressful situation, cannabis being one of them. This paper will attempt to analyse the theme of the use of cannabis as the protagonist's coping mechanism by employing Lazarus's psychological stress theory. By employing the diverse theories of cognitive appraisal, coping strategies and reappraisal, a complex interplay of reflections will exemplify how the protagonist grapples with the demands of their environment while seeking to maintain a sense of self in the face of adversity.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Somreeta Dinda, Ph.D. Scholar
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences NIT Warangal
sd23hsr2r01@student.nitw.ac.in
&
K. Madhavi, Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences NIT Warangal
madhavik24@nitw.ac.in
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