BOOK REVIEW- 2: Serious Men by Manu Joseph

 

BOOK REVIEW-2

   SERIOUS MEN by MANU JOSEPH

Serious Men is the debut novel by Manu Joseph published in 2010. The novel was published simultaneously in India, Britain, the US and Canada and has been translated into Dutch, German, French, Italian, Danish and Serbian. Manu Joseph, a journalist by profession has won Hindu Best Fiction award in 2010 for Serious Men for its ‘panache’. The novel has also won the PEN/ Open Book Award in 2011 and was also shortlisted for Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010.  Serious Men is an extremely satirical portrayal of contemporary Indian society. It is a social satire which scathingly attacks discrimination and prejudices prevailing in our country on the basis of caste, class and gender. A Film adaptation of Serious Men was premiered on Netflix on October 2020, directed by Sudhir Mishra starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui, playing Ayyan Mani’s role. Manu Joseph has also authored The Illicit Happiness of Other People, a semi-autobiographical novel published in 2012.

Manu Joseph’s Serious Men narrates the story of Ayyan Mani who is a clerk and personal assistant to a brilliant astronomer Arvind Acharya, director of The Institute of Theory and Research. Ayyan Mani who is a Dalit and son of a sweeper strangled in the slums of Mumbai had worked very hard and made his entry to a government job. Being an opportunist, determined to entertain his family by giving hopes of a colourful future to his wife Oja and son Aditya, Mani dares to weave a fiction around his boy which convinces everyone that his son Adi is a remarkable child prodigy, a genius. In his attempt to confirm this myth, Mani plots many strategies.

Contrast to Mani, his family and other eighty thousand people in the BDD chawl stand Brahmin scientists ruling the Institute. Arvind Acharya, the head of the Institute and an eminent world scientist was obsessed with his theory about microscopic aliens falling to earth. This man who vehemently opposed ‘Big Bang theory’ was capable even of bagging a Nobel Prize in the field. The Balloon Project was Acharya’s mission to prove his theory by bringing air forty-one kilometres above earth in samplers to test for living cells. In this mission, Acharya was assisted by Oparna Goshmaulik, an astrobiologist, one of the very few women in the all-male Institute. Eventually after months of working together, Oparna and Acharya get into a relationship and spend nights at the basement lab of the Institute when Acharya’s wife Lavanya left for Madras to attend a funeral for ten days. On her return, Acharya confesses the matter to his wife and ends the illicit affair. Sad and dejected, both Acharya and Oparna decides to move on and work for the successful completion of the project.

Ultimately samplers are brought to the lab, checked and presence of living cells is confirmed. Meanwhile, Mani manipulates new plans in making his son a national hero featuring him in newspapers, TV channels and showcasing him in the public. On the other side, news from Cardiff and Boston confirms no presence of living cells in the air which upsets Acharya. Oparna determined to avenge Acharya resigns declaring that she was forced by Acharya to contaminate the sample and manipulate the whole thing. Following a trial, Acharya get ousted from the Institute. As a result, Jana Nambodri, Acharya’s political rival becomes the chief and proceeds with his ‘Giant Ear’ project which search for extraterrestrial intelligence with radio signals.  Many of the frauds played by Mani is caught and warned by Jana who along with his fellows make insensitive remarks about Dalits.

Ayyan Mani helps Acharya to find a place in the basement to work and in return Mani gets JET questions from Acharya. As a result, eleven-year old Adi cracks JET and becomes popular in the whole country. Mani who has the habit of eavesdropping, has recorded many crucial conversations in the Institute. Finally, Mani manages to get Jana and his fellow astronomers ousted giving the recordings in the press conference on which Jana talks ill of Dalits and women. As a result, Acharya gets his place and Mani resumes with his game.

Serious Men is a serious examination of the lingering effects of the caste system in contemporary India. The Institute maintains a strict caste hierarchy where the Indian scientists primarily Brahmin, is contrasted with the Dalit staff who serve them. Ayyan Mani, an aspirational man who find himself stuck in the Mumbai slums is one among the non-scientific staff members at the Institute belonging to the lower caste.

When Acharya does not exhibit bias based on caste, Jana Nambodri and many others openly shows it. Jana condescendingly talks about the reservations for backward castes and the dangers that might happen when power goes to the hands of the lower castes. He authoritatively speaks of the racial intelligence and cerebral limitations of the Dalits, Africans, Eastern Europeans and women. Jal, another astronomer opines that Dalit people are meant to clean toilets and not fit for white-collar jobs. Not just that, many science lectures and other academic engagements held in the Institute were only meant to glorify the Brahminic past. Thereby the neutral position attributed to such institutes are thrown into air by Manu Joseph in this work.

Ayyan Mani is a brilliant man aware of his capabilities and is determined to escape from his bad circumstances. He also being a very caste conscious person, harbours a deep resentment for the Brahmin culture and finds ways to exact revenge. Mani notices caste hierarchy even in the roads where cars are most powerful, and then comes the motorcyclists, pedestrians and cyclists. Similarly, even though his son studies in a reputed school, guards there who know the whereabouts of Mani does not salute him as they do it to other parents. Mani sometimes even play tricks on scientists, eavesdrops all their conversations, and even open, read and reseal confidential couriered letters. Finally, he uses the recording in order to expose Jana and his team of their caste-based prejudices. As a result, they are ousted from the Institute and he ignites the caste war that he always dreamt of.

 Another interesting strategy he employs to avenge the age-old discrimination of Brahmins is the element of “Thought for the Day”. Mani frequently manipulates anti-Brahminic quotes and writes it in the blackboard attributing it to some famous world personalities. One among them as manipulated to be said by Vallumpuri John is:

Reservations for the low castes in colleges is a very unfair system. To compensate, let us offer the Brahmins the right to be treated as animals for 3,000 years and at the end of it let’s give them a 15 per cent reservation.

The novel exposes how difficult it is for a Dalit clerk to survive even in such higher institutes usually tagged very rational. The protagonist Ayyan Mani well aware of the hierarchy and hegemony operated based on caste attempts to subvert it in very different ways.

Religion along with caste also has a place in the novel. Ayyan Mani fed up with casteist Hinduism embraces Buddhism and rejects Hindu gods calling them Brahmin products. Occasionally Mani has arguments with his wife on the issue who accuses Mani’s renunciation of faith as the reason for Adi’s deaf ear. Similar arguments take place between Adam and his wife Naseem in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.  Question of conversion comes through Sister Chastity, the principal at Adi’s school who tries to persuade Mani to accept Christianity trying to evoke the caste issues. This conversion strategy of Christianity which does not provide any betterment in the status of Dalits in the end is talked about in Karukku, the autobiographical novel by Bama.  Acharya’s rejection of Big Bang theory as unscientific is because that he feels it a product of Christianity or the Vatican and the Pope.

Oparna Goshmaulik is a character featured in the all-male world of the Institute. Unlike Oja and other women of the chawl, she is freer to wear anything of her wish and venture at night as part of her career. But inside the Institute too, which is said to reside highest minds, she had to endure misogynism and voyeurism. She falls into an illicit romance with aged Acharya which completely shatters the concept of age in love. She is called as the basement ‘item’ screwed up by Acharya in the novel. One of the most misogynistic statements from Jana Nambodiri goes like this, “Look at women. They will get nowhere in science, everybody knows that. Their brains are too small... But today you can’t say this anymore.”

Ayyan Mani is extremely misogynistic and voyeuristic in the novel. He is interested in breasts and arses and peeps at every woman possible. He comments, “These days, men live like men only in the homes of the poor”, teasing that the rich men had to share responsibilities with their wives.

On the other hand, Oja Mani is a discontented woman who spent her time watching weeping serials and colourful TV commercials. Acharya’s wife, Lavanya is posed as a dutiful wife. Oparna even though privileged, marriage as an inevitable responsibility falls on her too. Oja Mani represents that mediocre Indian woman who lives for the family. Issues of wife beating and alcoholism in the slums are mentioned and a more serious and a common issue of burning wives in North India is also brought into light.

In the novel, disheartening stereotype of a forgiving wife and working woman as a seductive mistress is constructed through the characters of Lavanya and Oparna. Through the affair of Oparna and Acharya, the novel manages to affirm another stereotype that a man and a woman, however career-oriented, cannot work together at night, but the space and time will result in their love making which would doom them both, to be clear, men for a short while and the woman forever. In short, Serious Men only talks about achievements of men in the novel.

Another serious issue discussed in the novel is that of the child Adi. The novel hints at the conditions of extra brilliant or differently-abled children in the Indian educational system. For the brilliant questions Adi asks in the class, even though made to ask by Mani, the school authorities summon his parents and asks them to make him behave properly in the class. Adi is complained of not being disciplined and questioning the authority of teachers in the class. He is also teased by other children insensitively for his hearing defect.

Serious Men also gives a clear picture of working of many institutes, especially science institutes in India. Power struggles and casteism prevailing in such institutes are discussed. Along with all the problems, the novel does not forget to mention ever changing nature of the science. Serious Men woven with elements of fiction as well as scientific facts also hints at India’s unsustainable development where rockets had to be transported in a cycle which reminds of the photograph of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam doing the same.

Media is criticised for its blindness towards anything sensational. Adi is raised to the status of a national hero by the gullible media without any check on the reliability of the news. Ayyan Mani also makes fun of the TV ads which poses hair fall, dark skin and so on as the greatest problems in the world. In the opening of the novel, tyranny of fashion and standard body shape that rules the people of Mumbai is discussed by beautifully picturing people walking at the waterfront not to look aged and lovers in jeans that expose their buttocks. Usage of women as ‘ceremonial dolls’ in formal functions is also funnily spoken in the novel.

The novel is not an emotional portrayal of lives of Dalits in the country. But it is about the new shapes that these prejudices take and new ways of fighting it out. The novel gives no declaration of moral winners or losers in the end but shows the survival of the fittest. Unlike Arundhati Roy’s Velutha of The God of Small Things, here Ayyan Mani does not lose his life but emerges victorious. Manu Joseph do not attempt a compassionate and sympathetic view of the poor, rather portray them in a more realistic way. The author’s keen observations of human nature as well as idiosyncrasies with his sense of humour have made the novel an interesting one. Serious Men is a biting satire on Indian society which is always judgemental and hypocritical. The novel exposes the series of prejudices that still rule the Indian society in a satirical manner.

Joseph, Manu. Serious Men. Noida: Harper Collins, 2010.