Early Echoes of Digital Alienation in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August: An Indian Story

Abstract

Before the advent of the digital media, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel English, August: An Indian Story (1988) anticipated the divided consciousness of the digital era. The novel swirls around two poles, the fantasies of the western media and the shadowy terrain of post-colonial India which is recognized by Agastya Sen, an IAS trainee who is caught in between. Mediated images, western cultural imports, cassette music, pornography are things that impact Agastya’s world in the novel. The fragmented self in a technologically overburdened world is mirrored in the novel’s identity crisis. It will examine the novel’s protagonist, his/her sense of selfhood and how the novel’s consumption of media, linguistic hybridity and cultural fragmentation is eroded this sense of selfhood. These keywords can be considered a proto-digital story. There are also references to postmodern fiction and film and the discussion contextualizes Chatterjee’s novel within the broader narrative of postcolonial alienation. The paper also addresses the modernity of solitude Agastya foreshadows with private life in a screen mediated manner. This novel will explore, not only a problem of technology, but a problem of culture: that of the precursors to digital alienation, as a phenomenon of the postcolonial era, of mimicry, of linguistic dissonances and psychological drift.