The Other Kinds of Grotesque: Neel Mukherjee’s Disenchantment of the glorious and the Issue of Nationalism through The Lives of Others

Abstract

This paper interrogates Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others as a site where the “grotesque” is re‑inscribed beyond colonial and bourgeois nationalist frameworks, and where Kolkata’s contested identity becomes a metaphor for the fraught imagining of the nation in post‑colonial Bengal. Through the decaying Ghosh family, the peasant Nitai Das, and the revolutionary Supratik, Mukherjee exposes the fractures of caste, class, and ideology that unsettle monolithic narratives of progress and unity, replacing the colonial “city of horror” with an indigenous, unsettling realism. The article situates its reading against the backdrop of colonial and anticolonial constructions of Kolkata, drawing on Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between the “material” and “spiritual” domains of nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore’s affective, aspirational imagination of the nation.  It argues that Mukherjee neither restores a Tagorean “golden motherland” nor replicates colonial caricatures, but instead decentres both by foregrounding the grotesque everyday; household decay, slum violence, and the unmourned death of Chhaya, as a more honest reckoning with Bengal’s post‑independence realities. By analysing the Ghosh mansion as a palimpsest of colonial grandeur, bourgeois hypocrisy, and unspoken subaltern suffering, the paper shows how Mukherjee uses the form of the novel to track the “disenchantment” of nationalist idealism, especially in the figure of Supratik, whose radical commitment collapses into betrayal and violence.  In this way, the essay positions The Lives of Others as a crucial intervention into contemporary debates on nationalism, arguing that Kolkata’s fragmented, grotesque vitality; its refusal of purity and easy unity, becomes a model for reimagining the nation as a contested, imagined, and ethically ambiguous project.