From Mimicry to Mockery: A Reading of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s IAS Novels

The day-to day micro-governance of the world's largest democracy is performed through the multi-tiered machinery of the Indian Administrative Service which was established by the East India Company as the Indian Civil Service in the late eighteenth century. Ontologically perceived, it is an immensely complex system, devised by the administrators of a colonial government to rule a group of ‘natives' with whom they had hardly anything in common. The inevitable heavy influx of Indians into the service post-Independence has only accentuated its hybrid nature. This article seeks to understand the hybrid nature of this system and its representatives through the fictional representation by Upamanyu Chatterjee of the “steel frame” of the welfare state. In Upamanyu Chatterjee's novels, English, August (1988) and its sequel The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), the protagonist, Agastya Sen, an IAS officer, is a classic representation of the hybridity of the system that he serves. Burdened with the name of a mythical Indian Saint, Agastya, the son of a Hindu Bengali father and a Goanese Christian mother, epitomizes the in-betweenness of the postcolonial subject. His missionary education and Anglicized upbringing have conferred upon him several nicknames like August and English. His existential crisis comes to a head when he finds himself taxed with the task of understanding the system of governance in the far-off district of Madna as a trainee officer. This article seeks to understand Agastya's plight as symptomatic of the problems inherent within the structure of the Indian Administrative Service and the state of India itself. Using the theoretical framework developed by Homi K Bhabha in The Location of Culture, I would like to understand Agastya as a postcolonial ‘mimic' subject and the system he represents as a ‘hybrid' and ‘ambivalent' one.