Chapter I

INTRODUCTION

‘Geniuses are born, not made.’ 19th December, 1959. Not a very
significant time from socio-political angle when Shri Sudhir Ranjan
Chatterjee’s son Upamanyu Chatterjee sees the first light of this world.
It is the mid of the twentieth century. Two World Wars have passed,
leaving their bloody footsteps. Rootlessness, anxiety, neurotic diseases,
sense of alienation are found everywhere in the world like stinking
dead bodies, but in India the picture is not yet too bad. The twentieth
century syndromes will be stronger no doubt, within a decade or two
when Upamanyu will look at the world with grown up and more
matured sense and sensibilities. So, Upamanyu Chatterjee grows up, in
a higher circle as he belongs to an elite class, with higher I.Q. and soaks
from the rapidly changing society, like an adult, the changed air and
water, without getting contaminated. He has the background of rich
Bangla literature, he loves Rabindranath, he is brought up in English
school surroundings… and thus has a very good grip in English
language and literature, later on studies French literature too (it
becomes almost his own as he marries a French lady). He has
knowledge of Hindi too which gets reflected in his writings. All these,
the knowledge of so many languages and the awareness of the
changing society, of man’s self-centredness, the change from joint to
nuclear family, selfishness, apathy taking the place of sympathy, all
affect him and make his personality. Being an IAS officer himself, he
has better chance to see the society, to see the hollowness of the highest
 2

authorities and to look at the helplessness of the lowest. So we find the

writer in whose writings, all these things have been picturized, who
looks at life as a spectator at the same time plays his part, if any, like an
amateur, who does not hesitate to present the reality, however horrible
and filthy it might be, but does not forget to wrap it with the potential
dose of humour and satire. He creates laughter, makes fun of the
situations, because, today, the situation is that, one can get everything
in life, except real laughter. “Vadet satyam priyam vakyam, na vadet satyam
apriyam”, says our Shastras, Upamanyu therefore presents unpalatable,
rude and crude truth, with laughter to make it palatable and interesting.
In all his novels, he has presented in some way or other, his mentality,
his familiar things, his experiences. He does not present any world out
of imagination. He is not a romantic in this respect, on the contrary, he
is totally realistic. Like almost all geniuses, in his personal life, he is
introvert, even unsocial but he is very very extrovert in his writings
where he leaves no stone unturned to portray his picture with bright
colours. But he is an expert in using dark colours too and leaves
something unsaid for the readers to continue thinking.
Upamanyu Chatterjee grows up and becomes a writer, thus,
weaving in him the colours and syndromes of two Ages consequently,
‘The Modern’ and ‘The Post-modern’. One thing is very clear that in
spite of being a transitional writer, accumulating in him the traits of the
late twenties and the early twenty first centuries, at least the post-
modern trend of Godlessness is not in him. His protagonists, whether
Agastya or Jamun, or even Bhola, do realize something, something
higher, something beyond the body, atleast out of the physical if not
totally metaphysical, something related with the goodness of mind, of
soul at the end. They step out of their selfish self at least for something.
 3

No writer can be totally objective, no writer can leave his or her

own self completely. Here and there, he or she presents or rather, is
compelled to present his or her own self because writing is a creation.
The creator and the created can never be separated totally. In case of
Chatterjee too, the way can not be altered. Therefore we do find
Chatterjee’s scattered self’s reflection sometimes in immature Agastya,
sometimes in more matured Agastya Sen who compromises himself
with his job though not whole heartedly and sometimes in Jamun’s
feelings and problems with a paralysed father. So, autobiographical
touch is always there. It is there even in Bhola, the most complicated
protagonist, at least with his concerns, as Chatterjee himself admits.
Among the post-colonial writers of the fiction world of Indian
writing in English Upamanyu Chatterjee has a very significant place.
Tarun J. Tejpal in the article, “The Literary Babu”, comments: “… he
blew into the musty world of Indo-Anglican writing like a blast of
peppermint into a jawful of halitosis, armed with a comfortable
candour.”1 Radhika Mohanram points out, “The corpus of Upamanyu
Chatterjee is not vast but his is a powerful emergent voice in Indian
post-colonial literature.”2 He has presented the inner vulgar but very
realistic and authentic picture of the Indian milieu including the
administrative and political world with a minute physiological and
realistic observation of course with a tinge of sharp humour and satire.
Anjana Sharma equates Chatterjee’s vision of humanity with W.B.
Yeats. She writes:
Eighty years apart, cultures, civilizations, even craft and
temperament apart, Yeats and Chatterjee share an identical
vision of a de-centred, de-natured world.3
 4

Dr. Mukul Dixit opines that Chatterjee has for the first time, focused on
a ‘new class of Westernised Urban Indians that was hitherto ignored in
the Regional as well as the English fiction of India. He declares that
Chatterjee’s imagination is as fertile as Kafka’s, his tratic sense is as
keen as Camus’s, his understanding of the absurd-comic (farce) in life is
at par with Milan Kundra and Saul Bellow.
Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in a Hindu Bengali Brahmin
family on 19th December, 1959 in Patna, Bihar. His father Sudhir Ranjan
Chatterjee was working in Delhi, so he completed his school education
from St. Xavier’s School, Delhi and later he went to St. Stephen’s
College in Delhi for his higher education and did his Master Degree in
English Literature. He was a brilliant student and always did excellent
in his examination securing first division right from the beginning.
Later in 1991, he completed a course on international economic relations
from a University in France. When he was in St. Stephen’s College,
switching from History to English and destructing one year being a
“dope fiend” his father, retired from air, had a stroke leading to partial
paralysis. Chatterjee quietly tailored his life to his father’s routine,
concentrated on his academics and did brilliantly.
For those who thought English, August was in the main a
private joke between Stephanians, it’ll come as a rude
surprise to know that Chatterjee sets very little store by his
college years and is dismissive of its ‘meaningless
activities’.4

While talking to Sagarika Ghosh Chatterjee frankly admits,

‘This St. Stephen’s school of Indian literature makes no sense to
me. Someone asked me to write on it and I said, I have absolutely
nothing to say!’ All he remembers of St. Stephen’s College are the
long bus rides.5
 5

But he is roused when asked about the idea of a Stephenian school of

writers, a categorization he firmly rejects. “They’ve even said, without
irony or comedy, that if Vikram Seth had been educated in India, he
would have gone to Stephen’s.”6
The proverb “Morning shows the day” suits Chatterjee very well
as while studying in high school, he penned a play, the story which he
adopted from a Hitchcock drama, ‘Dilemma’. Though the drama was
never published, but it won the school drama competition in spite of it
caricaturing the school rules and regulations. After completing his M.A.
degree in English Literature, he taught English in St. Stephen’s College
for one year. In 1983 he joined the elite Indian Administrative Service
from Maharashtra cadre. And now, the Appointments Committee of the
Cabinet (AAC) has approved Chatterjee’s appointment as the Secretary
(joint secretary level) of Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board
(PNGRB) till March 20,2016, or until further orders. Chatterjee, 54, has
been a joint secretary in the ministry of defence since March, 2009.
Chatterjee is married to a French journalist and has two daughters Sara
and Pia.
More than an administrator, Chatterjee is known in the corridors
as a litterateur who created some of the amazing English fiction.
In combination with his sockless shoes, greased hair, and
big-buckled belt out of the early ‘70s, he looks the part of the
laid-back, cynical creator of Agastya and Jamun, not an
eager-beaver bureaucrat oiling with spit and sweat the
escalator to secretaryship.7

Chatterjee has written a handful of short stories of which The

Assassination of Indira Gandhi (1986) and Watching Them are particularly
noteworthy. The Assassination of Indira Gandhi was anthologized abroad
 6

with the best short fiction of 1986. When asked why he stopped writing
short stories, he told Gowri Ramnarayan,
I started writing with a short story. Early reviews said
English, August is a collection of short stories! I have dozens
of plots in my head but I must switch off from novel writing
to do short fiction. Not easy. One day…8

He joined the IAS in 1983. His professional career not only marked the
beginning of his literary career, but also was the source from which he
created his wonderful characters. In 1990, Chatterjee lived as Writer in
Residence at the University in Kent, U.K. In 1998, he was appointed as
the Director (Language) in the Ministry of Human Resource
Development, Government of India.
Chatterjee who claims to have ‘no social life apart from reading
writing and attending to his 9 to 5 job,’ is a man of few words, someone
who hardly indulges in small talk. “He is a self confessed recluse of
sorts—“I hardly meet any people”—but on the other hand, he is
verbose enough in the books he writes. A dichotomy? Perhaps. But
then, Chatterjee’s life seems full of dichotomies. Two separate selves
working at two different levels. “For the last 20 years I’ve lived two
completely different life,”10 says Chatterjee. Despite satirizing the
administrative world Chatterjee never thinks to leave the IAS.
He acknowledges the contradiction and the comfort of his
choice, but adds that the establishment has been good to him
and that he has enjoyed the variety of his posting from
health to heritage. ‘I don’t think I would do better books if I
wrote full time. I write for amateurish reasons.’

Writing is a discipline like jogging, he says.11 While talking to The

Hindu, he says,
 7

I am not sure if I would produce more if I become a writer

full time. Here you have a 9-to-5 and when you do get down
to work, it’s nice to switch off and get onto something else.
Whereas I imagine if I was writing full time, I’d always be
looking for distractions to prevent me from getting the job
done. Writing is a sort of both tiresome and tiring, don’t you
think so?12

Actually Chatterjee is somewhat like his creations, Agastya

and Jamun: casual iconoclasts, poking fun at and
blaspheming the idiocies of the conventional without
breaking out of it. Ranting against their burden, but not
refusing to carry it.13

He accepts a fact also that it is also the subconscious need to have the
security of not having to worry about the next meal that keeps him at
his job with the government. A seasoned bureaucrat, Chatterjee has his
life well compartmentalized and prefers it that way. In an interview
with American broadcaster Leonard Lopate, he had said, “The
government and bureaucracy is very complex. It is difficult to leave.
Funnily enough one learns something new every day.”14 To this date,
Chatterjee continues to wake up early in the morning and write with
fountain pen something even if it is a sentence, in pen and paper before
he drops off his daughters to school, and leaves for office.
I lead two completely different lives. Schizophrenic. I take
four to five years, writing every day to produce a book. In a
genuine old-fashioned way, I’m an amateur writing for
pleasure. I find writing de-stressing. It brings order.
Otherwise you wake up, go to office, do kinds homework.
And the day passes….15

While talking to Sheela Reddy he confesses:

Advances don’t fundamentally interest me. It sounds
terribly naïve, but money doesn’t really mean anything to
me. If a lot of money come my way, I’m certainly not going
to say no. But it hasn’t come my way as yet and I’m not
 8

heartbroken. Had I been a full-time writer, it may have

bothered me more. You can’t possibly measure works by
money. We are not tennis players that we need to be rated in
this way.16

He stays away from contemporary literature. While talking to The

Hindustan Times he says, “I have not read enough of (Salman) Rushdie,
just ‘Midnight’s Children’. It was part of my preparations for my IAS
interview. It was in the same year the book was published.” On the
other hand, he is catching up with Bengali and French literature—two
languages close to his heart.
Try and read Bengali, try and read in French, it is a different
experience altogether. The more languages you know, the
less likely you are to become a terrorist.17

His novels are written in a humorous style and are intended to go

beyond the basic concept of comedy. He has defied conventional and
traditional writing and created a niche for himself. Through his works,
one can notice his protests against the austere world of the Indian
Administrative System and the political world. The characters of his
novels have a wry sense of humour, amazing language and an eye to
portray the life of middle-class Indian society. His novels are very rich
in satire which sometimes shocks his readers as he goes to an extent
which no one has dared to go to. Through his novels he has dared to
match the sensibility which one uncovers only in modern European
novels. He has written five novels upto now. They include English,
August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of
the Welfare State (2000), Weight Loss (2006) and Way to Go (2010).
Chatterjee admits that he likes continuity, which is why Way to Go picks
up where he left off in his second novel, The Last Burden (1993). Quite
like his third book The Mammaries of the Welfare State, that continued the
 9

world of Agastya Sen, the trainee civil servant protagonist of English,

August. This novel won him the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in
English in 2000. Chatterjee was honoured for his contribution to
contemporary literature by the French Government with the prestigious
Officier des Arts et des Lettres (Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters) in
2008. After receiving the award while chatting with IANS later,
Chatterjee said that it was an honour to be placed in the same pedestal
shared by the legendary Balamurali Krishna, Mahasweta Devi and
Raghu Rai. “Probably the reason why they gave me this award is
because of the fact that I am wearing a bandhgala and have a French
connection,”18 Chatterjee, whose wife is French, added as an
afterthought. His latest novel, Way to Go was shortlisted for the Hindu
Best Fiction Award in 2010.
… by the virtue of his observing skills and the fluidity of his
pen, he has opened the floodgates for literature which is not
only clever but also brash and awfully honest. And for a
change it enables Indians as well as foreigners to view this
nation for what it is than what it is popularized to be.19

While talking to Sagarika Ghose at Pakwan at the Le Meridien—a short

shuffle away from Parliament, Chatterjee comments,
It’s a challenge for us to find our sensibility. And to get
people to read our books. Sadly, Indians themselves disdain
other Indians who write in English as they think only sahibs
can write English.

Even the book critics are not very helpful in either way. “All the people
who write columns hate Indo-Anglican writers, so get used to a pretty
bad time from everybody,”20 adds Chatterjee.
Thus, from the bloody dusty dusk of one age and from the
anxiety filled, the prodigal dawn of the ciber age, this genius,
 10

Upamanyu Chatterjee takes and rejects, collects his own building

materials and builds his homes one after another, his own handwritten
homes, not even using ball pens but using fountain pens that are
thought to be outdated. Isn’t this enough for understanding his mind
set up, for understanding that though he is presenting the hollow,
rootless, self-centred youth of the post-modern age, he himself has a
solid mental platform on which he stands without caring for ‘what the
people would say’ like complexes.
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s maiden novel, English, August: An Indian
Story was published in the year 1988. In this novel the theme of
alienation, dislocation and the real portrayal of the Indian
administration in a remote area of India have been presented through
the character of a young anglicanised Indian whose thoughts are
dominated by sex, women, literature and drug. Through this novel,
Chatterjee discusses some serious issues that revolve around the ‘urban
educated youth’ and pictures a class of ‘Westernized People’ who are
otherwise unnoticed in regional and English fictional work.
His first book, English August: An Indian Story (which he
laments is still referred to him as ‘The Night of the August
Moon’, ‘Electric Moon’, et al.) displayed a ‘cool’, a with-it
cynicism that mocked many things, apart from the rural
education of an IAS initiate from urban India.21

According to Chatterjee,
English, August speaks of a world we (Indians) are all
familiar with but at the same time it is a world which hasn’t
been reflected in fiction. India tends to be romanticized and
English, August is anything but romantic.22

The novel was hailed as the country’s “Catcher in the Rye”—a novel
that captured the zeitgeist of the 1980s.
 11

His second novel entitled The Last Burden was published in 1994.
In this novel the novelist is exploring the dark side of kinship and
family ties. It is a growing up story of a middle class Hindu Brahmin
family comprising Shyamanand, the father, Urmila, the mother and
their two sons Burfi and Jamun, set in a town by the sea. The strongest
point of the novel lies in its exploration of the subterranean emotional
conflict and ties of dependence among modern Indian families. In this
novel Chatterjee probes into the mysterious workings of the human
mind and also he delineates the intricate problems of the complex age
in the contemporary Indian society.
The third novel The Mammaries of the Welfare State is a sequel to
his first novel, English, August: An Indian Story, which won for him the
prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006. In this novel the novelist
takes the readers through the corridors of Indian bureaucracy with gory
sarcasm and leaves no opportunity to mock the entire administrative
and political world of India. It is a novel about ‘Mutsyanyaya’, the big
fish swallowing the small ones (Chatterjee sarcastically calls it
‘Nutsyanyaya’ that means lunatic justice), the essentially impenetrable
monolith of the Omnipresent bureaucracy that has taken on a
whirlwind tour through the “Blunderland of babudom” and employs
several comic devices to pinpoint its absurdities. In this novel
Bureaucratic red tape, corruption, nepotism and sheet pig headedness
have been expertly presented by the novelist.
In the fourth novel Weight Loss, the novelist presents a gloomy
and dark picture of rootless post-modern man’s sexual desire in the
most perverted form and in the most abnormal manner who,
completely devoid of emotion, feelings and human values, can cross all
the limits without any hesitation just to satiate his physical sex urge.
 12

Chatterjee presents this through the central character Bhola, a sexual

deviant, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on
their lustworthiness.
During the long journey from English, August to Weight Loss, the
growth of the writer becomes evident through the use of his language
and style. He uses different types of vocabulary in different novels, e.g.
in English, August the language is of one type, decent, direct,
understandable and in The Last Burden, the language is so different that
it seems that the novel has been written by some other writer. The novel
is full of difficult and obsolete words. This change of language and style
is intentional as the writer himself acknowledges. The style is also
different because the first novel deals with the administrative world
and the second one deals with the family relations. Similarly the third
one Mammaries of the Welfare State again deals with the bureaucratic
region, presenting the picture of its corruption and filth, so the language
is again different—bold, crude and more realistic. In Weight Loss, the
story of a lost youth, the language is sometimes too raw, the
descriptions too horrible, and the style too is different to a large extent.
Chatterjee’s latest novel Way to Go was published in the year 2011
by Penguin Books India. The novel is a sequel to his second novel, The
Last Burden. While talking to Samita Bhatia Chatterjee himself says, “I
felt that The Last Burden was in a sense incomplete. It was a very
difficult and hard book and there was a lot of rancour in it that needed
to be reconciled and characters had to be redeemed.”23
Way to Go is a book about the relationship between father and son
in the post-modern era. It is also a story of aimlessness, helplessness
and complete spiritual draught in the lives of the present generation.
The novel tells the tragic tale of an eighty-five years old paralysed and
 13

helpless father, Shyamanand living wholly on the mercy of his younger

son, Jamun, his sudden disappearance leaving Jamun in great shock,
surprise and guilt laden and the endless and fruitless search resulting
ultimately the disappearance of the searcher Jamun himself. The novel
revolves around the sudden and mysterious disappearance
(presumably dead) of Shyamanand, who lives with his bachelor son
Jamun in his big house. With his absence Shyamanand leaves behind a
physical void in his prized house, and a spiritual vacuum in the heart of
his sons, specially in Jamun, the younger one, who has come to live
with his father to look after him leaving his job and home in
Maharashtra. “Finally relieved of the ‘last burden’, Jamun realizes that
he does not want to be relieved at all.”24 He is torn with the guilt for his
negligency towards his eightyfive years old and helpless father. He
realizes that he loved him very much only when he was no longer
before his eyes, within his reach. He longs for his father from the core of
his heart to return to him not dead but alive with all his shortcomings
and weaknesses which he disliked and hated in the past, like his
constipation, his habit of nit-picking, his morbidity, his acid wit,his
adoration for all things Bengali, and his attitude of suspicion mingled
with admiration towards his sons. By disappearing, Shyamanand sets
himself and later his two sons, free. As the novel progresses, the
novelist continues his exploration and excavation of the orifices of
Indian society. The world presented in the novel is not a normal and
optimistic one where one finds any hope, pleasure and peace. It is the
depressive world full of tedium, despair, violence and spectacular
dysfunction. Dr. Mukherjee commits suicides rendering the building
unrentable, the presumption that his ghost will be a co-squatter
dissuades most prospective tenants. There is a great change in Burfi, the
 14

elder son, who was sent to jail for beating his wife, Joyace. Jamun’s old
chum and beloved Kasturi, also the mother of his daughter, Mithi, has
turned into a celebrity, a producer of hugely popular TV soap opera,
‘Cheers Zindagi’ which is actually the story of the relationship between
Jamun and Kasturi. It is perhaps Kasturi’s way of telling Jamun that he
is not unique and the novel is a record of Jamun’s failure to fit into
Indian reality. There are Kashibai, the lascivious ex-cook, Madhumati,
the Czech-tenant with shaggy underarms and urine-drinking habits,
Lobesh Monga, the builder, who has an eye on Shyamanand’s house
plus frisky rats, dead cats, morgues, garbage dumps—in short all the
typical horror-comedy elements of a post-modern novel.
There are three unexplained absences in the novel, starting with
Shyamanand who vanishes without a trace one day and after some
weeks, so does the neighbour, Naina Kapoor and finally Jamun the
protagonist himself succumbs to vanishment leaving his brother to
perform the laborious task of filling out yet another ‘Missing Person’
form at the local police station. The story proceeds through a series of
fragmented episodes, moving back and forth through time so that one
has to pay close attention while reading.
The novel also illustrates the suburban lives of people in
Calcutta. It highlights the fact that every person who seems
to have normal life actually hides a bag of dirty secrets
within. The author talks about how the family, and love,
even though extremely imperfect, can make all the weird
instances that life provides, more bearable. The most
important relationship in the book is the one between father
and son—the problem they feel living together, and the
underlying need that they have for each other.25

“For not having loved one’s dead father enough, could one
amend by loving one’s child more?”26 –the novel begins with this query.
 15

After the disappearance of Shyamanand, maturity comes to Jamun and

he thinks about the various things putting himself at his father’s place.
He learns to forgive his father for being cold towards his wife, Urmila
and callous towards his both sons. Jamun, now himself a father of an
adolescent daughter, understands the intricacies of relationship
between father and son or daughter. Jamun aspires for his biological
daughter to love him like her father to give her his own name but it is
not possible and she only calls him ‘uncle’. In his loose passive way he
tries to protect Mithi, but finds that there is nothing to protect, since the
child is inexorably blundering her way into adulthood with or without
her parents’ help.
The book is structured around the dead and disappeared,
and though especially towards the end events may seem to
swivel haphazardly, they’re actually part of the scheme that
is quite deftly explained. The horrors of death and decay
present the condition of modern world where there is no
zeal for living and people only think about suicides,
disappearances while watching this terrible modern world,
Chatterjee’s satire offers a dogged detailing of failures; the
failure of middle-class life of relationship, desire, marriage,
fatherhood and sonhood. All these failures have been
occurring because of man’s distance to his inheritance and
cultural values.27

Way to Go deals with the perils of old age, agonies, inevitability of

degeneration and death. The novel raises some really serious issues like
questioning the meaning of life, imperfection of the world, the futility of
existence and where does the exercise of living lead us to. Chatterjee
seems to stress one’s preoccupation with easeful death than life.
Jamun’s ruminations on suicide have a lively quality that no single
element of life can quite match. Jamun prefers death over living. He
tells Burfi, “Living is just so much more stressful than dying, incredible
 16

the fuss we all make about splitting.”28 The novel focuses on human
extremities in their behaviour, attitudes and idiosyncrasies. All the
characters of the novel suffer from guilt, depression, isolation,
alienation and wish to relieve themselves from inner, oppressive
burdens. Whether it is Jamun, Burfi, Shyamanand, Madhumati,
Kashibai all go through the same experiences and suffer the guilt as a
part of the painful ordeal of existence, though these guilts are the
products of their own past and acts, which now come full circle to
haunt them psychologically and spiritually.
Way to Go is less a sequel—in the sense of something that
takes a story forward—than a looking back. Because of its
absorption in death, dying and disappearing, this is a novel
of unremitting bleakness. And a measure of this bleakness
comes, one senses, from Chatterjee’s longing for the felicities
of The Last Burden and his inability, for same reason, to
recreate them.29
To end our discussion, we can quote Upamanyu Chatterjee, the creator
of the novel himself, because no one claims to know more than
Chatterjee about his creation:
I think Way to Go is redeeming in a world without God….
Novels, more than plays, have the author’s stamp upon
them. It doesn’t make me cringe that I don’t have characters
bouncing and full of life. In Way to Go, life is summed up as
a simple and dreadful business. A writer must be true to
what he sets out to do.30
 17

References

1. Tarun J. Tejpal, “The Literary Babu,” India Today (August 15,

1993).
2. Radhika, Mohanram, “Contemporary Novelists 2001”,
www.cf.ac.uk./n/mohanram-radhika-html.
3. Anjana Sharma, “Milking an Icon,” The Hindu (January 21, 2001).
4. Tarun J. Tejpal, op.cit.
5. Sagarika Ghosh, “Eating Out,” Outlook Magazine (May 7, 2001).
6. Vaishnavi C. Shekhar, “I’m really a nice and gentle person,” The
Times of India (February 19, 2006).
7. Tarun J. Tejpal, op.cit.
8. Gowri Ramnarayan, “Way to go, man!” The Hindu (October 23,
2010).
9. Suchitra Behal, “Two Parallel Selves,” The Hindu (October 23,
2010).
10. Ibid.
11. Vaishnavi C. Shekhar, op.cit.
12. Suchitra Behal, op.cit.
13. Tarun J. Tejpal, op.cit.
14. Rai, “The August Babu,” Isahitya.com/index.php/…465-
upamanyu.chatterjee-the-agust-babu (August 09, 2012).
15. Gowri Ramnaayan, op.cit.
16. Sheela Reddy, “The Style’s Still Weighty, August,” Outlook
Magazine (January 30, 2006).
17. Anonymous, “Upamanyu Chatterjee gets French ward,”
Hindustan Times (December 12, 2008).
18. Ibid.
19. Rai, op.cit.
20. Sagarika Ghosh, op.cit.
21. Tarun J. Tepal, op.cit.
22. Rai, op.cit.
23. Samita Bhatia, “Book Review—Way to Go,” The Telegraph (March
21, 2010).
24. Anusua Mukherjee, “Heavenwards—Much possessed by death,”
The Telegraph (April 30, 2010).
25. Priya Savoor, “Book Review: Way to Go,” http”//helter-
skelter.in/2010/06/book-review-way-to-go-way/
26. Upamanyu Chatterjee, Way to Go. New Delhi: Penguin Books,
2010.
 18

27. Nisha, “WAY TO GO: A CRITICAL STUDY OF TRADITION

MODERNITY CONFLICT,” Sai om Journal of Arts & Education,
Volume 1, Issue 3 (April, 2014).
28. Upamanyu Chatterjee, Way to Go, p. 306.
29. Anjum Hasan, “The Outsider,: Rediscovering one of the Original
heroes of Indian English Fiction,” THE CARAVAN (June 1, 2010).
30. Gowri Ramnarayan, op.cit.