ABSTRACT
Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others is an attempt at a narrative reconstructing the very boundaries of what may be broadly called the voices of ethics. Set against the backdrop of 1967 Calcutta, the novel involves a web of relations at familial and political levels, questioning the boundaries of norms and ethics. Calcutta is used as a haunting urban backdrop at a time when political changes are sweeping across the city. Ultra-Left ideology is on the rise as the disillusioned middle-class Bengali youth is driven towards dreams of social revolution against the ruling bourgeois. There is also an ideological contrast drawn between the urban and the rural spaces represented by Supratik’s politics in rural Bengal to create a class revolution and the decadence inside the city of Calcutta where everyone is busy negotiating with their own sense of loss and dislocation. This chapter looks into these issues in the novel and reads the text from the perspective of dislocation and identity crisis, taking cue from theoretical paradigms of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Sartre, Lyotard, and other thinkers of postmodern thought.
