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TThe pre-delivery drumbeats have already heralded the arrival of Hari Kunzru as the biggest bang in Fiction 2002. First, that £1 million price tag to an imagination with an Indian dna. That was really big for a debutant. Another towering tale from the newest republic in literature, the Indian novel in English? The newest spellbinder in town? As simulated anticipation and gossipy awe grew in size, adjectives and allusions rolled out from the publicist: an epic mix of Salman Rushdie and Henry Fielding, that is, Saleem Sinai meets Tom Jones. A picaresque through the whirling histories of the Empire, funny and fantastic, humane and Homeric. Truly, the reviewer has been adequately warned, and offered the first impression of The Impressionist gratis.

THE IMPRESSIONIST By Hari Kunzru Hamish Hamilton Price: £12.99 Pages: 481

So here you are, with the book after the buzz, and you wish you didn’t have any of those secondary impressions about Kunzru’s first novel. The originality of The Impressionist is more impressive than the salesman’s hyperbole. True, Rushdie hovers over the jacket like a commandments-issuing Jehovah. True, the adventures of the impressionist are steeped in that roguish romance of Fielding’s outcast. Also true, in the Kunzru cosmos geography competes with history and the many branches of the humanities. Kunzru, a 32-year-old journalist based in London, leaves no word unused in his eagerness to impress. Still, The Impressionist is a high velocity existential drama in which the multiplying identity of the self is matched by the shifting stages of history. Stretching from British India to England to West Africa, the physical vastness of the novel provides the impressionist with most exhilarating situations to play out his script, in which comedy is a camouflage and tragedy is the essential text.

TRAVELLER'S TRIUMPH:For Kunzru, it’s ideas and action

And the script of Pran Nath begins with a big bang, more aptly bang-bang, in a ferocious rainstorm somewhere in the remotest desert of British India, at the turn of the last century. The fury of water and wind brings the Englishman Ronald Forrester and the Kashmiri Hindu girl Amrita together for a few moments of surrealistic sex. The Englishman doesn’t survive the flood, Amrita does. The scene shifts to Agra, where she, now the wife of a court pleader, a Kashmiri Pandit, a prolific author of high morality and cautious nationalism, an advocate of rigorous personal hygiene and traditional politeness, gives birth to Pran Nath, at the cost of her own life. When Pran is 15, the legal father, so comically sketched by Kunzru, dies a tragi-comic death, and whose last knowledge is the true identity of his son who is not after all his son. Pran Nath, a half caste, is exiled to the street, and begins the picaresque, bringing out not only the many enchantments of the waystations but the prodigious talent of the storyteller.

It is a masquerade, Pran Nath’s self-shifting progression: “Traditionally, the consequences of our actions in this life are only felt in the next one, a quick inter-incarnational karmic tally moving us down the evolutionary scoreboard in the direction of sweeper, dog, and fish, or up towards Brahminhood and eventual escape from the cycle of action and suffering. Pran’s accounting is happening with unusual speed.” In this evolutionary saga of the half-caste, every rejection is followed by an acceptance, and in some kind of karmic sabotage of the script, he is a permanent intruder into someone else’s drama, someone else’s history, drawing his oxygen from someone else’s situations. Have a quick glance at the Pran avatars.
As Rukhsana in the custody of the eunuchs at the Fatehpur palace in the Punjab, he is the sex slave who can influence the dynastic succession. But his relationship with British Resident Privett-Clampe grows beyond the sexual and acquires a kind of English affinity. The court of the Fatehpur nawab in Kunzru’s pages is both fabulous and farcical and home to some of the funniest set pieces in fiction—East meets West in the backdrop of Oriental extravaganza. Post-Fatehpur, after a brief stopover in the fear streets of Jallianwallah, it is Bombay, and Pran now is Pretty Bobby, the hero of the red streets, the adopted ward of a Christian missionary for whom “craniometry has revealed the foundation of British imperial domination of the world”, and his wife, a proponent of the scientific spirituality of the Theosophical Society. And parallel to the Pran journey runs history—bloody, fiery and riotous.

It is the intervention of history on the Bombay street that gives Pran a passport to England, in the newly acquired identity of Jonathan Bridgeman, who in London acquires new ancestry and wealth. In a Norfolk public school, preparation for Oxford is a series of discoveries—and the guilt of a big betrayal. Pran the half-caste is becoming one with the conceit of the acquired identity: “He no longer lives in constant fear of discovery. He is becoming what he pretends to be, realising that the truth is so unlikely that, despite his occasional oddities and lapses, no one would ever divine it. He is starting to coincide with his shadow.” The merger is almost complete as he reaches Oxford where love and learning groom him for the ultimate mission, ironic and tragic, for last destination of the “white” Bridgeman is the faraway Fotseland in west Africa, the land of ancient spirits, where the anthropologically propelled Pran will carry the white man’s burden, that too as the last, liberated white man, forward without the expectations of further arrivals, for “now the journey is everything”.
The beauty is, Kunzru carries it on with lightness, though the ballistic brio of Pran’s adventures in India loses the momentum—also the fun—once he touches the British shores. Maybe it is quite natural—the Englishness of the self cannot be so boisterous once it is in its natural environment. Though the Rushdie-inspired esoterism and exhibitionism mark the high-wattage narration, unlike in Rushdistan, history is a loose adjective to Pran’s world, where the text of his story remains unscarred by the context of history. That is why Pran is not the natural cousin of Midnight’s Children’s Saleem or The Tin Drum’s Oskar. That doesn’t make him a lesser citizen in fiction, for in his journey every discovery is an astonishment of the self whose identity and ancestry demand more adventures—after all it began in the desert deluge. And in Kunzru, you have a novelist for whom ideas and action make life enchantingly imperfect.