Arun Joshi’s extraordinary novel was the English, August of the Seventies
Arun joshi (1939-1993) was part of the “Before Midnight” generation of Indian writers in English. Of the five novels he wrote between 1968 and 1990, The Last Labyrinth (1981) won the Sahitya Akademi Award, while the eponymous hero of The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) remains his most memorable creation.

Whatever did happen to Billy (Bimal) Biswas? Joshi’s novel about the restless rebel, who leaves his affluent urban life to go and live in the other India, ends in tragedy. It begins as one of those stories that everyone has come across, about some college hostelmate or the other who suddenly reaches burnout — but Billy’s story is more enigmatic. “What happened to Billy was, perhaps, inevitable; as inevitable as the star-constellations in which he came so absolutely to believe,” muses the narrator Romi Sahai at the beginning of the novel. “I know of no other man who so desperately pursued the tenuous thread of existence to its bitter end, no matter what trails of glory or shattered hearts he left behind in his turbulent wake.”

Romi first meets Billy Biswas when they room together one summer in New York; at that time, Billy is introduced as “engineer, anthropologist, anarchist ... and thoroughly crazy, even by Indian standards”. This brief biography serves almost as a prediction. Billy, comfortably cosmopolitan, chooses to live in Harlem because white America is “much too civilised” for him; he is studying anthropology although his father, a Supreme Court judge, thinks he is doing engineering; and Billy’s eyes, even when they laugh, are always serious. To add to this, we are informed that a Swedish student of psychiatry finds in him a “great force, an urkraft ... a primitive force” waiting for self-expression.

... contd.