‘The Madhouse’: Gyan Chaturvedi’s biting satire about the discontents of consumer culture

As I read The Madhouse by Gyan Chaturvedi, I was reminded of what Mark Frost once said: “Good literature is a mirror through which we see ourselves more clearly.” Indeed, The Madhouse functions as a striking mirror, reflecting the transformations that swept through Indian society during the onslaught of liberalisation in the 1990s. The Madhouse was originally published in 2018 in Hindi and was translated into English by Punarvasu Joshi in 2024. It is an allegorical novel that chronicles the very jarring transformations that occurred in the psyche of Indian society by the onslaught of liberalisation. It is in this era of the free-market economy and excessive consumption that the nameless characters of The Madhouse find themselves bound within. This critique and questioning of the free market economy mirror the discontent and contemporary concerns about globalisation and consumer culture.

An appetite for consumption

The book throws us into the depths of the bazaar, a representation of the free market forces that are described as being “tyrannical,” colonising the living spaces on the planet, gnawing away at livelihoods, displacing people, and worst of all, according to the novel, turning “sacred institutions of a democratic society impotent.” Chaturvedi’s narrative is both scathing and thought-provoking, forcing readers to confront the realities of a society increasingly defined by...

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