‘The Politician Redux’: Devesh Verma’s novel of Indian politics makes familiar events interesting

In a seminar on Urdu poet and dramatist Zahida Zaidi (1930-2011) in Aligarh, two different papers on her only short novel Inquilaab ka Ek Din, a campus novel set in Aligarh Muslim University, offered two diametrically opposed readings of its characters and themes. Saghir Ibrahim, a senior professor of Urdu who knew Aligarh well, was able to read all those well-known and lesser-known personages of the campus who appeared as thinly disguised characters in Zaidi’s novel. Aysha Munira Rasheed, a young scholar of English literature, neither probably knew most of them nor tried to know them but still offered a perfectly valid and convincing reading of Zaidi’s novel reading it as a novel with all features of the novelistic form. 20th-century formalistic criticism made a fetish of not reading biographical details in the text and instead exhorted critics to see whether a text succeeds as a literary work irrespective of the author’s intention.

The Politician Redux: Odessey of Chance, narrated by Kartik and mediated through the voice of Deena, unmistakably succeeds as a novel. It is interesting, readable and is like no other novel on the subject. At the very beginning of the novel, Kartik is also described as the alter ego of the novelist. However,...

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