By Ankush Pal

Jhumpa Lahiri is a well known American writer of Bengali heritage whose work has drawn both praise for its literary craftsmanship and criticism for its supposed political quietism. Born in London to Bengali immigrants and raised in Rhode Island, Lahiri has spent much of her career exploring the terrain of cultural displacement and immigrant identity, earning a Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and establishing herself as perhaps the most visible voice of South Asian American fiction. Yet for all the accolades, there’s always been something slightly unsettling about how neatly her work fits into the American literary establishment’s conception of immigrant experience— tasteful, melancholic, political, and  just adequate.

Lowland as a departure

The Lowland (2013), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, marks a significant departure from this trajectory. The novel tells the story of two Bengali brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, whose lives diverge dramatically in 1960s Calcutta, one pursuing academic success in America, the other drawn into revolutionary politics at home. 

Where Lahiri’s earlier work tended to focus on the quiet domestic dramas of immigrant families negotiating cultural difference, The Lowland confronts the violent realities of postcolonial politics, forcing its characters to reckon with the costs of both political commitment and political withdrawal. 

The Naxalite movement that provides the novel’s political backdrop was a genuine historical phenomenon that began with a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal, in 1967. Inspired by Maoist ideology and led by figures like Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, the movement initially sought to address the desperate conditions of rural sharecroppers through armed struggle against landlords and the state apparatus that protected them. 

However, the movement soon fragmented and evolved into an urban guerrilla campaign that brought unprecedented violence to Calcutta’s streets throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Young middle-class intellectuals, many of them university students, became involved in assassination campaigns targeting police officers, government officials, and perceived class enemies. The state’s response was equally brutal, with paramilitary forces conducting raids and extrajudicial killings that terrorised suspected sympathisers and their families.

I find myself returning to Udayan Mitra’s character with a persistent unease, the kind that comes when you encounter someone whose convictions seem unshakeable, yet whose actions feel fundamentally misguided. 

There’s something about revolutionary figures that demands we take them seriously even when, perhaps especially when, their methods appall us. Udayan presents this challenge in its most acute form: a young man whose genuine outrage at injustice leads him down a path that reproduces the very structures of oppression he claims to oppose. Still, Udayan’s revolutionary awakening comes across as entirely authentic. 

When he witnesses the Naxalbari uprising through newspapers and radio broadcasts, his response isn’t the detached intellectual interest of a middle-class student but the visceral anger of someone who suddenly grasps the full horror of systemic injustice. “People are starving, and this is their solution,” he says after hearing about government crackdowns on peasant protesters. “They turn victims into criminals.” This recognition of the state’s capacity to invert moral categories—to make victims of oppression appear as threats to order—marks the beginning of his political consciousness.

This very authenticity of feeling becomes the source of his political failure. Marx understood that revolutionary sentiment, however genuine, remains impotent without scientific analysis of class relations and material conditions. Udayan’s emotional response to injustice, whilst morally admirable, substitutes for the patient work of understanding how capitalism functions in the specific context of postcolonial Bengal. His rapid consumption of revolutionary texts—Fanon, Lenin, Mao—represents what we might call revolutionary consumerism, an accumulation of radical ideas that functions more as cultural capital than as tools for concrete analysis. 

The bedroom he shares with Subhash becomes a kind of museum of revolutionary memorabilia: pamphlets by Charu Majumdar, copies of Liberation and Deshabrati, Mao’s Little Red Book. But this accumulation of texts reveals the fetishistic relationship to revolutionary theory that Marx criticised in the German ideologists. Udayan treats these writings as talismans of revolutionary authenticity rather than guides to action rooted in specific material circumstances. His excitement at reading about distant struggles—in Cuba, Vietnam, China—reflects the internationalist scope of his sympathy and its abstract nature.

Contradictions in domestic sphere 

The contradictions of Udayan’s ideology are nowhere more apparent than in his own home.  A man committed to a vision of justice and equality, he unthinkingly expects his wife, Gauri, to manage the household and serve his meals while he pursues his political activities.  This is not mere hypocrisy but a structural failing too – his inability to recognise the domestic sphere as a legitimate site of political struggle. 

Udayan’s politics remain trapped in a “masculine public sphere”, unable to recognise the domestic sphere as a site of political struggle. This blind spot is tragically illustrated in his relationship with Gauri, whom he uses as an aide in his political will without her “full consent”. 

He involves her in intelligence gathering for the movement without fully explaining the consequences, treating her as an instrument of his political will rather than an autonomous agent. When he asks her to observe the police constable’s routine, he’s effectively conscripting her into a revolutionary cell without her consent. The fact that this surveillance contributes to the constable’s eventual murder makes Gauri an unwitting accomplice to political violence—a violation of her agency that reveals how supposedly liberatory movements can reproduce the very patterns of coercion they claim to oppose.

The assassination of a police constable represents the tragic cul-de-sac of Udayan’s revolutionary path. Rather than striking at the structural foundations of oppression, the movement targets a working-class man, a father walking his son home from school. This “conspiratorial socialism,” as Marx would have called it, is politically bankrupt. It attacks not the ruling class but the very social bonds a genuine revolutionary movement should seek to foster. The image of the constable holding his son’s hand, a moment of “familial intimacy,” becomes the occasion for political murder, revealing how far Udayan’s movement has strayed from its professed goals.

The rootless hyacinth

Udayn’s death, alone and abandoned in the lowland, underscores the isolation that is the inevitable fate of such revolutionaries. His execution occurs not in the context of mass struggle but in solitary abandonment, his organisation having provided no meaningful protection or solidarity. 

The water hyacinth that conceals him initially—a plant that grows aggressively but remains rootless—serves as an apt metaphor for the kind of politics he has embraced: spectacular in its initial growth but ultimately superficial in its connection to the social soil. The geographical symbolism of the lowland itself reinforces this analysis. 

As the novel progresses, we learn that the lowland where Udayan hides and dies is gradually filled with refuse and eventually disappears entirely, replaced by new construction. This transformation represents the state’s capacity to absorb and neutralise revolutionary gestures by simply moving on, building over the sites of resistance until they become unrecognisable. The memorial tablet placed by Udayan’s comrades becomes increasingly isolated as the physical landscape that gave it meaning disappears.

Even so, Lahiri’s treatment of Udayan resists simple dismissal. His commitment to justice, however misdirected, emerges from a genuine confrontation with systemic oppression. His anger at seeing refugees from East Bengal living in shanties, his outrage at feudal land relations, his disgust with the Tolly Club as a symbol of colonial privilege—these responses reflect a moral clarity that demands respect even as we critique his methods. The tragedy lies not in his idealism but in the historical circumstances that channelled this idealism toward destructive ends. 

Chosen paths of brothers  

The novel’s structure, which moves between Udayan’s revolutionary activities and his brother’s scientific education in America, emphasises the class-specific nature of their choices. Both brothers respond to the same social conditions—the poverty and political upheaval of 1960s Bengal—but their different temperaments lead them toward different forms of privilege. Subhash’s emigration to America represents one form of escape from postcolonial limitations, whilst Udayan’s revolutionary commitment represents another. Neither fully challenges the structural conditions that make such escapes necessary.

This parallel suggests that Udayan’s revolutionary politics and Subhash’s academic success are perhaps not as opposed as they initially appear. Both represent forms of individual mobility that, whilst challenging certain aspects of the existing order, ultimately leave fundamental structures intact. 

Subhash achieves personal advancement through integration into the American knowledge economy, whilst Udayan seeks transformation through spectacular resistance that lacks any viable programme for systemic change. 

The gendered implications of this analysis become particularly significant when we consider Gauri’s trajectory after Udayan’s death. Her eventual career as a philosophy professor in California represents a form of intellectual achievement that mirrors Udayan’s revolutionary aspirations whilst remaining entirely divorced from collective struggle. Her academic work on German idealism and the Frankfurt School, whilst intellectually rigorous, exists within the same sphere of theoretical abstraction that characterised Udayan’s revolutionary reading. In this sense, both husband and wife end up reproducing forms of middle-class cultural production that, however critical in their content, remain structurally integrated into capitalist social relations. 

The most damning aspect of Udayan’s legacy may be its reproduction across generations. His daughter Bela’s eventual commitment to agricultural labour and community organising, whilst more grounded than her father’s conspiratorial politics, still operates within the framework of individual moral choice rather than collective political organisation. Her rejection of academic life and embrace of manual labour represents a form of class guilt that, however admirable in its intentions, fails to address the structural conditions that make such choices necessary.

In the end, Udayan’s character serves as a cautionary tale about the seductive power of revolutionary romanticism. His genuine commitment to justice becomes trapped within forms of political practice that reproduce the very relations of domination they claim to challenge. 

His story illustrates Marx’s insight that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”—but that changing the world requires more than individual sacrifice or theoretical commitment. It demands the patient work of building mass movements capable of challenging the structural foundations of oppression rather than merely its most visible manifestations. 

The lasting significance of Udayan’s character lies in its unflinching portrayal of how revolutionary desire can be simultaneously authentic and misdirected, and how genuine political commitment can lead to profoundly counterproductive actions. 

Through Udayan, Lahiri offers a complex meditation on the relationship between individual conviction and the structural possibilities for social transformation. Udayan represents the fate of an entire generation of middle-class radicals whose political awakening, however sincere, occurred in conditions that made meaningful change impossible. 

The tragedy of Udayan Mitra is not that he failed to change the world, but that he failed to understand it. 

Ankush Pal is a sociologist trained at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who researches the representation of Bengal and its culture, social movements, and urban spaces.