Power, Sex, and Detection in Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins

Abstract

Through its repeated references to William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins announces a close textual kinship to this earlier work, one that plays out in terms of a common aesthetic aim of laying bare the naked ugliness of the social forces of power and oppression structuring the societies each represents. This essay argues that while operating in this vein The Story of My Assassins uses elements of the detective fiction genre to critique the structures of power of an early twenty-first-century India whose emergence as a major global economic power has allowed a small minority of its population to garner previously unheard-of levels of wealth and power while leaving an 900 million or so strong underclass subject to myriad forms of brutalization and social marginalization. In doing so, it uses narrative to consider the roles played by sexualized violence, state bureaucracies, and an emergent plutocratic elite in fomenting the defining social inequalities and exclusions of a society it poses as having drifted far from the originary social visions of Gandhi and Nehru.

Keywords:

• Tejpal
• The Story of My Assassins
• Indian detective fiction
• sexualized violence

Notes

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Cheap, home-made guns with a high likelihood of exploding upon firing (249).

2 From “Kapoor,” his surname, and “sahib,” Hindi (from the Arabic) for “mister” or “master,” a term that carries considerable overtones of past colonial power asymmetries.

3 Though ironically, traumatized by stories of Hindu/Muslim violence during the partition of India and Pakistan, Kabir’s father has attempted to hide his Muslim birth and has gone so far as to provide him with a certificate claiming that his circumcision was performed for medical, not religious reasons (197).

4 “Big idiots” – an expression with vulgar overtones.

5 c.f. Naked Lunch: “The naked need of control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct [...] Democracy is cancerous and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms [. . .] Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus” (19, 112).

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Notes on contributors

Michael K. Walonen

Michael K. Walonen is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Peter’s University who specializes in world literature and postcolonial studies. He is the author of the books Imagining Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary World Literature, Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism, and Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature, as well as articles that have appeared in journals including Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Studies in Travel Writing, African Literature and Culture, and Frontiers: The International Journal of Study Abroad, and in the collections Geocritical Explorations, William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, and Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture.