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A friend saw one of author Chetan Bhagat’s books in my bag and exclaimed in horror. Her dismay were somewhat allayed when I told her I had it for a review. This exchange was noteworthy. I have always been a champion of popular literature, partly because I think such writers deserve a chance and partly because I mostly enjoy reading them. Yet, I felt the need to explain the presence of Half Girlfriend in my bag and save some face.
Before the book was released, an excerpt was available online. It spoke of a Bihari boy who spoke to his sophisticated “girlfriend”, Riya, thus: “Deti hai toh de varna kat le”. Bhagat, through the character of Madhav who spoke the words, generously offers translations of this phrase in English. He eventually settles for “f*** me or f*** off”, which, by his own admission, still sounds better than the Hindi phrase.
There was outrage in intellectual circles, though mostly restricted to Facebook and Twitter. General snorts followed whenever one mentioned Bhagat’s book. How could he generalise thus? How can he be so biased against Biharis? But I was intrigued. I didn’t want to judge the book by its orange-and-blue cover, or, in this case, by its crass excerpt. I wanted to put it in context and believe that it was more than a mere marketing gimmick.
Oh, the naïve heart. What I wished was a blameless excerpt was actually the high point of the novel. Besides an indelible impression of Bhagat’s prose, the excerpt, much like the novel, leaves you with little else. I have read two of his previous novels, Five Point Someone and One Night at the Call Centre, and watched three films based on his novels. These films have somehow done greater justice to his writing, but the books were average. Even after all these years, I remember bits of Five Point Someone, though I’m sure this might be irksome for some of my literature professors at university. But some of those lecturers also taught me how to always read a book like a critic, how to believe that literature can change lives. Sadly, Half Girlfriend wasn’t able to change more than half a minute of my thought processes.
I have battled with the concept of stereotypes, especially because of my seamy affair with popular literature. Do cliches exist because there is some truth in them? Must an author avoid using racial, gender and regional stereotypes even when they, at least on the face of it, have some grain of truth? So why did it annoy me to read Bhagat’s account of a “Bihari boy” in New Delhi? It seems to be a noble idea to address the issue of Delhi’s inherent hostility towards students, migrant labour and professionals from other states, especially Bihar. But the sociological inquiry is couched in red, velvety cushions of love, romance and teenage hormones.
For example, Madhav, the protagonist, is a student at St Stephen’s College in Delhi University, reading sociology, a course that doesn’t exist in the college. Although the book talks of his vocabulary and mannerisms as being the butt of all mockery, Bhagat rarely goes beyond Madhav’s country bumpkin persona. It was a wonderful opportunity to bring Bihar and the stigma attached to it into the mainstream debate, and I assume that it was Bhagat’s intention to do so. The best-selling author occupies a unique position with his mass appeal about which he has no qualms. The acknowledgement page at the beginning of this novel is an attempt to appear modest while hinting at his popularity. But then I’ve also learnt about intentional fallacy and I know better than to assume Bhagat’s noble, lofty ideals. Some argue that at least with Bhagat's books, India’s youth are picking up a book and reading it. But, like a colleague pointed out during an animated debate, what good will it do for evolving their minds or improving their language skills if clichés and colloquialisms are blindly replicated without any intellectual inquiry?
I thought that at least the romance might be mildly interesting, but it is mostly laced with heavy-breathing sexuality, with the image of a boy from Bihar ruining a perfectly platonic friendship the only takeaway from the book. The prose is flat and caricaturist in nature. While one understands why Bhagat couldn’t have used Hindi for the narrative, he makes his characters sound like men and women from American films about Indians. And while I wished that I could make a case for reading this book, if only for the sake of a greater debate between the canon and those outside it, it would be an injustice to the delightful popular literature I’ve read and has found space in my memory and my bookshelf.
Author: Chetan Bhagat
Publisher: Rupa
Pages: 260
Price: Rs 176
