● In Arjun , among the many social and economic transformations that have made

possible the transition from the epic universe to that of the novel , one fundamental
change is signalled by way of a metaphor- the calendar advertising a foreign airline with
the picture of falcon in flight.
● This calendar then becomes a hyper literalised image of the commodification of nature in
modernity.
● It is not simply a photograph of the falcon in flight but the bird has become something it
never was before , that is an aesthetic object.
● Nature then has been endowed with aesthetic value and is being deployed to sell a
product.
● While the marketing of the product appears slightly unusual , that the aircraft as a
soaring bird of prey, the image allows the writer to not only emphasise the general
brutality of the newer modern times but also allows him to evoke the full subsumption of
social relations to capital or foreign capital.
● The multinational company has little impact on the refugees of the colony, it is the profit
oriented plans of kewal singh that has direct impact on the colony. It raises the specter of
displacement for the colony refugees.
● Given that the non Bengali commercial community in Calcutta is largely dominated by
the marwaris , therefore the use of the punjabi also condenses the image of partition with
the new kind of capitalism that was emerging.
● In the intervening 20 or so years since the partition and the novel , men like kewal singh
have emerged as a capitalist , he has succeeded exactly in the way in which success is
to be had.
● The migrant families have remained as squators , displaced , and employed.
● Between the refugee settlers migrants and the capitalist , there endures an existential
conflict. The conflict is between the aggressive colonial capital and the 'bare life'.
● The scene not only has the support of the duttas , but also the support of the police , so
that when he takes recourse to arsen , the law enforcement team did not even bother to
interfere. It is this particular nature of the political state that not only allowed it to come
into being in 1947 , disposed of and displaced millions but also that in the postcolonial
period , it is still under the control of the elite and therefore unwilling to respond to the
needs of the poor.
● It is only after Avanish intervenes that the government is compelled to take some action.
● It is only after the government acknowledges their position as the citizens that the state
accepts their claim to the ownership of the land.
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● Somnath is innocent and honest , but in mid 20th c , post partition calcutta , there was
no place for him.
● For the refugees , it was a hand to mouth existence .
● Arjun, unlike his brother, survives primarily because he recognizes how to survive in a
hostile city and that there is no other way but to hold on to what is made available.
● It is precisely this recognition which also denies Arjun's character the pathos that
surrounds a character like somnath.
● Somnath is grieving his loss, he is wistfully looking for the pre-partition past and he longs
for the idyllic childhood that he spent in the vast open spaces of his ancestral village.
● He suffers a painful severing of the umbilical cord with everything that represents
stability.
● In the post partition geography, there was no place for Somnath because the energies of
the national movement which were betrayed by the communalist politics that led to the
climax of partition had already dissipated into the dystopias of India and pakistan.
● For somnath , still in his psyche, he lived in an undivided bengal.
● It is the partition that Somnath in his insanity repeatedly claimed to have been revoked.
He believed that his village home was not far and was still familiar , of an accustomed
way of life.
● He fails to understand that there is no life anymore. Somnath's suffering clearly indicates
that the very notion of modernity that came with partition was a complete misrecognition.
● One cannot really overlook the complicity of the past in creating the present. The
modernity that came however briefly, was imagined because the present that had come
into being was a result of the colonial past,
● This is reflected in the way in which Somnath idealises village life.
● It is the opacity of the past that deters somnath from recalling his actual experiences of
his youth and childhood.
● When we compare Arjun and Somnath , it is clear that Arjun can survive anywhere.
Arjun is able to vividly remember and recall his life in the village. Unlike Somnath , he
refrains from romanticising village life. Except once in a delirium , he seems to be
romanticising the past after his second attack.
● He is nowhere considering a return to his native village.
● It was not only impossible for him to return to the village but also that he had realized
that the city had provided him a qualitatively better life than what he had in the village.
● Arjun is not strongly tied to the ancestral home. The ties with the birthplace have been
rendered less effective.
● He says ," just by any standard there is no doubt that we are in many better here than
we had been in our home in ...if pakistan had not been created ….teacher in a
school...returned to the village". ( page 50 )
● Partition forced Arjun's move to the metropolis in a manner which is not pitiless . Yet
precisely this move brought with it live possibilities which were otherwise impossible for
him.
● Moreover, the memories of his childhood, for the loss of his pencil or the harmonica or
theft of his vest , all of it he was instructed to bear in silence because the miscreants
belonged to the majority community. Finally there is the burning down of their family
home. Which illustrates that his life as a minority hindu in east pakistan, dominated by
fear, is by no means enviable.
● He describes his loss rather hyperbolically , he sees his loss as a part of the larger
process…" as a result of the partition numerous people have lost...red blue silver
childhood dreams." ( Pg 17)
 ● Together with his general cosmopolitanism ,he has set himself apart from the other
residents in his colony, his difference is also marked even at the level of his speech. He
is the only one in the colony who doesn't use the dialect of his east bengal.
● In the Bengali original text , he uses a distinctly calcutta dialect. The use of the speech is
taken to a literal level when towards the end of the novel , Arjun discusses the possibility
of moving out of the colony.
● Nobody knows whether his moving out of Deshpran colony would mean a migration out
of the india. His mother, in order to make Arjun continue with his education , suggests his
journey to england.
● There is thus a possibility that Arjun might move from the formerly colonized margins to
the center, england. If home is the place where one lives within the familiar, then his
home in the colony is not a home. His village , he referred to as desh, might be his
birthplace but is not his home. Arjun's complete rejection of the provincial idioms also
makes him separate from not only the colony but also the differences from his past.
● Through his reeducation of his own self , possibilities may have opened up for him but
these openings that he dreams of, exist for Arjun the individual and not for the
community.
● This distancing that we see between Arjun and the other residents is fraught with
ambiguity. we look at Arjun's reaction to Maya's comment on the recent wave of
migration of the east pakistan refugees , as he heard Maya saying , "again so many
refugees have arrived". Arjun says" it was as if someone had suddenly punched me on
my chest . Looking around..seeking charity . " (page 50-60)
● Even within the refugees there is the question of indifference. Arjun is aware of his
association with the past , but he is indifferent. He calls the migrants 'them'.
● He is often identifying himself with the migrants and he also recognizes that his
readjustment or accomodation with the present circumstances requires a denial of the
past.
● The reference of Amaladi is evocative. It is the sight of her mutilated body that triggered
the first sight of insanity in somnath. The injured body of Amaladi had been one of the
first signs of the approaching violence /hostility which compelled Arjun and his family to
abandon the village.
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● He doesn't respond to Subimal . He is the owner of an aluminum factory. His house is

splendid and is located in a posh south Calcutta neighborhood. He had prospered in his
life.
● We immediately have a response from Arjun. Arjuns narration of subimal's prosperity
exposes a certain degree of pretentiousness that moves beyond his expensive living
room house.
● In Subimal's house.. outsider , they were …. Hard core bangal . Not all their accents
fel… in 1947 , …. Had ended their connections to eastern bengal. Their business did
well here. (Text ref)
● Despite the distance Arjun has with the migrants in the Deshpran colony , yet he doesn't
forget his position.
● The emotional attachment which subimal babu claims to bear for his native place
faridpur is a pretension. What really separates subimalbabu from arjun is their class
location.
● It is class that makes subimal babu a 'foreigner ' to the kind of struggle for survival Arjun
has endured and it is the reason for the impossibility of any kind of dialogue between the
two.
● Howevermuch subimal babu claims to identify with eastern bengal , theirs is a world he
cannot enter as he has never participated in the unfolding of the history of the region.
● The kind of empathy that Arjun demonstrates for the displaced laborers and peasants at
the sealdah station is in sharp contrast to the criticism that he comes up with when he
talks about the migrant elite (subimal babu). He believes that the migrant elite sided over
the loss of comforts and had no inkling of the suffering of the displaced.
● Furthermore, when they have a conversation , we do notice arjun's distracted silence
despite the fact that subimal babu is repeatedly talking about the homeland. By
remaining silent, Arjun is trying to censor the middle class romanticisation of
pre-migration life.
● Subimal Babu says , what's there in West bengal.. there were so many expansive
rivers….living next to such vastness …goosebumps. (Text ref)
● Despite arjun alienation from subimal and his identification with the squatter in the
sealdah station , arjun is completely aware that the railway station is not that place
where he wishes to return. Deep down he also has a desire for upward social mobility.
● On a literal level , Arjun's homelessness is suggested by his repeated changes in living
quarters. His movement from his village home to the temporary shelters , to the platform
of sealdah , then to the deshpran colony and finally to some place outside the colony
and eventually to england.
● Arjun is not the only character who has to move from one place to the other. In Sunil
Gangopadhyay's other novel called 'East West', (Purbo Poshchim) which came out in
1988 , there was Hareet Nandal, an underclass partition migrant . He too moves from
one colony to the other and then to marichjhapi in Sunderbans. This displacement and
dispossession was the plight of most of the underclass partition migrants coming to
calcutta.
● The Bengali words for displaced people are 'udbastu' , uprooted or 'chinnamul' which
means torn roots.
● Even when one is terming them as udbastu or people who have faced complete
displacement from original lands, these terms remain inadequate in expressing the plight
of those like Arjun or Hareet .
● Because those words are also not allowing readers to understand the manner in which
people like arjun and hareet were never allowed to settle somewhere . They remain
udbastu forever.
● Arjun's restlessness does not really result from the loss of a physical dwelling place.
While somnath could seek some kind of comfort in imagining that he would restore his
home and retrieve the old life he loved, there is no such simple solution as far as arjun is
concerned. He remains homeless and he doesn't want to return to his homeland ever ,
even in his imagination.
● Arjun's homelessness is very different from the other migrants . It is ,in one sense, a
deficiency in Arjun which is responsible for the existential crisis he has to handle.
● Arjun is aware of this deficiency , and in this awareness , Arjun is completely alone. Thus
among all the characters , Arjun stands out.
● Arjun also claims that there is no place for him in the elite world of shukla or Avanish. He
is a nowhere man . When she visits him , he says "i am too far off from your world.
That's why I don't have to bother you. I don't exactly have a place in it …. I know that.
"(98)
● Shukla's beautiful life then has less to do with her financial condition than it has to do
with her general nature. Her association /cameradi with arjun is the only diversion for
arjun from the growing resentments of the colony.
● Although subimal and shukla belonged to a professional class to which arun may not be
able to belong , yet arjun's relationship with shukla cannot be compared to with his
alienation from subimal.
● Arjun's rejection of Subimal's world is marked by disdain whereas his inability to find a
place in Shukla's world is marked by melancholy.
● If Arjun remains indifferent to the other spaces of community which are available to him ,
it is the distance that shukla maintains despite her cordiality that keeps him apart.
● Shukla's remoteness is crystallized not only in Arjun's calling her a 'very far away person'
but also in comparing her with the Taj mahal.
● The two images of shukla resonate with beauty and love as well as the suggestion of
coldness of stone.
● On a symbolic level then , shukla represents an ideal , seemingly within reach but
always eluding arjun. She escapes Arjun's attempt to hold her hand and this
inaccessibility makes her all the more valuable and deepens arjuns longing for her.
● When co-migrant labonya is attracted to him , she doesn't pose any challenge. She
exemplifies the mundane and Arjun disregards her.
● Attended by a certain kind of refinement , shukla becomes a representative of a certain
fullness of life. And she remains indifferent to the fact of money.
● If Arjun's search for home is a metaphor for something metaphysical , it is perhaps the
exuberance of life which shukla stands for.
● The very name shukla means clean , bright and pure , and is an embodiment of that
unbounded joy of life. For Arjun , to overcome his existential crisis , the only antidote is
Shukla's love.
● By the end of the novel , when she expresses her sentiments towards him, Arjun asserts
that to" be alive is such bliss… my head is clear… I live .. I love living . But I will not
die...out of the village … ll live , i will certainly liv"
● The note of joy in the above lines that he expresses does not really emanate from that
news that the government will intervene in the affairs of the colony.
● The last pages provide the strongest reaffirmation of life in a way.
● This reaffirmation of life embodies the spirit of the difficult struggle of the refugees or the
dispossessed by the political division of the subcontinent .
● Arjun's repetition of the words, "i will live" , are at some level forced. It is the narrative of
the novel which has forced such a response from him even though there is the
impossibility of the ordeals being over for the refugees forever.
● What Sunil Gangopadhyay does is that he draws upon the epic past to narrate the
history of the present and by setting his scene in the aftermath of partition , he somehow
insists that the new / the present is supremely modern and yet wholly dominated by an
unmastered past.
● Even with the epic context/backdrop , the social realist mode of the novel 'Arjun' , which
is combined with the writer's minimalist style, does emphasize and evoke the complicity
and harshness of migrant life.