The City Must Die Before It’s Reborn: Varun Thomas Mathew’s THE BLACK DWARVES OF THE GOOD LITTLE BAY
The dystopian universe of Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019) is a prophetic chronicling of crisis as a condition of existence, and the contingency of truth as a mode of knowing or bearing witness to crisis.
Midway through Varun Mathew’s ecodystopian novel The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (Hachette, 2019), the tale’s first-person narrator witnesses and unsuccessfully attempts to prevent a brutal gangrape and murder, one that is chillingly evocative of both the 2012 ‘Nirbhaya case’ in New Delhi, and more recently, the grizzly violence at Kolkata’s R.G Kar Hospital—including the latter’s associated underbelly of corruption. What is particularly telling about this episode in the novel is its depiction of the simultaneity of mundanity and atrocity, where a crowded rock concert doubles up as a crime scene. The suddenness with which a routine public event in a seemingly safe, gentrified urban locality turns into a site of unimaginable horror—performed almost with impunity and through collective complicity—is the source of trauma and narrative shock.
Later in the text, the ideologically-motivated lynching of an innocent victim from a minority community serves as another reflective juncture in the continuum, which the novel traces between this fictional world of sanctioned dysfunction where injustice is normalized, repeated, and carried out through the consensus and participation of what is an apparatus of hatred, bigotry, sexism, greed, and the readers’ own sociopolitical context.
As the lynching and death of a young boy at the hands of cow vigilantes in Haryana earlier this month demonstrates, perhaps a distinctively singular feature of contemporary India is the increasingly permeable border between technological advancement and feudal power politics, instrumental reason and arbitrary irrationality, liberal democratic governance and endemic violence, and finally, between fact and fiction.
Even as it was written before Covid-19 and the tide of mass incarceration, surveillance, medical biopolitics and the catastrophic collapse of public infrastructure—catalyzed and laid bare by the pandemic—the speculative dystopian universe of The Black Dwarves is less anticipatory forewarning of an apocalyptic future and more prophetic chronicling of the banal, routinised, incrementally accruing dimensions of crisis as a condition of existence, and the contingency of truth itself as a mode of knowing or bearing witness to crisis.
A distinctively singular feature of contemporary India is the permeable border between technological advancement and feudal power politics, instrumental reason and arbitrary irrationality, liberal democratic governance and endemic violence, and finally, between fact and fiction.
In his 1945 political-philosophical work The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper demonstrates the close link between totalitarian ideologies and utopian impulses. Historical instances of social engineering, Popper argues, have involved figurations of utopia, in which the very imposition of a unified, homogenous cultural blueprint on the complex multiplicity of human (and nonhuman) agency has catapulted to dangerous fascisms. Unchecked by critique and self-reflexivity, and without the mitigating effects of accountability and nuance, utopia soon devolves into its opposite.
Black Dwarves is set in Bombay of 2041, renamed and refurbished to suit the prevailing climatic exigencies, as Bombadrome: an algorithmically monitored, technologically saturated, biochemically regulated built environment in which scientific advancement is used to divest the living of their cultural, historical, and ecological moorings. With scathing prescience, Mathew’s novel explores the gargantuan costs of social perfectionism: the accomplishment of perfect equality, perfect justice, and perfect peace. The Bombadrome’s colossal oversight in this visionary calculus is a foundational flaw, of equating symmetry with equity, its attempt to build consensus without regard for solidarity, and in effect its inability to exit the logic of structural power to mobilize change.
Mathew’s dystopia is thus as much a narrative of a catastrophic future beset by warming, submergence, and depletion, as it is of a failure of affirmative and redemptive action in the face of such calamities. In its chillingly contemporary view of Machiavellian realpolitik, the omnipresence of routinized violence, particularly against the marginalized, ideologically mediated collective psychoses and technology induced amnesias, capitalist greed and ecological plunder, and most importantly political megalomania and its meticulous manufacture of mass compliance, Black Dwarves is as much a speculative tale belonging to a burgeoning literary interest in South Asian futurisms, as it is a trenchant diagnosis of immediate sociopolitical maladies.
The protagonist of the novel is a civil servant Convent Godse, whose name, is an indelible remnant of an embittered nun’s vengeful wrath. An abandoned child, Godse is sent to live in a convent with his single mother after her husband elopes with a woman from a different community, an act that symbolically demotes the family from upper caste society. He bears nomenclatural witness thus to the links between appellations and forms of control: a name’s semantic potential to encode power hierarchies and their historically entrenched contexts, social privileges, and dominant value-systems. Rising to the status of a civil servant in a new meritocratic India of post-Soviet liberalization through an interview response on this very issue—the national malady of misnaming—Godse highlights the status of names as a contested territory for cultural appropriation, historical erasure, and factual distortion in the recent subcontinental past.
Godse’s tragicomic tryst with names thus bears a blueprint for the narrative’s own elaboration of the devastating power of misnomers, which can simultaneously conceal, gloss, and disclose.
The names in Mathew’s book acquire a prophetic function, keeping with the narrative’s significant deployment of the trope of prophecy as a philosophical intervention into the domain of speculative epistemology. There is Alas, whose bloodied, ruthless rise to power mirrors the rueful irony of his sobriquet; Radheyan Moosak, whose patronymic carries the compressed history of caste oppression and its Eugenic conflation of persons with vermin; or Frontier Khaki, the omnipresent constable whose girth grants him a diminutive near synonym of his historical counterpart from the North West Frontier Forces, and whose shadowy, liminal inhabitation of the crime-infested fringes of the city resonates aptly with his name’s spatial demarcations.
Naming, thus, takes on the task also of providing critical subtexts—of enforced amnesias, cognitive landscaping, technological alteration of the human sensorium, linguistic and cultural homogenization, apathy and misinformation, dilution of critical sensibilities and political thought, mediatized content—the overarching architecture of neurobiological control and consumerist excess that constitutes the politics of post-truth, post-industrial global capitalism. There is AREBO, the Alteration of Reality within the Bombadrome project, the central virtual reality system that simulates individual and collective experience; Bhaashafish the translation software; and Freedom Rooms, controlled laboratories where pleasure is manufactured as psychotropic cocktails to be administered to residents in ‘safe’ and regulated doses.
Nomenclature in The Black Dwarves further points to the unspoken and invisible “slow violence” (Rob Nixon, 2011) performed on the human capacity for remembrance, perception, empathy, imagination, and interrogation by truncated, fabricated, refurbished, platitudinous, ceaselessly repeated, and bartered narratives of normalcy and order. In its perverse role as a handmaiden of political status quo, a language divested of dissent, complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, and experience, it dulls, reduces, stagnates, and desensitizes.
Inside the Bombadrome, communal harmony and cultural tolerance are engendered through biopolitical technologies, which directly interfere with the body’s chemistry, erasing people’s memories and archival records, creating a form of ersatz communication based on exaggerated politesse, and tuning out the existence of difference through virtual reality simulations. Clean energy and sustainable living are solutions managed by controlling local conditions, outsourcing instances of violence, waste, and exorbitance (cramped slaughterhouses are built outside the sanitized premises), and systematic disconnect of people from the environment. As a rising Arabian sea engulfs parts of Bombay, the levitating drome responds through a self-generated triumphalist myth of utopia—which is survivalism at best and an Orwellian fascism at worst.
When an aged Godse decides to go against the establishment to expose the ungainly roots of Bombadrome’s claim to perfection and its leader’s rise to fame, he is instantly denied access and identity by the drome’s automated biometric systems. Simulation, suppression and surveillance as strategies of governance may seem to be at odds with the utopian impulse of non-violence, harmony, emotional regulation, and equitable distribution of access and resources. However, the novel exhaustively shows that as a systemic formation tied to instrumentalist goals of profit, private ownership, political power, and the production of docile subjects, the proposed utopia quickly devolves into a gamified universe of arbitrary rules and their constant shuffling in the service of repression and regulation of that which is most human. In Bombadrome, the line between control and consensus is often blurred.
This ethical dilemma remains at the core of the novel’s larger philosophical exploration of concepts of power, authority, liberation, free will, determinism, and autonomy. The narrative’s singularly clear-eyed approach lies in laying out these tensions and contradictions
The focus of Mathew’s narrative is not only this piece of speculative world-building, it is also the circumstances leading to such a post-apocalyptic future. The story thus alternates between two temporalities, testifying in its very narrative structure the impossibility of achieving Alas’s dream of an entirely obliterated or selectively salvaged history, and the brutality of effecting such defacements. Spanning a period of roughly ten years from Godse’s arrival in Bombay as a newly-minted IAS officer, his friendship with an estranged former roommate and a conscientious lawyer, to a horrific turn of events as each of the three friends get drawn both knowingly and unawares into an intricate anarchic web of political scapegoating, targeted violence, organized crime against women, sexual minorities, Dalits, artists, along with embezzlement and fraud, spun by the novel’s most well-delineated character the antagonist and CM incumbent Ankur Lal Shinde on his quest to a landslide victory. Shinde’s maniacal dream is of a total revolution: the city must die before it is reborn, a structural overhaul that he goes on to puppeteer by harnessing the existing ferment of civil discontent, economic squalor, infrastructural collapse, sexism, misogyny, casteism, and bigotry, to underscore the failings of the current authorities.
The eloquently worded promises of affirmative action, social justice and equity become part of an elaborate campaign strategy funded through money laundering and fuelled by organized crime. The party’s name, ‘Dus Shabd Party’ is itself a clever demonstration of the performative power and moral vacuousness of political sloganeering:
[F]reeing this nation from all the evils that enslave it. That is our mission. Ten words. Freeing this nation from all the evils that enslave it. From caste and religious intolerance and economic inequality; from superstition and gender violence and discrimination; freedom from all evils that currently enslave our nation. On these Ten words we will build our party. (206)
The novel is careful however to not portray Alas through a black and white lens: his malevolence is fascinatingly imbued with a belief, almost bordering on delusion, in the political and moral superiority of his radical paradigm of governance as a future panacea to existing evils, and the necessity thus of the means, irrespective of how unsanguinary towards a noble end—no matter how ignobly accomplished.
This ethical dilemma remains at the core of the novel’s larger philosophical exploration of concepts of power, authority, liberation, free will, determinism, and autonomy. The narrative’s singularly clear-eyed approach lies in laying out these tensions and contradictions born of the traumatic formation of Indian contemporaneity as a fractured and factitious halfway house between the devil of entrenched socioeconomic legacies of injustice, including colonial inequities, and the deep blue sea of dehumanizing neoliberalism, without smoothing these over with easy or predictable resolutions.
Shinde’s predicament is also closely connected in the novel’s understanding with the dilemma of envisioning a transformative future which is at once revolutionary and just. His justification for murderous revolutions, political coups, and wars of liberation is that the loss of individual lives is collateral damage for a larger cause of collective and anticipated good. These justifications become the narrative’s telling expansion of the scope of the genre of speculative futurism to meditate on concerns that are immediate and ongoing: the ethics of revolutionary violence, the limitations of liberationist discourse, the dangers of advocating for a utopian future without addressing crises in the present, the perils thus of failing to acknowledge the inevitable links between politics and time.
Some of the novel’s most visually and descriptively remarkable passages comprise the multiple instances of protest and insurrection that punctuate the narrative. Mathew is careful not to reduce social precarity and dissent to mere pawns in a larger scheme of political ascendancy. The eponymous Black Dwarves in the book are the manual scavengers and other contractual labourers from Dalit communities, who are addressed as the derogatory “Kaala Bauna”. They become pioneers of a new form of artistic protest. They use black paint to denote their proximity with filth and waste and a range of subversive vocabularies from slangs and sexual innuendos to bawdry verse and lewd caricatures. This excremental aesthetic is a disruptive return of the repressed, the carnivalesque force of margins and marginalized subjects to destabilize hegemonic cultural scripts. The fugitive resistance of the muralists serves as a graphic counternarrative to the forces of historical erasure and political immunity.
Mathew’s book is a refreshing addition to the recent surge of eco-dystopian narratives from South Asia, building its imagined catastrophe from the embedded histories and ongoing narratives of our social climate, and in the process, highlights the impending perils of a calamitous disconnect from the critical continuities these afford.
Their art is further carried forward in a series of creative disruptions across the city, most notably by a Feminist and Queer theatre troupe Aasman, whose plays are incendiary satires on prevailing lawlessness and injustices, but also provoke acts of brutality against the performers.
While attributed to Shinde’s machinations, the rioting also serves as a comment on human propensity towards cruelty and oppression. We see many instances of such macabre, gratuitous violence corroborating Alas’s argument, that his party merely churns and channels the crucible of hatred which already exists. However, Godse and the novel remain unconvinced by such pleas of involuntary enmeshment in pre-existing social mechanisms, as much as it eschews a view of history and politics as a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and destruction. Instead, the novel exposes such an ‘invisible hand’ approach to serious legal omissions and unconstitutional violations as rhetorical ploys used by those who wield power to evade accountability and more significantly obscure the links—often deliberately and strategically secured, mediated deployed, and mobilized—between historical instances and configurations of power asymmetry and their contemporary iterations. In the novel’s forensic cartography of a civil society on the brink, hatred acquires amorphous dimensions in its pervasive presence and activation as a social emotion, operating through specific actors and stakeholders, and producing particular targets, victims, and collaterals.
While taking poetic liberties, Black Dwarves thus covers a capacious swath of contemporary urban history: the Bombay Mills strikes, attack on the Taj, Safai Karamchari Andolan, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid to name a few, creating a credible narrative straddling both historical recovery and futuristic worldbuilding. This presents an intelligent science fictional imaginary, with suave segueing between dystopian scenarios (immediate and anticipated), the calibration of speculative epistemology to include prophecy and clairvoyance as modes of alternative sentience, and ineffable but powerful responses to algorithmic omniscience.
Black Dwarves is narrated as a first-person account, a practice of countermemory against the mass obliteration of history, and a gesture of historical recovery by Godse, who is the last civil servant before the profession is declared obsolete by the powers of new India. The story offers a hybrid narrative voice, combining autobiographical telling with journalistic reportage, documentary evidence, epistolary records, excerpts of diaries. Thus, Mathew’s book is a refreshing addition to the recent surge of eco-dystopian narratives from South Asia, building its imagined catastrophe from the embedded histories and ongoing narratives of our social climate, and in the process, highlights the impending perils of a calamitous disconnect from the critical continuities these afford.
This narrative polyphony meant to challenge the Bombadrome’s production of monolithic ‘truths’ is also part of the testimonial apparatus that Godse is mobilizing against Sinde’s suppression of the most important facet of recent historical memory, : the unlawful, genocidal manner of his rise to power. However, despite this preoccupation with recording, in a final instance, Godse also acknowledges the limits of the testimonial apparatus. His final act of remembrance is of an intimacy deeply personal, situated in a place beyond the drome.
In bearing witness to the fragility of archives, the narrative also locates its resistance in a space and experience outside the frames of documentary capture. The final image of utopia in the novel is much closer to the term’s etymological sense, of an ou-topos. It is a topography beyond familiar boundaries and forms of thought and reflection, one that escape registration.
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Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33.
