An Outline of the Republic: A Novel
by Siddhartha Deb
A Fascinating Search For A Girl Through A Troubled India
Intrigued by a disturbing photograph of a woman, a young journalist in
Calcutta embarks on a quest to learn the story behind the violent incident
captured on film -- a strange odyssey that leads him to a volatile remote
corner of India mired in civil strife and sustained by timber, drugs, and
guns. Yet the truth he hopes to uncover is as uncertain as the mysterious
woman he seeks, smoldering dangerously on the border between illusion
and reality.
Personal Review: An Outline of the Republic: A Novel by
Siddhartha Deb
Amrit, a journalist from Calcutta, now in his thirties and disillusioned with
his life which leaves him little room to grow, takes off on an assignment for

a German magazine to uncover the story of a porn star, supposedly
executed by militants. He has found her photo in his newspaper's morgue
and she at once takes hold of his imagination. To find if she could still be
living, he travels deep into the lawless hill states between China and
Burma. Slowly he enters a world where nothing is at it seems: deserted
buildings, rusty signs, buses that hardly creep along roads which are
hardly passable. In shabby hotels strangers knock on his door, or accost
him at his table, each insistent on spilling forth their stories over quantities
of whisky. Every encounter is illusive, half conclusive, the falsehoods so
deftly mixed with truth that even the speaker cannot break them apart.
Pushing deeper into the hostile and harsh land, Amrit encounters officials
with suitcases spilling open money, large hotels entirely stripped of
furnishings but for a few rooms, hearing always of a great and altruistic
man who has started something called a Prosperity Project which will help
everyone in need. Amrit still steadfastly seeks the missing girl in the picture
and as he travels on crowded buses, or jeeps, hearing contradictory
stories of her, he begins to feel in some way that her journey is his own.
The India portrayed in An Outline of the Republic is different than any other
I have encountered: neither Bollywood nor the shanties of Calcutta, the
memories of the glittering princes of the Raj; no temples, comfortable
middle classes, arranged marriages, or religious fervor on the shores of
the Ganges, but a world utterly apart, forgotten. It is a corner of India
where people's souls have been so thoroughly scraped out that they no
longer consider them, but exist somehow in this violent world, struggling
hand-to-mouth for existence. Deb writes of one town: "It was a town
dissolving bit by bit into a state of nothingness, crumbling into an ocean of
absence, with each one of us in the town seceding in his or her own way
from the blinding presence of the republic."
"It is the only way to live in the region," someone says. "To conceal
surfaces under other surfaces is necessary." But as the story continues,
the benefactor of the Prosperity Project is not as he first seemed to Amrit,
nor is the girl in the picture, and indeed, once Amrit has gone as deep as
he can go and still remain safe, he is also no longer what he thought he
was.
A compelling novel from a sensitive writer with a remarkable journalist's
eye to capture this obscure, unsettling corner of India.
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