The Middle Finger | Novel | Saikat Majumdar |
New Delhi: Simon & Schuster India (2022) |
ISBN 978-93-92099-27-4 | Pp. 223p | ₹ 599 (HB)

A Compelling Campus Fiction

Saikat Majumdar, with his new book, The Middle Finger, joins a bevy of scholars who penned a fictional narrative about the very space(s) that they were ensconced in. The act of reading and writing campus novels, some might say, presents a delightful opportunity for academics to indulge in their self-absorption. Thus, Elaine Showalter says that for fellow scholars these accounts offer the narcissistic thrill of recognising literary renditions of real-life academic figures and campuses (1). While such novels do have the propensity to be inward-looking, they are simultaneously, invariably, chronicles of the trajectory of the higher education sector of a country. Saikat Majumdar is familiar with the topology of higher education, having written extensively on the same in his book College: Pathways of Possibility and sundry articles in The Telegraph, Times Higher Education, and others. And so, it is not surprising that besides providing a portrait of a diasporic academic, The Middle Finger is interspersed with a critique of the higher education system in India and America.

The Middle Finger weaves the personal and professional life of Megha, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, who relocates from a largely white and elite campus to a state university in Rutgers with a multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational student body, and finally finds herself at a neoliberal university named Harappa in India. Her unfinished dissertation haunts her, and so does her creative output which transforms into an “alien” entity through audio-visual performance. “People loved the sound of her poems. She … squirmed.” (Majumdar 12) It is not only the strangeness of the form that leaves her feeling discomfited but also the politics of representation. She is, after all, “borrowing the voices,” speaking in “other people’s tongues.” (22) Her students’ lives provide her with raw material that can then be processed into her poetry, and this, in turn, makes her wonder: “There is a language of pain that draws you in, but does that pain really belong to you?” (160) She carries the guilt of never truly feeling secure in their possession in a manner that is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s essay, “Death of an Author”: “I write poems, I don’t own them. They leave me once they are out there.” (185) While vanquishing death through one’s artistic creation has been an enduring theme in poetry, for Megha, coexistence with her own poems begins to feel like an albatross around her neck.

The theme of (un)belonging also informs Megha’s relationship with Poonam, her domestic help in Delhi. The novel opens with Poonam’s monologue about the slaughterhouse below her house in Calcutta and it is hinted that she belongs to a marginalized caste community in a place “where they eat kinds of flesh unknown to most people in this city.” (3) Her own precarious and vulnerable condition is not dissimilar to the poor hens being slaughtered in the slaughterhouse. A vast chasm exists between both women due to the disparity in their class and caste: “She (Poonam) could never be (her student)... She was too far,” Megha notes (117), and that is perhaps only one of the many reasons behind the tentativeness of their advances. The intimacy they share is subtle and it is further complicated by the historically hierarchical relationship between a guru and the shishya (pupil) that Poonam wants both of them to occupy. She is in awe of Megha’s poetic genius and eager to learn from her despite Megha’s disinclination. And learn she does, by reifying Socrates’s desire, delineated in the preface, to enable learning through his physical proximity to Agathon.

Megha’s relationship with Poonam is enmeshed in the question of home and the sense of (un)belonging. In a telling scene, Megha confronts Poonam for publicly calling her her teacher. The air between them crackles with tension until both of them find themselves locked in a passionate embrace. Poonam’s life’s story and memories pour out of her and Megha feels a strange ache of “letting down the one who called her three times to ask if she was ready to come back home.” (188) Later, Megha tries to distance herself from Poonam, engrossing herself in her work and refusing to acknowledge a change in her attitude to Poonam. She returns to the familiar darkness of her home in Delhi which had been full of light whenever Poonam was inside (181). The lights in the house evoke warmth within Megha (97). It pains her to be away from Poonam but she appears to be unwilling to return to the home that Poonam embodies, as her conception of the home has been marred by the memory of her parents’ loveless marriage. Her father had eventually left home to be with his longtime working-class mistress.

Megha moves continents for her education and seems to always be in transit, flitting rather smoothly from one place to another, at home without a home. Journeys were a reminder of her broken family, triggering memories of witnessing her mother kissing a colleague on an airplane. Thus, to her, empty apartments seemed comforting as they did not try to masquerade as the home she never had.

It is worth noting that Megha’s relationship with Poonam is reminiscent of the transgressive erotic dalliance frequently found in Anglo-American campus fiction. The Middle Finger is part of a rich literary tradition that is centered around the university and fits neatly into the paradigm. Such novels have been variously named campus novels, university novels, college novels, and academic novels by literary scholars. Compared to the thriving corpus of Anglo-American campus fiction, Indian campus fiction in English, quantitatively, fares badly. It is, however, successful in documenting the significant coordinates in the higher education timeline in India: from the colonial to the socialist system, and finally to the neoliberal model in the present.

Megha is hired to develop the Poetics and Performance program and Thinking to Write Seminar at Harappa. The portrayal of the university is evocative of Ashoka University where Majumdar currently teaches and furnishes a blueprint of a neoliberal university. Harappa, then, is a neoliberal successor to a university such as Jawaharlal Nehru University(JNU) which makes a brief appearance in the novel and definitively belongs to the era of Nehruvian socialism. Unlike JNU, Harappa possesses a predominantly homogenous student body whose education in this “obscenely expensive college” (100) had been bought by their parents. The readers are shown the genesis and inner workings of Harappa, which is founded by venture capitalists and technocrats, funded by global capital, and ostensibly sustained by strategic marketing. Harappa organizes multiple events at schools in Indian cities to attract student customers with its faculty and students’ class markers and cultural capital. One such event is led by an “ex-Princetonian professor (Megha)” and a “star student from an elite boarding school” (192) who happens to be the scion of a political dynasty in India. The Regional outreach manager, Simi, who spearheads the entire operation is business-like and absorbed in her phone throughout the event and does not seem to be emotionally invested in the process of building a student body, unlike Megha’s friend Alberto, a passionate and feisty Chicano faculty member at CUNY, who cares deeply about the inclusivity and accessibility of American universities. Simi’s demeanor, on the other hand, highlights the detached and commercial nature of the operations undergirding the neoliberal university.

The Middle Finger thus heralds the new entrant in the higher education terrain, capturing the unofficial and intangible facets of the university and its denizens in the process. It nimbly welds the fraught relationship Megha shares with her poetry and the tensions of diasporic and academic life that weigh heavily on her mind. Additionally, the novel provides a highly microscopic view of the juncture where Indian tertiary education is privatizing at a great velocity and the humanities are finding new sites for refuge. This makes Majumdar’s new novel a compelling read for anyone who wishes to understand where Indian and American higher education systems are headed and gain an insider’s view of the newly burgeoning aspirational campuses in India.

Works Cited

Majumdar, Saikat. The Middle Finger. New Delhi: Simon & Schuster India, 2022. Print.

Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Oxford  University Press, 2005.