I have often argued, perhaps facilely, that the three institutions that are holding back humanity, are religion, nations and family. That of course is in addition to class, the most debilitating of all social institutions. It is fairly easy to imagine a more enlightened world without religion and nation, but somewhat more problematic to envisage alternatives to the family. From most reports, neuroses arising from the Israeli kibbutz network were every bit as pronounced as those produced by your typical nuclear family. Similarly, the English boarding school system was and is notorious for producing its own catalogue of life-long disfunctionality.

It seems that however we organise ourselves, we humans have a predisposition towards neurosis. Jhumpa Lahiri, in her latest literary offering, zooms right in precisely on this arena of fraught family life to great effect.

But this is no mere quality chic-lit. Far from it. Lahiri has produced an intriguing portrait of an Indian family unravelling over three generations and two continents, complete with all the usual regrets, suspicions, resentments, sibling rivalries and missed opportunities. On top of that, Lahiri creates a wonderful, all-pervading sense of existential angst that hangs over all the key protagonists, an angst that we all inevitably experience when we’re not too busy running around like headless chickens. But what turns this very absorbing story into something more profound, is the continual reference to the on-going Naxalite rebellion that has been simmering in the rural areas of India for decades. The Lowland has been shortlisted for this year’s booker prize, and I feel that if Lahiri had developed the Naxalite theme still further, she might have produced not just a very good novel but a really great one.

To me, all of Lahiri’s characters are credible and convincing. It’s no easy task to transplant your main protagonists from an isolated Indian village to a post-graduate university life on Rhode Island but Lahiri does just that with consummate skill. And her austere control of language creeps up on you. When you least expect it, you suddenly feel the full emotional trauma of her characters. There is a touch of Albert Camus The Outsider about this novel.

The broader context of the novel is, as mentioned earlier, the Maoist/Naxalite movement that we in the west know very little of, but which has claimed many thousands of lives on both sides of the political divide. Lahiri does not lecture and it is unclear whether she herself supports the armed struggle. Certainly she is fully able to appreciate the human dimensions of such a struggle. But there is no sitting on the fence when it comes to Lahiri’s profound understanding of the grim material conditions in rural India that allow for armed struggle to gain traction. Speaking of one of the family members who had committed himself to the struggle, Lahiri writes:

He’d gone to the countryside to further indoctrinate himself. He’d been instructed to move from place to place, walk fifteen miles each day before sundown. He met tenant farmers living in desperation. People who resorted to eating what they fed their animals. Children who ate one meal a day. Those with less sometimes killed their families, he was told, before ending their own lives. Their subsistence was contingent on arrangements with landowners, moneylenders. On people who took advantage of them. On forces beyond their control He saw how the system coerced them, how it humiliated them. How it stripped away their dignity. P335/336

Lahiri’s triumph is how subtly she weaves this political narrative into the family one. Whether she wins the Booker prize or not, this novel deserves to be widely read and widely appreciated. It marks a significant contribution to our understanding of India’s current predicament, and of the real and varied implications of our increasingly globalised world.