THE IMPRESSIONIST
By HARI KUNZRU
New York: Dutton, 2002. 383 pages, $24.95

reviewed by Arshia Sattar

Hari Kunzru's debut novel, The Impressionist, is a pleasant surprise. The hyperbolic publicity blurbs are trueKunzru controls his characters, his language, and his historical materials, pulling them along on a cartwheeling journey across continents and cultures. With remarkable assurance, Kunzru explores the underbelly of colonialism, specifically that of the Raj in India. He goes below the grandeur and the glitter of the jewels to the dirt under the fingernails of the people and the politics that animated that period.

The Impressionist tells the fragmented tale of a young man of mixed parentage whose life is constantly battered by centrifugal forces pulling in all directions. Pran Nath is born into a high-caste Kashmiri Brahmin family, but his biological father is a sad and short-lived Englishman who had a single, surreal, explosive sexual encounter with an Indian woman on her way to her own wedding. The child is born and brought up in Agra, where, at the age of fourteen, his scandalous parentage is revealed and he is thrown out into the street. Stripped of the cocoon of security that comes from wealth and caste, and with a new and loathsome identity thrust upon him, young Pran Nath is dragged by a perverse fate through a series of adventures that cover an enormous historical canvas.

Pran Nath becomes many peoplea potential eunuch in a maharaja's harem, toy boy to a British civil servant, adopted son of a missionary couple, hustler and pimp to Bombay's prostitutes, and, finally, a student in England. Kunzru uses these changes in identity to examine various aspects of the Rajfrom the conspiracies and contradictions of the ruling elites to the aspirations and concerns of the people on the street. Each diverse segmentthe secluded harem in the 1920s, the busy and roiling streets of Bombay in the 1930s, the pastoral landscapes of schooldays in England in the 1940sis carefully researched and has a ring of authenticity. Kunzru brings these historical periods to rambunctious life: the minor characters sparkle, the backdrops are detailed and luminous, and at the shifting center stands the transparent hero.

The Impressionist is also a meditation on identity explored through obsessions with purity and pollution. The issue of miscegenationimpurityis at the very heart of the book, represented both literally and metaphorically by the protagonist. Pran Nath, who is ultimately fluid, undefined, and malleable, is juxtaposed against characters who fetishize purityof caste, of gender, and of race. But Pran Nath remains on the move, searching for an anchor, a definition. It is not until his fateful encounter with the young British student Jonathan Bridgeman that Pran Nath makes an active choice. Until then, he has allowed others to bestow identity upon him, becoming what they perceived him to be in order to survive.

Kunzru plays with the idea of a person who is a tabula rasa, one who is what others write onto him, impress upon him. What is fresh and new about Kunzru's rendering of this compelling literary idea is that he seems to link identity and destiny, identity and morality. Are these the metaphysical and existential questions that The Impressionist poses? It would appear so. Pran Nath's bestowed identities confuse his fate, but his decision to remake himself gives him control. As this wonderful tale progresses, there is a complete erasure of Pran Nath's personality, which makes him completely amoral. Having lived a series of colorful and outrageous lies, Pran Nath has fallen outside the boundaries of conventional morality. Since his identity and his fate are fluid, so, too, is his moral sense. It is when he falls hopelessly in love with the glamorous Astarte that he faces his ironic moment of truth. But by then his course has been set and he can only move forward, propelled by the lies and the disguises. The book ends tantalizingly with the hero poised on the brink of another adventure with what appears to be a final identity, one born out of a crisis of body and soul.

For all the big themes that are tackled here, Hari Kunzru's triumph in The Impressionist is that he is a great storyteller. What sets Kunzru apart from other Indo-Anglian writers is that he does not need the support of formal and linguistic convulsions to attract attention. He has a rollicking good story to tell, and he tells it with bluster and humor, with grace, and with compassion.