“Palimpsests of Power in Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others”

The paper takes into consideration Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others as an opportunity to interrogate the effects of the timeserving practices of leading political parties in India during the first decades following the Partition separating India and Pakistan. They were made possible by the instrumental employment of military forces following an internal reorganisation in the ’50s and ’60s. The then young Indian state de facto deprived tribals of their lands for profit with the com-plicity of the police and the military, whose repressive force was em-ployed not only to repress and stifle any form of dissent or protest, but also to “creatively” produce normative discourses which represented a constant threat to national growth and development. By blurring the line between truth and fantasy, the military decisively contributed to the symbolic binding of tribals to an imaginary of fear which proved instrumental to the emergence of the “modernity” of the nation-state. From this perspective, Mukherjee’s novel highlights how such biased forms of knowledge traversed the different networks composing the so-cial body in its entirety.