The Revolution Will Be Commodified: Gyan Chaturvedi’s THE MADHOUSE
Photo: Karan Madhok
In a world filled with abstractions, the greatest clarity in Gyan Chaturvedi’s The Madhouse (Pagalkhana) comes from the protagonist’s never-ending pursuit for escape: an escape from the Bazaar, from the dependence on commodification, from being commodified themselves.
A dreamscape forms the contours of plot in Gyan Chaturvedi’s The Madhouse (Niyogi Books, 2024), originally published in Hindi as Pagalkhana and translated to English by Punarvasu Joshi. In a vaguely-described town, a few vaguely-described men begin to go crazy. They feel a call to rebellion against the vague entity that is ‘The Bazaar’, the marketplace that now encompasses and commands all aspects of human life: their politics, their spirituality, and of course, their commerce, too.
Is the Bazaar a single person, a corporation, or the entire global capitalistic ‘machine’? It’s unclear. Are the men teetering on insanity just two men in interchanging fables? Is it just a single protagonist? Is it each one of us? It’s unclear. In a world filled with abstractions, the greatest clarity in The Madhouse comes from the protagonist’s never-ending pursuit for escape: an escape from The Bazaar, from the dependence on commodification, from being commodified themselves.
Chaturvedi is the author of six novels, 12 satire collections, and was the recipient of the Padma Shri Award in 2015. Originally published in 2018, Pagalkhana won great acclaim, including the 2022 Vyas Samman Award, given to an outstanding Hindi literary work by an Indian citizen published during the last 10 years. The English translation attempts to reproduce much of the peculiarity and the playfulness of the allegorical prose from the Hindi original.
However, it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to call The Madhouse an ‘allegory’: the elements of its narrative are more than a representation of a greater theme; they are the greater theme itself. There is no character symbolizing the market—the market is the character, personified, with its actions having a direct impact on the livelihood of the protagonist(s).
When trying to explain how his dreams have been literally stolen by the Bazaar to a doctor, the protagonist realizes the futility of his struggle, for everyone in the world reacts to his anguish as they would to the rants of a madman. “Once you consider the other person insane, things get a lot easier from thereon… Then, even the truth uttered by a person can be taken as a joke.”
In the world of The Madhouse, the “free market forces” are presented as an unequivocal evil by the “tyrannical Bazaar”, which, “in its rampant and unchecked expansion, was colonising an increasing number of the planet’s living places, gnawing away at people’s livelihoods, ruthlessly displacing people from their traditional and ancestral homes—and most importantly—slowly turning the sacred institutions of a democratic society impotent.” (1)
The human impotence at the face of the Bazaar is portrayed through various forms of willing or unwilling surrender. Citizens in this society surrender their ambitions, their dreams, their curiosities, their ability to imagine a life outside of the market, their freedom to not participate. No matter how absurd or uncomfortable life may become for its citizens, the market is able to convince them otherwise. “… This whole world is getting used to this stench in such a way that from tomorrow onwards it will start to believe that this stench is a fragrance.” (269)
And in such a world, any individual that begins to see clear-eyed through the Bazaar’s smog, to question the thievery of their dreams, to consider a way out, is branded crazy. The Madhouse is filled with many visits to doctors and experts—all working in cahoots with the Bazaar, of course—who diagnose any freedom of thought as thoughtlessness. Madness, or any form of mental anguish and anxiety, is efficiently weaponized by the Bazaar, and sanity is only bestowed upon the dutiful consumers. “According to this formula, the wise ones were those who were with the Bazaar in every black and white with their eyes wide shut, and the rest were crazies who refused to side with it.” (153) When trying to explain how his dreams have been literally stolen by the Bazaar to a doctor, the protagonist realizes the futility of his struggle, for everyone in the world reacts to his anguish as they would to the rants of a madman. “Once you consider the other person insane, things get a lot easier from thereon,” he thinks. “Then, even the truth uttered by a person can be taken as a joke.” (182)
Stuck in this paradox, The Madhouse and its chief character evoke the other great literary treatise on madness, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Here, a U.S. Air Force Captain and bombardier Yossarian is often posited as the only sane person in the symbolic ‘insane asylum’, which is the brutal, absurd world around him. While Yossarian faced the irrationality of choosing a system of ethics in the cruelty of war, the protagonist of The Madhouse faces a world that has surrendered its freedoms to become an impotent cog in the free market machine.
Chaturvedi’s prose—like Heller’s—is often cyclical, where themes are repeated, turns of phrase are turned over, and conversations stray into further absurdities. Both authors use this technique to plant seeds of doubt about insanity: after all, what credibility can a single individual have to claim their sanity, if their actions and interactions are filled with such oddities? Chaturvedi’s protagonist digs tunnels that nobody else can see, attempts to shop for an impossible lock, and even begins to forget his own identity—all except for his ID number, the only marking of a citizen devoid of any other humanity.
There is humour and hysteria in the repetition, and in the crossed wires of communication, much like the way it is employed in Catch-22. For example, the protagonist—seemingly suffering from amnesia—tells a salesman that he is wishes to buy memories:
‘… By the way, why are you looking to purchase memories?’ he wanted to know, and started laughing.
The man said, ‘No, no. I am not looking to buy memories. Memories aren’t bought and sold.’
‘That’s exactly what I was telling you. Memories aren’t bought and sold in a market.’
‘That I am very well aware of,’ he said, thinking something.
‘Then?’
‘But they will be found here. That’s for sure,’ he was saying confidently.
‘How so?’
‘They were my memories. I know that.’
‘If they were yours, then why don’t you go home and look for them? They must be there somewhere.’
‘No, no. They were lost somewhere here in the market.’
‘But why did you come to the market with memories? You are supposed to come here with an empty mind,’ he said. (217-218)
These repetitions, however, often over-burden the book, a satire that feels overcooked, a joke killed by over-explanation, until even the absurdities feel predictable, and the farce becomes a farce of itself.
In his vague multiplicities, this protagonist—Chaturvedi’s very own Yossarian—is a type of everyman, sometimes a middle-class citizen aspiring for greater material gains, sometimes a rich man paranoid about protecting his assets from the government, sometimes embroiled in the filth and muck of the netherworlds of sewers and tunnels. Sometimes, he grows anxious, unable to blink, constantly restless, sleeping with ‘chilli powder at hand’ (90). As the only sane man in the madhouse, he notices a world where everyone looks the same. “All of them had a peculiar mix of politeness and shrewdness on their faces” (263). “The Bazaar,” he concludes to himself, “was present there simultaneously in many gestures” (262). The plethora of other characters—including his son, the doctors, the shopkeepers, etc—befriend and infantilize him, puncturing the seriousness of his anxieties, often addressing him with a common ‘yaar’, as if they are satiating him into acceptance.
All the Bazaar wants for the protagonist is for him to be customer. “The most dangerous thing is that a man can think,” The Bazaar says (199), later adding, “Only the Bazaar should think” (200). There is only harmony for the citizen through interaction with the Bazaar: to trade, to consume, to buy, to buy, to keep buying. The Bazaar even repurposes language, so that words like “Democracy, honesty, love, affection, brotherhood”—much like the Newspeak of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—were “now under the Bazaar’s possession.” (261)
Many parts of The Madhouse feel like an Orwellian dystopia: of an individual under constant surveillance, living under the threat of being branded a ‘thought criminal’ (or insane), even by his own family and loved ones. In this way, Chaturvedi was even more prescient than Orwell, for the authority is not a totalitarian government, but a government and a citizenry shackled by the comforting chains of the marketplace. In Chaturvedi’s dystopian reality, a man is more likely to lose his innate humanity to the distractions of commerce rather than stomping boot of authority. Instead of violence, the Bazaar demands a polite acquiescence.
For much of the novel, the tunnel feels like a Sisyphean, existential task for the protagonist: agents of the Bazaar block every path, the Bazaar knows of all paths that lead out, and every exit only leads to more Bazaar.
The only solution—the protagonist figures—is the tunnel, a central motif of the story, of a man attempting to dig his way out and imagine a world without succumbing to capitalism. The tunnel is also an unsubtle shot to the continuing casteist practice of manual scavenging in India. For much of the novel, the tunnel feels like a Sisyphean, existential task for the protagonist: agents of the Bazaar block every path, the Bazaar knows of all paths that lead out, and every exit only leads to more Bazaar.
The Bazaar never fails to remind us, again and again, that a dependence to consumerism is the only real path to happiness. Everything is commodified, and when the Bazaar reveals to the protagonist that it has always been aware of the tunnel, instead of a punishment, the Bazaar offers the protagonist an opportunity to commodify the dig itself: ‘Once this tunnel becomes popular, we will bring a whole project of tunnel tourism. Tunnel tourism, yes! Even the name sounds cool. People will buy a ticket and entre the tunnel, and they’ll see you digging the tunnel—live! They will be able to take selfies with you. They will have your autograph.’ (369)
Our protagonist is given a sort-of Hobson’s choice by his supervisor, when being directed down a manhole. “Either climb down or don’t show up for work tomorrow” (291). It’s the choice capitalism gives its citizens: either to fully accept its rules, or accept death (a social death, a declaration of insanity, or a literal death when one is left with no resources to survive the system).
The Madhouse continues down an abstract, dreamlike path. Chaturvedi sacrifices specificity for universality, so that the protagonist could be any of us, and the city could be any city, and the Bazaar in its intangibility flows into any space of discontent in contemporary society. But in this lack of specificity, Chaturvedi also sacrifices intrigue and forward momentum for the novel, so that the dreamlike sequences often circle back to land on the same themes that have already been communicated multiple times. The symbolic characters remain symbols, the everyman is almost akin to being no man at all.
And yet, the same abstract everyman is also a symbol of hope. The obsession with the tunnel is, of course, labelled as a form of insanity, until the protagonist discovers some hope: there could be other tunnel-diggers, just like him, others who hope to escape The Madhouse. “Right now, he was doing this all alone and he was called insane for it… But if many joined him in this endeavour, then this would been called a movement, a new revolutionary thought! He smiled. Every revolutionary thought in the loneliness of the beginning is nothing but madness.” (304)
The protagonist, we are told, “was ready to live in a world of sewers, dirt, filth, and insects—provided he had freedom” (71). In the grand pagalkhana, if any one of us can dream to rebel—and anyone can desire to dream again—then, perhaps, all of us can.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. He is the author of Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis In India (2024) and A Beautiful Decay (2022), both published by the Aleph Book Company. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Caravan, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph Book Company) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
