Bureaucratic Decay, The Struggle for Integrity and The Corruption in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Novel ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’

Abstract

Upamanyu Chatterjee presents a biting satirical portrayal of the Indian Bureaucratic system and its widespread corruption in his work ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’ (2000). He is not only the winner of Sahitya academy award in 2004, but also a civil servant, who knows the practical depth of his view point. In his work, English: August, he exposes the ‘steel frame’ of Indian Administration, which is not serving properly to its citizens and it has become self-serving. This paper studies themes of systematic corruption, moral degradation, bureaucratic alienation and individual’s void resistance with in a degraded welfare state. Analysis of the key episodes –housing crises, reservation politics, plague outbreak, personal compromises- highlights Chatterjee’s social vision. The study highlights Chatterjee’s social vision: a critique of post-colonial India’s governance failures. Public welfare was neglected because of personal ambitions and institutional decay in post- colonial India. This novel emphasizes how the honest individuals like Agastya Sen are gradually corrupted by a system, where exploitation and sycophancy was rewarded.