Identity Crisis in Arun Joshi’s novel The City and the River

Abstract

Arun Joshi’s last novel The City and the River. It came out some ten years after ‘The Last Labyrinth’, a considerable span of time if one takes into consideration that the novelist took only a little more than a decade to publish his other four novels, a collection of short stories and a book illustrating the history of the philanthropic institution he worked for. The story told here is that after a disturbing dream, interpreted as a harbinger of problems by the Astrologer, the Great Master of the City resolves to strengthen his authority. Surrounding himself with a group of ambitious, sycophant ministers, he tries to win the boatmen’s sympathies. They represent the other pole in the city, the poor who still live according to tradition and have made an alliance with the river.

Arun Joshi’s the fifth and the final novel, The City and the River was published in 1990 after a breach of nine years. It aims at determining resolution to the inveterate problems of man’s birth and death. The novel runs concurrently on two levels, physical and metaphysical. There is a deep inner meaning and exact purpose behind the conception of some of the eccentric characters. Joshi while dealing with the intricacy of the modern society makes an effort to expose the plots of the modern-day politicians. He explores deep into the mind of the common man to substantiate his old age attachments with nature that makes him refuse to concede the supremacy of the so called, self-appointed, Grand Masters of the society.