Don’t laugh

Amit Chaudhuri

• The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
  Hamish Hamilton, 435 pp, £12.99, April 2002, ISBN 0 241 14169 9

The story begins one afternoon, ‘three years after the beginning of the new century’ (the 20th). A figure on a horse appears on mountainous terrain. This is Ronald Forrester, dust ‘clogging the pores on his pink perspiring English face’. Hari Kunzru, Forrester’s creator, didn’t have to look too far for his character’s name: Forrester works with trees. There is a self-conscious aside: ‘In the European club at Simla they never tire of the joke, Forrester the forester.’ The man ‘takes a gulp from a flask of brackish water and strains in the saddle as his horse slips and rights itself, sending stones bouncing down a steep, dry slope’. At this point the book sounds and feels a bit like a Western. But you soon realise that nature, so important to the Western’s vision of the history of America, is ornamental, or incidental to this writer’s conception of India. Kunzru’s book, like so many novels about India in English, is less about nature than about artifice: about the creation of selves, and identity.