English, August

An Indian Story

By Upamanyu Chatterjee
Introduction by Akhil Sharma

Agastya Sen, known to friends by the English name August, is a child of the Indian elite. His friends go to Yale and Harvard. August himself has just landed a prize government job. The job takes him to Madna, “the hottest town in India,” deep in the sticks. There he finds himself surrounded by incompetents and cranks, time wasters, bureaucrats, and crazies. What to do? Get stoned, shirk work, collapse in the heat, stare at the ceiling. Dealing with the locals turns out to be a lot easier for August than living with himself. English, August is a comic masterpiece from contemporary India. Like A Confederacy of Dunces and The Catcher in the Rye, it is both an inspired and hilarious satire and a timeless story of self-discovery.

Read the introduction and first chapter of English, August.

Read a chapter (PDF)

Reviews

A jazzy, baggy, hyperbolic, comic and crazy clamour of voices which…brings a breath of fresh talent to Indian fiction.
— Glasgow Herald

There's a popular conception that Indian fiction in English hit the road to big time with Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August in 1988. The irreverent language, the wry humour and the immediately identifiable situations struck a chord with a generation of Indians which was looking for its own voice and found it in Agastya Sen.
— The Sunday Express

A remarkably mature first novel.
— The Times Literary Supplement

The 'Indianest' novel in English that I know of. Utterly uncompromised, wildly funny, and a revelation of everyday life in modern India.
— Suketu Mehta

English, August is one of the most important novels in Indian writing in English, but not for the usual reasons. Indeed, it's at war with 'importance,' and is one of the few Indian English novels in the last two decades genuinely, and wonderfully, impelled by irreverence and aimlessness. It's this acutely intelligent conflation of self-discovery with the puncturing of solemnity that makes this book not only a significant work, but a much-loved one.
— Amit Chaudhuri

Comparing Upamanyu Chatterjee with any other comic novelist is like comparing a big fat cigar with a menthol cigarette. Page by page and joke by joke, English, August shimmers in a way that is hard to believe. To read about India from the point of view of this new writer is like discovering India for the first time.
— Gary Shteyngart

Excellent stuff. Let's have Chatterjee's other novels, please.
— Kirkus Reviews

Also see:

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian By Nirad C. Chaudhuri Introduction by Ian Jack The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is an astonishing work of self-discovery and the revelation of a peerless and provocative sensibility.

Cassandra at the Wedding By Dorothy Baker Afterword by Deborah Eisenberg Dorothy Baker's fascinating tragicomic novel follows an unpredictable course of events in which Cassandra appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and surprisingly sympathetic.

Jejuri By Arun Kolatkar Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri A sequence of stunningly simple but haunting poems, Jejuri is one of the great books of modern India.

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