Power, Sex, and Detection in Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins

Abstract

Through its repeated references to William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins announces a close textual kinship to this earlier work, one that plays out in terms of a common aesthetic aim of laying bare the naked ugliness of the social forces of power and oppression structuring the societies each represents. This essay argues that while operating in this vein The Story of My Assassins uses elements of the detective fiction genre to critique the structures of power of an early twenty-first-century India whose emergence as a major global economic power has allowed a small minority of its population to garner previously unheard-of levels of wealth and power while leaving an 900 million or so strong underclass subject to myriad forms of brutalization and social marginalization. In doing so, it uses narrative to consider the roles played by sexualized violence, state bureaucracies, and an emergent plutocratic elite in fomenting the defining social inequalities and exclusions of a society it poses as having drifted far from the originary social visions of Gandhi and Nehru.