Signal Red reviewed

‘The Culture of Surveillance’
By Sayantan Dasgupta
8th Day (The Sunday Statesman Magazine), 3 July 2005

Gopal Chandran is a scientist. He works for a defence research organisation tucked away in one corner of India. He has been researching Signal Red, a kind of glass found in a village in Rajasthan. He has always been passionately involved in and happy with his work. One day, he finds he no longer is.

Gopal’s doubts are fuelled by the visit of Anuprabha, a friend of his wife, Vidura. Anuprabha is a sociologist and is using her visit to study the lives of scientists and there families. After he meets her, Gopal begins to doubt the ethics of his work and to wonder about how his research is used by the defence establishment. His doubts are further strengthened when he stumbles across a secret weapons project.

Signal Red is a scathing comment on the culture of surveillance that characterises contemporary life It also critiques a nationalism that has unfortunately become too familiar to us — one that believes in the concept of a ‘hard’ state and in the thesis that the most effective way of becoming a great power and of making one’s voice heard is to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. And very often, such weapons are manufactured at the cost of the very citizens the state is supposed to protect. There ample hints in the novel that the misery of Songarh village is the result of some scientific experiment that went awry.

This novel focuses on some very contemporary and relevant concerns. The saffronisation of research, the manufacture of apocalyptic scenarios to justify defence spending and strikes, the subordination of human rights for a greater common ‘national’ good — these are all issues we are familiar with.

Rimi B. Chatterjee has written a gripping novel of intrigue, and one that succeeds in negotiating some difficult ethical and philosophical questions. Incorporating shades of The Matrix, 1984 and The Circle of Reason, Signal Red belongs to an emergent genre of Indian English literature — one that can be expected to become more prominent in the near future.