Administrative Necropolitics: Bureaucratic Power, Slow Death, and State Violence in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Novels

Abstract

Bureaucracy has occupied a central position in postcolonial Indian governance, often represented in literature as a system marked by inefficiency, corruption, and administrative inertia. In Indian English fiction, such representations have largely been read through the lenses of satire, alienation, and middle-class disillusionment. This paper re-examines bureaucratic governance in postcolonial India by applying Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, which foregrounds state power over life, death, and conditions of slow death. The study identifies a significant research gap in existing scholarship on Upamanyu Chatterjee, noting the absence of sustained necropolitical readings of his bureaucratic fiction.

Focusing on English, August and The Mammaries of the Welfare State, the paper employs a qualitative, interpretive methodology grounded in close textual analysis and political theory. It argues that bureaucracy in Chatterjee’s novels functions as a necropolitical apparatus that governs through delay, neglect, procedural excess, and moral indifference rather than overt coercion. Administrative routines, welfare rhetoric, and institutional apathy collectively produce conditions of slow death for marginalized populations, revealing state violence embedded in everyday governance.

By reframing bureaucracy as a mechanism of necropolitical power rather than administrative failure, this study contributes a novel theoretical intervention to Indian English literary studies. It demonstrates how Chatterjee’s realism and satire expose governance as a system that manages suffering, thereby expanding the critical application of necropolitics within postcolonial literary analysis.