In three loosely connected stories, The Elephanta Suite features Western travellers who are disturbed and bewildered by their encounters with the “real” India.
Their preconceived and somewhat romanticised ideas about the country are overturned once they come face to face with over-crowded streets, beggars, noise and bureaucracy. Instead of an exotic land of spirituality, yoga, temples and ancient traditions, they find poverty, corruption, and stark inequalities between wealthy elites and the urban poor.
The tales in The Elephanta Suite form a composite picture of how foreigners perceive and react to India. Some of Theroux’s characters viewed their trip to India as a place to discover and reinvent themselves. They are indeed changed completely by their experiences but not in the way they could ever have imagined.
The three stories introduce us to:
- The Blundens, a middle aged couple on holiday at an upscale health resort near a town with a large Hindu temple. Caccooned within the boundaries of the hotel they feel safe, able to sample the best of India without getting too close to the less desirable elements.
- Dwight Huntsinger, a Boston lawyer visiting the city to secure outsourcing deals for American companies.
- Alice, a solo female traveller staying at an ashram near Bangalore.
Each story shows how these travellers take steps initially to separate and protect themselves from the “real India”. But once they step outside their protective bubbles, they become de-stabilised.
In The Monkey God, for example, the drive from the airport had left a lasting impression on the Blundens, one they’re not in a hurry to repeat. India to them is …
“… a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people — a big horrific creature, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous”.
In their luxury resort, protected by security guards, they’re insulated from this India. They’re aware of the nearby town only through the smells of scorched dirt and excrement that waft towards their poolside loungers.
The Blunden’s interactions with local people are largely through the hotel employees. It’s their sexual dalliances with two of the masseurs that prove their undoing. Their wealth cannot protect them and they are booted out unceremoniously. Their holiday ends in a violent encounter.
In The Gateway of India, Dwight Huntsinger’s interactions with India are even more constrained. He’s staying in the five-star Taj Hotel just a few hundred yards away from Mumbai’s famous monument. But Dwight is happier staying in his room eating tuna from a can (he doesn’t trust the local food).
Just like the Blundens, sexual desire gets the better of him. He becomes entangled with a child prostitute and later with a girl who works part-time in a hair and nail salon. It’s all very unsavoury. Work gets neglected as his obsession with these girls takes hold.
Retribution for his reprehensible behaviour is no less decisive than that which befalls the Blundens, but is more subtle. This one-time leading light of the business world essentially becomes invisible.
In the final story The Elephant God, the central figure has built up a picture of India from reading novels. Her back-packing trip has shattered the illusions created by those books.
“Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?’
Alice retreats to an ashram, embracing the spirit of the place wholeheartedly. But then gets a shock — if she doesn’t start contributing financially, she’ll have to leave.
Her job teaching American idioms and intonations to call-centre workers goes well initially. But her students take to the task rather too well, their new-found assertiveness making her feel uncomfortable. And there’s one student whose friendly overtures take on a worrying level of aggression.
What The Elephanta Suite suggests is that foreigners’ attitudes to India are often superficial and shaped by stereotypes. Those attitudes are put to the test during their sojourn in the country. Theroux portrays India as overwhelming, contradictory, and unsettling. It’s an active force with a tempo and desires of its own, not just a passive backdrop to fulfill one’s own desires. Those who survive their enounter — and not all do — are irrevocably changed as a result.
They get what one character calls the ‘Indian surprise’:
“India attracted you, fooled you, subverted you, then, if it did not succeed in destroying you with the unexpected, it left you so changed as to be unrecognisable.”
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