Fragments of a Fractured Self: Narrating the In-Between in Swadesh Deepak’s Bipolar Memoir

Alina M. Jolly and Rayson K. Alex review I Have Not Seen Mandu, exploring its literary and epistemological disruptions of India’s mental health climate.

Recounting Lived Experience in the Context of India’s Mental Health Crisis

The magnitude of India’s mental health crisis is severe and escalating, contributing to a significant public health concern (Meghrajani et al. 2023). India records the highest rates of depression globally, and with one in seven Indians affected by mental disorders of varying severity as of 2017, the scale of the issue is undeniable (Murthy 2017; Sagar et al. 2019). Yet, statistics alone cannot capture the texture of lived experience. This is where illness narratives become indispensable, bridging the gap between clinical abstraction and embodied reality. These narratives give voice to suffering in ways that lie outside the biomedical domain, revealing how cultural values and social relations shape our interpretation of symptoms and distress (Hydén 1997; Kleinman 1988). Such stories are powerful tools for fostering a deeper understanding among both clinicians and the wider public (Sree Lekshmi and Das 2025).

It is precisely within this framework that Swadesh Deepak’s memoir, Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha: Khandit Jivan Ka Kolaj (2003), translated as I Have Not Seen Mandu: A Fractured Soul-Memoir (2021) by Jerry Pinto, emerges as a striking literary intervention, rendering visible the fractured realities of living with bipolar disorder. Deepak’s portrayal of his illness emerges from a state of “in-betweenness,” a conceptual and emotional space that destabilizes the binaries through which mental health is often understood.

“In-betweenness” in the Sphere of Mental Illness

To fully grasp the significance of Deepak’s intervention, it is necessary to understand the broader conceptual terrain of “in-betweenness.” Bernhard Giesen describes it as “the (extraordinary) space in between the opposites—the third possibility, the transition between inside and outside, the ‘neither … nor’ or the ‘as well as …,’ the space of hybridity” (Giesen 2017). In the context of illness, particularly mental illness, in-betweenness highlights the cognitive, emotional, and existential disruptions patients experience—the oscillation between wellness and illness, sanity and instability, continuity and rupture. As Susan Sontag observed, patients often feel suspended “between the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick” (Sontag 1978, 3), confronting mortality, identity, and social expectations. Illness narratives capture this suspended state, showing how patients make sense of their condition, reconstruct identity, and navigate relationships amid suffering, while also revealing the ambivalence inherent in these processes (Frank 1997, 59). Deepak himself describes his bipolar condition as being caught “between to-be and not-to-be” (Deepak 2021, 172), evoking a Hamletian suspension that illuminates the liminal space between sanity and insanity. Building on this, the next section turns to the artistic strategies in his memoir that render his portrayal of this subjective “in-betweenness,” a state central to both his lived experience and literary practice.

Enacting In-betweenness: Fragmentation as the Memoir’s Artistic Strategy

This section analyzes how Deepak crafts his illness memoir through two intertwined artistic strategies—fragmented narration and language loss and shifts. Together, these narrative choices do not merely recount the sufferer’s distress but embody the liminal, ‘in-between’ condition of illness, in which time, identity, and meaning are destabilized. In Arthur Frank’s classification of illness narratives, Deepak’s memoir aligns most closely with the ‘chaos narrative,’ where “its plot imagines life never getting better” and “stories [are] chaotic in their absence of narrative order” (Frank 1997, 97). Rather than striving for coherence, Deepak deliberately employs form as a medium to stage the unstable terrain of bipolar disorder and the profound disruptions it inflicts on selfhood.

Deepak’s most radical intervention lies in his rejection of linear chronology, deploying a fragmented narrative to embody the cognitive ruptures of bipolar disorder. As Arthur Frank observes, “illness memoirs are fragments of an autobiography that the author prefers, for various postmodern motivations, to construct in such fragmented form” (Frank 1997, 120). The subtitle itself, A Fractured Soul Memoir, signals that Deepak’s story resists any unified whole. The memoir, as he recalls, was born from the advice of his writer friend Giridhar Rathi: “Forget about time and sequence…. Liberate yourself from past-present-future. Write it down as it comes back.… a fractured prose for a fractured autobiography” (Deepak 2021, 119). Deepak takes this advice to heart, producing a text that mirrors the very disorientation it describes. The narrative oscillates restlessly between timeframes and locations, as section headers announce disjointed shifts: “THE PRESENT – IN THE FUTURE – TIME PRESENT – THE FUTURE – THE PAST.” Its geography is equally unsettled, moving from his friend’s home in Delhi to hospital wards at PGI Chandigarh, from the dunes of Rajasthan to the intimacies of his own household. The plot alternates between scenes of camaraderie among fellow writers and the regimented encounters of patient and physician. This is not merely a literary device but, in Deepak’s own words, the enactment of a mind that has “crossed the borders of time. Past and present were at one place. My memories kept moving from their predetermined places” (9). Such contextual dislocations lend the text a surrealistic quality reminiscent of Luis Buñuel’s films or Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, where conventional coordinates of time and space collapse. At moments of heightened turmoil, Deepak’s prose becomes a desperate collage of literary echoes and visceral declarations:

“‘Life is a tale told by an idiot.’ Shakespeare had not seen me. How could he have known this to be true? My history has swollen stomach. I have become grotesque. My pills are now my point of view. I do not feel much hunger at all. A canister has been tied to my tail.

Such a woman cannot be a woman at all.

The lines from my palms have been erased.

I cannot find the portal of her fort.

My heart is orphaned. I am a refugee in my own home. I am her slave, hostage to her desire.

‘That is no country for old men.’ – W.B. Yeats.

My time has been castrated.

My family’s anxieties for me have turned to anger.

They want me dead.

I am waiting for Godot.

Languages have begun to turn away from me.

The doctors have almost been defeated.

Now sadhus and tantriks will take their place.” (91)

Here, his internal monologue becomes a desperate collage of literary fragments and stark declarations, asserting that his “pills are now my point of view,” his “time has been castrated,” and he is “waiting for Godot” (91). Later, he reduces his life’s achievements to a torrent of broken signifiers: “Madness. Tigress. Doctor. Medicine. Terror. Rebirth. Fear. Lame Hopes. Madame Bovary. And. And. And. Lukman Ali” (189)—and recalls his hospitalization in similarly staccato form: “…. The moon wanes. Me. Hospital. Bed. Stink. Impossible hopes” (198). This structural fragmentation denies the reader a stable timeline of recovery or decline. Instead, it compels them to inhabit Deepak’s liminal reality, a subjective “in-betweenness” where the boundaries between memory and present, hallucinations and dread, have dissolved. In this sense, the very form of storytelling is inseparable from the experience of illness itself.

 Language Loss and Language Shift: The Memoir’s Linguistic Experimentation

This sense of a fractured self is further realized through the memoir’s complex linguistic texture. As a Hindi writer and a professor of English, Deepak situates his very identity in language, which becomes a central battleground in his narrative. He reflects on telling his contemporary Nirmal Verma that words have grown “tough and obstinate” for him, that even his speech, like his appearance, has changed under the weight of bipolar disorder. The struggle with words mirrors the larger destabilization of selfhood brought on by illness. At one point, he laments: “If the right words do make their way from my belly to my throat, they get stuck somewhere behind my clenched teeth. I, the talkative one, was alone. I, Swadesh, from whom a river of words once flowed” (19). In this moment, the erosion of language becomes inseparable from the erosion of identity: the very faculty that once defined him as a writer now falters, leaving him stranded between his former eloquence and his present silence. It is within this gap, between fluency and muteness, Hindi and English, that Deepak inhabits a state of profound linguistic in-betweenness.

This gap widens as he slips into English during his most acute episodes, a language he calls a “language of lies” and the “language of the ruling class” (223). He is trapped between these two, using the language he distrusts to describe a condition that has stolen the language he loves. For Deepak, English is both a resource and a curse, a medium of survival in the clinic during physician encounters yet an alienation from his authentic artistic self and kin.  His sister’s ultimatum, “Kaka, don’t speak English. Not a word… I will never see your face again” (175), makes this fracture social as well as personal, dramatizing how illness reconfigures identity across linguistic, cultural, and familial lines. As translator Jerry Pinto notes, “[P]erhaps the best way to look at the relationship between Swadesh Deepak and English as a language is as a reflection of the ambivalence many feel for the language of power and the power of the language” (xiv). Deepak himself rejects the view that his use of English reflects pride. Instead, he insists his condition places him beyond the confines of national belonging: “They do not know that the cursed belong to every nation. International passports. I could speak Spanish, Russian too. Italian and Dutch as well. Not German. It is too difficult” (320). Here, illness universalizes exile, marking him as a perpetual outsider, a “citizen” suspended between identities, languages, and worlds. In this way, Deepak’s multilingual shifts enact the instability of his condition. Language, once the foundation of his literary vocation, becomes at once a symptom of rupture and the only means of bearing witness to it.

Conclusion

Deepak’s memoir refuses the tidy arc of recovery, choosing instead to dwell in the fractures where coherence slips, language falters, and time loses shape. In this space of in-between, Deepak’s narrative turns suffering into understanding, allowing the illness to speak in its own rhythms. His fragmented storytelling does not seek repair but recognition that brokenness, too, can carry truth. By unsettling these binaries, Deepak reminds us that living with illness is not merely having a medical condition, but a continual negotiation of its meaning. At a time when India continues to grapple with the scale and stigma of mental illness, Deepak’s memoir becomes a vital act of witness, an appeal for empathy, and a reminder that even amid disarray, the human spirit continues to seek connection. Narratives like his are crucial: they move conversations from the abstract to the embodied, from the clinical to the existential, urging a more compassionate and nuanced engagement with mental health. Ultimately, I Have Not Seen Mandu exemplifies the indispensable role of the humanities in illuminating the complexities of human experience — especially when the self feels most fragmented and most in need of recognition.

About the authors

Alina M. Jolly is a Ph.D. Candidate (English) in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus, Goa, India. Her research interests include cultural representations of medicine and illness, especially in relation to gender and reproductive health in the Indian context. (X: @AlinaMJolly) 

Rayson K. Alex is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, K. K. Birla Goa Campus, Goa, India. His academic work lies in the area of ecocriticism, or broadly environmental humanities (EH), with a specific focus on indigenous nature-cultures and eco-cinema. He is one of the editors of Essays in Ecocriticism (Sarup & Sons, Delhi, 2007), Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explorations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Ecocultural Ethics: Critical Essays (Lexington Books, 2017). He has translated works from Malayalam: Ecocriticism in Malayalam (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022) and E for Elephant: Elephant Tales and More (Green Books, 2022). He is a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship (Teaching and Research) (2022-23) and the ASLE Translation and Media Subvention Grants, and is the founder and co-director of the tiNai Ecofilm Festival.

References

Deepak, Swadesh. 2021. I Have Not Seen Mandu a Fractured Soul-Memoir. Translated by Jerry Pinto. Speaking Tiger Books.

Frank, Arthur W. 1997. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. University of Chicago Press.

Giesen, Bernhard. 2017. Inbetweenness and Ambivalence. Oxford University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195377767.013.30.

Hydén, Lars‐Christer. 1997. “Illness and Narrative.” Sociology of Health & Illness 19 (1): 48–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.1997.tb00015.x.

Kleinman, Arthur. 1988. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition. Basic Books.

Meghrajani, Vanee R, Manvi Marathe, Ritika Sharma, Ashwini Potdukhe, Mayur B Wanjari, and Avinash B Taksande. 2023. “A Comprehensive Analysis of Mental Health Problems in India and the Role of Mental Asylums.” Cureus, July. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.42559.

Murthy, R Srinivasa. 2017. “National Mental Health Survey of India 2015–2016.” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 59 (1): 21. https://doi.org/10.4103/psychiatry.indianjpsychiatry_102_17.

Sagar, Rajesh, Rakhi Dandona, Gopalkrishna Gururaj, R S Dhaliwal, Aditya Singh, Alize Ferrari, Tarun Dua, et al. 2019. “The Burden of Mental Disorders Across the States of India: The Global Burden of Disease Study 1990–2017.” The Lancet Psychiatry 7 (2): 148–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2215-0366(19)30475-4.

Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York, United States of America: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Sree Lekshmi, M S, and Aratrika Das. 2024. “Mental Health Memoirs in the Indian Medical Humanities Classroom.” The Polyphony. July 26, 2025. https://thepolyphony.org/2024/02/29/mental-health-memoirs-india/#:~:text=Given%20that%20mentally%20ill%20patients,be%20incorporated%20within%20Indian%20society.