The Mammaries of the Welfare State

The Mammaries of the Welfare State is an English-language Indian novel, the sequel to Upamanyu Chatterjee's debut novel, English, August, also told from the perspective of the fictional character Agastya Sen. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award (English) in 2004. The novel tells the story of political bureaucracy in the fictional state of Madna when an epidemic breaks out. The title derives from a line of dialog in the novel, where a civil servant states "In my eight years of service, I haven't come across a single case in which everybody concerned didn't try to milk dry the boobs of the Welfare State".