Reviews, Vol I, Issue IV
In
the middle pages of the narrative of the novel, we have a list. A description
of the dead bodies who were massacred by a police inspector: burnt alive by the
Caste-Hindu Landlords of Kilvenmani. It is a chilling few pages in the novel.
Trust me, nothing within the earlier pages where the novelist is preparing us
for the story, telling us the impossibility of telling such a story, and also
giving us the background of the massacre where both the political ideologies or
class/caste ideologies represented with two pamphlets will prepare you for
this. Till now, you may have dissected, interpreted, got irritated, got provoked,
itching, scratching your head, thinking hard to make sense (as you have no idea
about what actually happened), making some sense (of the historical details
given) a few times, gasping, yawning (not me), being impressed with the
techniques/ anti-techniques, narrative style/anti-narrative style, novel/anti-novel,
modernism/postmodernism, political commitment, research, thesis/ anti-thesis
and all other things. But trust me, you are not prepared for this graphic
detail. An absolutely emotionless detail. You come to know there were 44 of
them. You come to know most of them were women and children. You come to know
how those bodies, burnt, were sometimes so unrecognizable that their identities
(name, sex, house, but not caste or village or specie) get dissolved. As if
you’ve been hit with a brick. As if you now start watching things with your
eyes wide open(no more yawning in between or doing technical studies of
narratives, especially when you've been thinking about writing a review, your
first ever review) Here, when are craving for realism, when it’s too real, you
won't be able take it.
The
next couple of chapters are in reverse, like Gasper Noe’s Irreversible, and yes
the facts/images/smells/sounds are even more startling than that skull smashing
scene in the beginning of the movie. Next Chapter: Someone, probably someone young,
running to save his life (short sentences, breathlessness). The next one, has the account of the
massacre, where 44 people were burnt, locked inside a hut. (no commas, full
stops, no time for taking a breath, as if the novelist has a handy cam and she
is capturing those images, without a break). And then the trial, the usual
denial of justice and a violent ending (Can't tell you everything)
Since
it’s a novel (it is hard to describe it as something else, or maybe we can call
it a tragedy, an epic tragedy, a novel with tragedy of epic proportion) you are
searching for a single micro narrative, an isolated case study, a minute
description of what happened to the old woman in the beginning. You’ll be disappointed
if you want that story. The judges in the courts in the novel too wanted such a
narrative.
“Perhaps
he wanted a single story: uniform, end to end to end. The “Once upon a time,
there lived an old woman in a tiny village” story. Sadly, we are not able to
tell such a story. A story told in many voices seems unreliable.”
How
can you tell one story when so many people got affected? And is this just the
story of Kilvenamni? Probably not. Although the Kilvenmani story (in the novel
at least) is resolved temporarily, but it’s also the story of other such
massacres, the Bathani tola’s, the Lakshmanpur Bathe’s or even the Ramabai
Colony’s (it’s ironical that we have to use the word story here, even when we
are telling you a fact, because when someone narrates a fact, it automatically
becomes a story, hence unreliable and the impossibility of telling a factual
story stems from that)
What’s
also refreshing to see is that the novelist is not shying away from revealing
her political commitment to communism, and that commitment is not just reflected
in the narrative, but also in the narrative style. ‘We’ is the protagonist of
the novel, in this sense we can call it a proletarian narrative. Although there
are a few individuals too like Maayi, but it’s not your regular single hero
blockbuster. The villain, however, is cinematically represented, and the horror
that we are going to deal with in the future pages becomes believable.
The
preparation of the reader for the future events, where the novelist is trying
to figure out, what is the best way to tell the story, also works as an
alienating effect (see, I know Brecht) This alienation stops us from being
emotional about the story, to cry, and get purged and forget about it after the
reading. That is not going to happen to you. Although you won’t do the things
that the novelist suggested, but still, you’ll be disturbed (at least for a
while) you’ll try to find out the facts (though there is hardly enough material
on the net) This probably will be the only properly written thing (though the
novelist will disagree) that you’ll be reading about the massacre. Though there
are a few non-fictional accounts about which the writer herself talks about.
As
a first time reviewer (I don’t know if it’s a review, since I haven’t written
one before and also the fact that you can’t really write of something like this
as I have never been subjected to such a violence, being from a certain
caste/class/educational background, but still, for convenience sake) I would recommend
(strongly) to read the novel and to try and discover more. You can’t feel the pain
(don’t even try to pretend) but at least be aware that something like this has
actually happened. Do grab a copy. I heard that the paperback is out (buy a hardcover
version though, the words will remain secured inside it) Keep that story of
those Gypsy Goddess (seven or seventeen) and their children who were burnt with
them, in the hard disk of your memory.
About the Novelist
Meena
Kandasamy is a poet, writer, activist and translator. Her work maintains a
focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. She has
published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010). Her
first novel, The Gypsy Goddess was published by Atlantic Books (UK) and
HarperCollins India in 2014.
She
was a British Council - Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of
Kent and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University in 2011. In 2009, she was a
writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program
(IWP). She has held writing residencies at the Hong Kong Baptist University,
Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and the University of Hyderabad.
She
has co-authored (with M Nisar) a biography of Kerala’s foremost Dalit
revolutionary Ayyankali, and previously, she edited ‘The Dalit’, a bi-monthly
English magazine. She holds a PhD in socio-linguistics from Anna University
Chennai, and dabbles in political & literary translation.
- Reviewed by Prabhat Jha
Prabhat
Jha is a Research Scholar in Patna University.
He often writes poetry, plays and short
stories.
Apart from English he also writes
and translates from Maithili and Hindi.
and translates from Maithili and Hindi.
Email: prabhat.jha087@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment