The binaries between the mundane and the miracle, fiction and non-fiction Durga and Artemis, the politics of Gandhi and Savarkar, commitment to pre-marital celibacy as well as explorations of love, entrenched patriarchy and the assertion of feminism, the real and the surreal, the abhangs of Tukaram and the mediations of John Donne dissolve with much natural ease in this wonderful debut novel, Swallowing The Sun (STS) by India’s foremost diplomat Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri.
This is the story of the decades leading up to our Independence. It documents the struggle of Madhav Rao a forward-looking Maratha farmer and Vaidya of Ratnagiri to educate his two younger daughters Malati and Kamala in the village school where they are bullied by the boys - Bhika in particular, the marriage of their elder sister Surekha to Vilas Rao (Malak), twice her age but a minister in the princely kingdom of Vaishali which owes it allegiance and existence to the British Empire. Their mother dies in the quest for a male child, but Madhav Rao, their Baba, gets a male heir, Govind. The girls are now shifted to Ahilyabai’s Indore for their education in an orphanage where they learn english, maths, science and hindi in addition to Marathi. They get the first hints of ‘body touch’ between and among their wardens and fellow students. Meanwhile as Malati and Kamala go on to Elphinstone College, their father winds up their establishment at Ratnagiri and establishes a new settlement, Desaikheda, where he convinces the village elders of the need to educate girls and boys together in the same institution. While at Elphinstone the sisters meet with their class fellows: Guru, Ram, Chandra, Shyam and the Kaul twins – and there are a few good blushes as the young women and men explore love along with the philosophical texts and legal aphorism. One must mention here that in his character, persona and understanding of India and her ancient texts, the views of Macaulay and Elphinstone were as different as chalk and cheese – and this explains the reverence for the latter in the Deccan.
STS moves ahead when Malati makes the supreme sacrifice of quitting her legal studies to take up a teaching job at BHU, which she has to leave on account of her unwitting association with the Banaras revolutionaries, but she does make it a point to meet Madan Mohan Malviya the legendary founder of this great institution. Fortunately, by this time, Guru qualifies the judicial service exam and becomes a magistrate and Malati and Kamala are now ready to marry their beaus – Guru and Ram–both of whom come from a very conservative Brahminical background with their parents being totally opposed to this intermixture of castes. Malati’s resilience is put to test in the last two decades of her life with Guru, who by then is an established magistrate and sub judge and later an important officer inducted into the Law department of the Interim government tasked with the framing of the Constitution, formulation of a scheme for evacuee property. Malati has enjoyed being a mother to Kashi, a successful litigant lawyer for the freedom fighters but is frustrated as a bored society lady in Simla. The positive finale is the birth of their daughter ‘Bharati’ to mark the inauguration of the Republic of India could have been the third!
STS is also the story of Vaishali where we witness the inevitable tension between Vilas Rao and the Resident as he tries to exercise ‘control’ – both over the revenues and the growing nationalist sentiments. However, not all nationalists work on the same ideological premise – while Mahatma Gandhi is certainly the most widely respected mass leader, both of the Gandhian and the Savarkar ideologues vie for the attention of young minds. In Bombay (as Mumbai is then called) the call of the Mahatma gains ground and young freedom fighters like Yusuf Meherally are painting the town red with their ‘Simon Commission Go Back’ slogans.
Back in Vaishali, there are plots and subplots featuring Malak and his first wife, who is spiritually wedded to Lord Krishna, and their elder daughter Sarala, who wants to be a Greek goddess. When she goes for a hunt, she is ‘accidentally’ killed by her jealous husband Abhimanyu, who resents her proximity with his father. The incident is hushed to avoid a scandal, but another one follows: Surekha’s daughter Veena runs away from her marital home the very first night, goes on to become a successful actress but renounces the world to become a Sadhvi. In both these cases, the ‘arranged marriages’ with stout and sturdy Maratha grooms failed miserably with women having to face the burden of this patriarchal ahankara.
Then there is the life of Mohan Kaka and Hema Kaki – in many ways, the girls’ foster parents in Bombay. They too have their struggles and trysts with fate and destiny. The Anglo-Indian women - from Miss Crawford to Dorthy – are caught in the middle – for the British in India were as casteist in their approach to their non-ICS brethren and mixed races as the Brahmins were to the rest of their compatriots. No wonder then that Savarkar was keen to foster the concept of Pitrabhumi – in which all Indians who regarded Bharat as their holy land were bound in unity and fraternity. Interspersed in this is the life of the ‘highest of the high’ in Bombay – the world of Jehangir Petit, the Kaul twins and of their mate Chandra. It was in the ‘exalted Bombay company’ that Malati and Kamala got to meet both Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti.
The tension between the Marathas and the Brahmins comes to the fore on several occasions. This has carried on over centuries, and perhaps explains why the Marathas could never build a pan Indian empire – the Peshwa Brahmans who controlled the revenue and taxes were always undermining the military might, funds and legitimacy to the Maratha warriors – from the times of the great Maratha Shivaji, which prevented their confederacy to emerge as a real alternative to the Mughals in the post Aurangzeb period.
Puri has done well to use Hindi/Marathi words in the text: from vanshvridhi to vidwaan to yukti to colloquial expressions like Bas kara, kai Re and so on. Most readers will follow these expressions quite easily, and this is the way Indian words have entered the daily lexicon and even those who are not from India can capture the nuance from the context. The original verses in Sanskrit and Marathi are followed by superb translations. In fact, Puri deserves fulsome praise for her poetic sensibility – the letters and poems written by Guru to Malati capture all possible emotions: love, longing, suffering, pain, agony, ecstasy, jealousy, envy, frustration, despondency, resilience and joy. Guru’s descriptions of Malati are both sensuous and erotic:
‘the river had painted you with a sensuous, liquid brush. So, when you emerged out of it, and walked towards my camera, shaking off water droplets, it subtly unveiled your form to me - more than if you were standing naked before me. Your wet blouse and saree clung to your body in tiny, delicate folds. They embraced – to my great envy – your perfectly round and taut breasts … You can’t be the heavenly nymph Menaka who tempts sage Vishwamitra into a bodily union with her and also the one to prohibit it’
How can language be so evocative, one may ask? Another set of lines which held my attention and made me read it again was Mahatma Gandhi as the scorpion who had the British Shesha Nag crawling at his feet!
‘He with his eight stick legs moving swiftly all over the land of Bharat and beyond. The two magnetic pincers of this thought, grasping the unformed minds of the masses of Indian people. His ten eyes seeing the past, present and the future. His narrow-segmented tail held up in a magnificent curve over his tiny body, and stinging all with the tincture of protest and defiance, so it courses the veins of every Indian. He was slowly, but surely, burrowing down to the netherworlds of the British raj. Soon the British sheshnag, snake king, would bow his head unfurled before the scorpion of the Mahatma.
Let me end the review with some words from the dedication:
‘only if you dare, can miracles happen.’
This book is both a miracle and a metaphor: the ant can, and does swallow the sun, even as you and wonder in amazement at the magical realism of the Abhang of Muktabai which sets the tone for this offering!
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