On Boyd Tonkin's The 100 Best Novels In Translation

Over the last 400 years, the novel has become the pre-eminent prose storytelling form around the world: a torch that passes from country to country, language to language, lighting new fires of story everywhere and finding, or making, new audiences. It follows, then, nobody counts as a serious reader of novels who does not read novels in translation.

Many of our great novel-reading experiences are actually the result of the work of two artists, not one. How would we know Chekhov in English without Constance Garnett, Proust without CK Scott-Moncrieff, Garcia Marquez without Gregory Rabassa? How would the Arab novel have travelled to Anglophone shores without the pioneering work of Denys Johnson-Davies? As the British literary critic Boyd Tonkin argues in his exciting new book The 100 Best Novels in Translation, translators are the great travel agents and bridge-builders of the novel form, allowing books written in one language to be read – with pleasure approximating the experience of the original – by readers in many others. 

Since no one language or country has a monopoly on novelistic excellence, every reader knows a majority of his or her favourite novelists in the words fashioned by their translators. In fact, without translators to give them new material to feed on, even novelists would be stuck with models solely from their own linguistic tradition. Unsung, often even unnamed, translators are the silent heroes of literature. 

And although the Anglophone world is extremely rich in translators, a sad consequence of the spread of English and of monoglot culture has been the marginalization of works in translation. But here comes Tonkin to remedy that. For many years the literary editor of the British newspaper The Independent, Tonkin has always been a committed proponent, in a literary culture all too often unconsciously insular, of the pleasure and power of the cosmopolitan tradition of the novel and the translators that make it come alive. Uniquely, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, an annual prize he helped found, awarded its prize money equally to author and translator. 

Now he presses his decades of reading world literature into a literary panorama of great geographical sweep and intellectual charge, making a list of his favourite novels in translation across 400 years, from Cervantes to Balzac, Mario Vargas Llosa to Orhan Pamuk (one of the rules of the game is that no author is allowed more than one book). Here is a book that makes a hundred other books come alive. 

In fact more than a hundred, as Tonkin often points to more than one translation of a novel, pointing to the relative merits of each in a way that might disconcert those readers who want him to recommend “the best translation”. Certainly, many versions exist of the first book on the list, Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), “the acknowledged pattern-book or seed-bank which germinates every branch of Western fiction”. But if Tonkin is to be taken at his word, Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation is the most readable of them all and the most faithful to Cervantes’s style.

For all those of us who loved novels in our youth but have sacrificed their pleasures to the demands of family, work, and social media, here is a book to make you fall in love all over again. In almost every essay, Tonkin says something illuminating and memorable.In Marcel Proust’s great novel sequence In Search of Lost Time, “Not quite all human life is here. All human feeling is.” In his essay on Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, he gets to the heart of what has made the novel such a good traveller when he says that the books “enact a dialogue between Egyptian ways of being and European ways of knowing.” 

Each essay has many wonderful quotations from the books themselves, allowing the reader direct access to the novelist’s style and sensibility. How I wish I’d had this book when I was a literature student 15 years ago. It would have saved me so much work.

Tonkin is at his most revelatory in his selections from 17^th and 18^th century novels, ands then again in the final decades of the twentieth century. I only found him somewhat limited – and more than a touch Eurocentric – in the middle. The core of his list is made up of novels from between 1920 and 1960. Here there are too many predictable choices – and too many men. I’m not convinced that Sartre, Camus, and Mann are as essential as Tonkin thinks. And there are a host of great Italian writers (Buzzati, Pavese, Bassini, Svevo) whom one might also consider not indispensable, especially when one sees there are so few novels from the Indian subcontinent (two), Africa, or the Arab world. 

Tonkin is too hung up, one might say, on European ways of knowing European ways of being. A cosmopolitan literary critic brought up in Delhi, Rio or Cairo would probably add many exciting novelists to such a list (Gopinath Mohanty, Jorge Amado, Nawal el-Saadawi, Malika Mokkedem) while still covering the great European tradition. But this is a small cavil at a large and generous project. As Tonkin shows, we are living in a great age of translation, with many of the great classics of old also being presented in exciting new versions. (“Translations, notoriously, age faster than their originals.”) We need people like Tonkin to bring the big picture into focus – and to allow us to refocus it to make big pictures of our own. 

A version of this piece first appeared in The National.

Talking History with Romila Thapar

Human beings live not just in time, but in history. History is an account of the events of the past, but it amounts to much more than that, for it is also a theory of cause and effect, a source of identity and consolation, a narrative that includes some and excludes others. History may have taken place, but it is never finished: it remains a dynamic entity, capable (like memory) of generating new meanings. History not only influences the present, it is also influenced by it. We go to history in search of answers to questions that are of importance to us now, and so different histories ebb and fade in conjunction with the needs and preoccupations of the present. 

These and many more ideas about the nature of history pop up in Talking History, a freewheeling book-length conversation about the practice – as also the politics – of history with Romila Thapar. 

Thapar is the doyenne of Indian historians, someone who has lived and worked in two centuries and taken readers into the India of many more, from the world of the Indus Valley civilization to that of the Ramayana, that of Ashoka to the medieval Kashmiri historian Kalhana. Even in her late eighties, she is still very much a vivid and forceful presence on the Indian intellectual scene – not least of because the ascent in recent years of the Hindutva school of history and its votaries, whose keenness to dismiss her outright as “anti-Hindu” and a “Marxist” is a grudging acknowledgement of Thapar’s stature. Her co-discussants here are the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (now virtually an honorary Indian after having produced several such book-length dialogues on themes in Indian life with other intellectuals) and the historian Neeladri Bhattacharya.  

Here is a book to initiate any lay reader into the subtleties and difficulties of the historian’s craft. Although it is not Thapar’s aim to say that history is best understood only by historians, she does want us to appreciate that history is hard: not an open plain, but a dense forest. Finding one’s way around the terrain of history is not easy, and much depends on the intellectual resources, scepticism, imagination and even self-restraint we bring to the quest. 

And just as everything – tea or coffee, monarchy or slavery, a word or a worldview – has a history, so, Thapar reminds us, does the writing of history itself. The study of history-writing is called historiography, and from it we see that there can be many ways of thinking about the past, some compatible with one another and some not. The Ramayana may have much to tell us about ancient India, but in its literal form it is not admissible as history, even if some people think of it as such.

Over 300 pages, Thapar takes us on a journey through Indian historiography over the last fifty years as it has attempted to interpret themes and events that take place over a span of at least five thousand years. These are questions of great import over which much ink – and sometimes blood – continue to be spilt. Is it true that Indians lack a sense of historical consciousness, as claimed by writers on India across a whole millennium from Alberuni to James Mill? (“Contesting this,” says Thapar, “has been my lifetime project.”) Was the defining historical event of ancient India an invasion, or waves of migration, from the north-west of the Indo-European peoples that we now call the Aryans? Or, as some writers today would have us believe, were the Aryans indigenous to India and migrants out of India to the west? What kinds of linguistic, archaeological, and literary evidence are admissible in the court of these debates, and must the historian ask different types of questions of each kind of source?

The best pages in the book are those in which Thapar shows how history, even when not motivated by any overt ideological agenda, gradually becomes aware of its own biases and develops new eyes and ears for the past. For instance, since so much of what we know about the past comes from textual evidence, elite groups that had control over the writing of those texts come to dominate our view of the past. The default version of Hinduism we project onto the distant Indian past, therefore, becomes text-based Sanskritic Hinduism. The actual practice of Hinduism may have been much more variegated and idiosyncratic, the product of little and local histories that time has rubbed away.

Nor are details of material culture in texts always set up with factual accuracy as their primary aim: the descriptions of vast wealth and splendour of the imperial court and capital in the Ramayana, for instance, may have behind them the literary impulse of inciting wonder and awe in the reader. Similarly, is easier to write the histories of settled societies than those made up of nomads, to trace a broad narrative of unification and consensus rather than the smaller ones of resistance and heterodoxy, to project modern religious and political categories and motivations upon the past rather than face up to its strangeness. “We should not forget,” says Thapar, “that there is always a part of history which is forgotten.”

And what of the future of Indian history? The arrival of the nation-state in the eighteenth century, Thapar reminds us, led everywhere in the world – whether the nations of Europe or the later decolonization struggles of Asia and Africa – to the gradual reinterpretation of the past through a nationalist frame. Although it was finally riven by a Hindu-Muslim divide that became the basis of a “two-nation theory”, Indian anti-colonial nationalism was an inclusive ideology that did not see Indianness as anchored in a particular religion or language. 

This led, at independence, to the ambitious construction in the new nation-state of India of a new platform for Indian history, one that sought to draw a line around the violence and iniquity of the past and endowed all those who lived within the boundaries of India with the same rights and freedoms. 

The secular and democratic leanings of this new order (as also trends in the wider world of historiography) greatly affected, Thapar explains, the aims and aspirations of Indian historiography. Indian historians aimed to recover the marginalized histories of women and Dalits, peasants and artisans, traders and travellers, even nonhuman histories focussed on ecology or geography.

Indian history became richer, more textured, more clamorous. But its political implications and reluctance to endorse a grand narrative were vigorously contested by Hindu nationalism, with in its emphasis on religion as the main constituent of Indian identity across the millennia and Vedic Hinduism as the starting point of Indian history (thus the desire to prove that the Aryans were actually native to India). As Hindutva has gained political strength, so too it has attempted to reclaim Indian history for itself – paradoxically often using concepts and formulations, Thapar reminds us, first proposed by British colonialism.

There is a civil war raging in India today, only it is being fought on the ground of Indian history. What we make of our history today will be a great influence on the history that we make.

An excerpt from Talking History is here.

Naguib Mahfouz and the truths of the Novel

Akhenaten, an Egyptian pharaoh, also called the 'Sun King' or the 'heretic', ruled briefly in Egypt more than three thousand years ago. Akhenaten's peculiar appearance, as if part man and part woman, his inscrutable ways, and the wrenching changes he ushered into the life of his kingdom – shortly after coming to the throne, he overthrew Egypt's traditional polytheism and decreed the worship of a single god, the sun god Aten – brought him a notoriety that secured his place in history, where he still floats untethered to a line of interpretation, a ghostly figure now perennially shrouded in ambiguity. 

Akhenaten's story nevertheless carries a certain resonance for all who hear it, because it serves as an archetype of a conflict that is one of the threads running through the history of civilization: the conflict between religion and freedom. It is a story remote in time that links the present to our past. Further, "truth" is one of the keywords of human language and consciousness and is at the centre of every human quest; a narrator who in the very title of his story declares that his protagonist is a "dweller in truth" suggests to us that, whether he is being ironic or sincere, there will be much to learn in the story about what truth is and how we may arrive at it (or the impossibility of ever achieving it). The legend of Akhenaten is explored, and indeed enriched (because presented in a way that brings into being before our very eyes the mystery that was Akhenaten, and also given a thematic direction, a focus on one or two repeated words that is one of the ways in which novels are most truly novelistic), by the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz in his slender, glancing novel Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth.

Mahfouz's story is narrated from a vantage point relatively close in time to Akhenaten, through the eyes of a character who grew up in Akhenaten's Egypt, Meriamun, who becomes a second protagonist. We are not told Meriamun's exact age, but his thoughts and his language suggest he is in his early twenties, somewhat unformed, and hungry for experience. On a journey down the Nile with his father, himself a venerable man with 'a passion for knowledge and for recording the truth', Meriamun espies on the river a gloomy and deserted city which he learns is Akhetaten, the dead pharaoh's capital, where his wife and consort Nefertiti still lives in isolation. "It all began with a glance, a glance that grew into desire, as the ship pushed its way through the calm, strong current at the end of the flood season." 

Meriamun's father calls Akhenaten 'the heretic,' but Meriamun is struck by the pharaoh's story, and senses a suffocating narrowness in the verdict that history has passed upon him. He quotes to his father a saying by Qaqimna, a sage they both respect: "Pass no judgment upon a matter until you have heard all testimonies." Many of Akhenaten's friends, family members, and followers are still alive, and Meriamun's father is an influential man and can get them to open their doors to him. With his father's approval ("Your forefathers sought war, politics, or trade, but you, Meriamun, you seek the truth instead"), Meriamun sets out to meet all those who knew Akhenaten, and, as Qaqimna instructed, hear all testimonies.

Akhenaten is dead; each person that Meriamun meets tells him about the Akhenaten they knew. A basic framework of facts is established. Akhenaten's mother, Tiye, came from a commoner's family. Having married the pharaoh Amenhotep III, she then exerted great influence over the royal household. Akhenaten's name at birth was Amenhotep, like his father; it was only later, whe he came to the throne, that he changed it to Akhenaten. He was frail and feeble from birth, but when he and his healthier brother, Tuthmosis, contracted the same illness, it was Tuthmosis who succumbed to it and Akhenaten who survived. While he was growing up Akhenaten, although the heir-in-waiting, showed no interest in matters of government. Rather, his interest lay in spiritual matters: Ay, his tutor in his youth, recalls that it seemed to him that he was born 'with some otherworldly wisdom.' Before Akhenaten came to the throne Queen Tiye had already declared her veneration of Aten, the Sun God, in preference to Amun, the master of all the deities in Egypt. As he grew mature, Akhenaten too began to believe in the preeminence of Aten. One morning, while watching the sun rise, he had a religious vision that affected him profoundly, and became convinced that the truth had been revealed to him – the truth that there was only one God, Aten. He resolved thereafter only to 'dwell in truth,' and walk the path of love and non-violence, and though the pharaoh tried his best to draw him away from these beliefs, he remained stubborn.

One of Ay's two daughters, Nefertiti, was drawn to the prince and his beliefs, and they fell in love and were married. When the pharaoh passed away suddenly, his son came to the throne, upon which he changed his name to Akhenaten, and immediately set about purging Egypt of its plural religious traditions by decree, declaring that there was only one god, Aten. He toured his empire preaching the new religion and proclaiming the message of love, and set up a new capital, Akhetaten, where he lived with Nefertiti and his closest followers and gave himself over to devotion. But there remained a disenchanted faction in the country, followers of the old beliefs and the old order. At the same time the country's enemies pressed in at its borders, sensing an opportunity to invade it. But Akhenaten refused to send an army to the country's borders, saying he would confront the intruders himself with his message of peace. Finally Akhenaten's chief of security, Haremhab, rebelled and declared his allegiance to a new pharaoh, Akhenaten's half-brother,Tutankhamun. Akhentaten was deposed and put under house arrest, his capital was emptied of his followers, and the country successfully defended by the new regime. Egypt returned to its old traditions, and Akhenaten passed away soon after. The official reason for his death, a sudden illness, was contested by his wife, who continued to reside in the deserted capital, and his followers. The aberrant monotheistic religion dedicated to the sun god Aten died a swift death after the pharaoh's passing away, and Akhenaten became established as a heretic in public memory.

These are the facts: now what is the truth? As Meriamun covers the territory of Akhenaten's life over and over again with the people he meets, he encounters a swarm of different narratives of Akhenaten's life, each with its own particular emphasis: psychological explanations of his behaviour, speculations that he was a puppet in the hands of his mother or his wife, providential readings of history, accounts in which he seems remote and otherworldly contrasting with those in which he seems all too human, assertions that he was foolishly or tragically deluded milling with those that he was in possession of a higher truth and hence a martyr.

Although the characters, who between them comprised the milieu in which Akhenaten walked, variously express anger, love, warmth, sadness, or bitterness, few, if any, speak complacently, as if confident of possession of the whole truth: they are aware that what they express is an account of a relationship, not a one-way stream of knowledge about the life of a man. The novel suggests that when we seek to establish something definite about human beings, we must resign ourselves to approaching only the threshold of truth, and not totally comprehending it: firstly, because we ourselves are implicated in the search, and bring to it either beliefs or perspectives that are our own and that we cannot quite lay by, and secondly because, even if we have had an opportunity to know the person closely or even intimately, and feel confident of a wide understanding and therefore a kind of objectivity, there is nevertheless still something about that person that we do not know about or is hidden from us – several people make some individual observation about Akhenaten that we could consider of importance, but that others close to him seem not to know.

Nevertheless, the novel is not pessimistic about our desire to know the truth, our belief that we can ascend to the truth through effort. It does not regard Meriamun's 'desire to know the truth' cynically, but rather shows him arriving a more complex conception of it. In fact, something of what Meriamun will eventually understand is hinted at early in the novel in his words to his father asking for letters of introduction to all those who knew Akhenaten and have something of importance to say about him: "Then I could see the many facets of truth before it perishes like this city." Truth here is not seen as something easily achieved or formulated; it has many facets, each of which must be discovered, after which it may not be further reducible. Also, it is significant that Meriamun speaks of the many facets of truth before 'it perishes' and not 'they perish': it is as if when even one facet of the truth is lost then the truth itself stands imperilled. Meriamun wants to take advantage of his historical proximity to the dead pharaoh to grasp the many faces of the truth before they begin to ebb away one by one, leaving behind a thinner, a more famished 'truth' – for instance, the current understanding of Akhenaten as a heretic.

But it is not Meriamun only, in this novel, who is preoccupied with the idea of the truth. For that word was also the most important word in the whole world for Akhenaten, who believed he was a ‘dweller in truth.'  The novel achieves its charge through the interplay and contrast of these two conceptions of truth, which we might call the truth of reason and the truth of religion or faith, a truth that prizes skepticism and one that resides in belief. We note the differing ways in which the two protagonists speak of the subject: Meriamun is a seeker of truth; Akhenaten, a dweller in truth. And through this contrast Mahfouz thrusts us onto rocky ground: is it possible to make some judgment of the truth about Akhenaten without first making a judgment of Akhenaten's 'truth' – the vision that came to him and which he codified into a religious system and propagated as the only true way of knowing God? From what standpoint can one make such a judgment?

The novel form, which is itself a product of the waning of religious belief in the world, has sometimes found this judgment easy; it is a form skeptical of absolutes, and for believers religion is an absolute. But the great beauty of Mahfouz's novel is that it allows us to enter and inhabit not just the universe of Meriamun's worldly truth but also that of Akhenaten's otherworldly truth. For Akhenaten's opponents his religion was a sham religion, the result of his hallucinations or else a piece of deliberate trickery; Toto, the chief epistoler in Akhenaten's chamber, thinks it 'the shrewdness of a man humiliated by his own weakness.' But these judgments are destabilised by the tutor Ay, who noticed the young Akhenaten's religious bent; by his wife Nefertiti, who confesses she was drawn to his beliefs 'as a butterfly is drawn to light,' and by the pharaoh's aged physician Bento, who was skeptical of his vision at first but then became a believer, and helped set up his capital at Akhenaten. Akhenaten's followers convincingly describe the ecstasy, the paradoxical wholeness of being that arrives from surrendering before the divine that, if at all we admit of the authority of religion, we know as being one of the authentic experiences of faith. "Every morning I compared what I heard in the temple of the One God to the liturgy of the old gods," recounts Bento. "I became certain beyond doubt that a stream of divine light was filling us with pure happiness. [...] Today, Akhenaten is known only as 'the heretic.' But despite all that was said about him, my heart still fills with love at the mention of his name. What a life he created for himself! Did he really devote his life to love?"

There is a polyphony, then, in Mahfouz's novel similar to the one we find in The Brothers Karamazov. Difficult matters are not resolved but addressed so compellingly from different angles as to give us a true sense of their difficulty. (It could be said that the novel's striking last paragraph is indeed a kind of resolution, but it is a private one, not to be generally applied.) Since no final judgment is passed on Akhenaten from the evidence Meriamun has compiled, one attitude towards Mahfouz's novel might be that Mahfouz has left it to us to make a judgment about Akhenaten. But this is to flatter ourselves. The novel is complete without the reader – complete with respect to the complexity and elusiveness of its subject, and also complete in the manner in which it is all-seeing, in the way in which it manages a omniscient, magisterial presence through nothing more than juxtapositions: of narrator and subject, and of different testimonies. Mahfouz’s narrative method reminds us of “the calm, strong current” with which the book began; he does not press a reductive idea of the truth upon us, and in doing so reveals the truths that only novels can show us.

A lovely essay by Peter Hessler on Akhenaten is here on National Geographic. Mahfouz's Nobel lecture is here ("One day the great Pyramid will disappear too. But Truth and Justice will remain for as long as Mankind has a ruminative mind and a living conscience.").

Gopinath Mohanty's Immortal Indians

Is there another Indian novelist whose books contain, not just so many beautiful sentences, but so many different kinds of beautiful sentences, as those of Gopinath Mohanty (1914-1991)? No Indian novelist is as consistently and meaningfully melodious as him, and with no one else’s material does the reader feel such a strong sense – very hard to achieve in novelistic prose – of the concentration and economy of music. Most thrillingly, when one reads Mohanty’s great novels of tribal life in Odisha, one realizes that the notes he summons derive not just not from his own feeling nature, but from his material: the pleasure and danger of the forest, the proximity and capriciousness of the gods, and the elemental beat and spark of the life-force itself.

Thankfully, the impact of Mohanty’s stylistic dexterity and felicity in Odia shine through even in translation – or have been made to do so by some very painstaking and adept translators. Amrutara Santana, published by Sahitya Akademi in a translation by the Odia scholars and professors of English literature, (the late) Bidhubhusan Das and Prabhat Nalini Das, as The Dynasty of the Immortals, is one of two great novels about Odia tribal life written by Mohanty in his youth. The other is Paraja, which appeared almost thirty years ago in an excellent translation by Bikram Das.

Mohanty’s engagement with the tribals of Odisha began fairly early in life. As a young bureaucrat enlisted in the Odisha Administrative Service in the years just before independence, he lived in distant outposts in the district of Koraput, then, as now, one of India’s poorest regions. But when the young city boy with an MA in English Literature came into contact with people whom those of the social order to which he belonged thought of as primitive, simple-minded hillmen, he found in them a beauty and integrity, a generosity of spirit and a animistic empathy, a love of song and story that cried out to be enshrined in words.

But the tribals were also the “other” of mainstream Indian civilization, relentlessly patronised and exploited, destined to be on the wrong side of history even when India rid itself of its colonial masters. (“The Kandha,” Mohanty writes presciently, “is to be found wherever the forest is. However, once the forest is opened up, the Kandha is evicted from his land.”) Like his contemporary Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay in Bengal with his forest novel Aranyak, Mohanty set out to describe both the rapture and the tragedy of this other way of life. But unlike Bandyopadhyay, he chose to do so from the point of view of the forest-dwellers themselves.

Readers of Paraja, about the tribe by that name, will immediately recognise the feel and force of the limber, capacious, almost centreless point of view in Dynasty of Immortals, about a group of Kandha tribals in a group of isolated, impoverished villages (“Here, humankind did not get anything from nature without a struggle”) in the Eastern Ghats. The narration ricochets continuously from the intimate and the domestic to the wide-angle and the cosmic, from the narrator’s almost ethnographic observations about the Kandhas to a tracking of the minds of diverse characters that unspools for us the same worldview from the inside. Mohanty’s translators find short and long, shapely and broken, sentences that capture the many shades of light and dark, the many intricate subtleties, that he conjures up.

Mohanty’s distinctive narrative method adds to the feeling of extreme intensity and compression: in tightly sculpted and focussed chapters no more than five or six pages long, written almost as short stories, we are hit by wave after wave of powerful feeling. But the jolt in this case is not just aesthetic, but – in Mohanty’s time and in our own – political. Mohanty’s ecstatic style is an instrument precisely designed to reveal the beauties of the way of life of his forest-dwelling protagonists.

Out here in the forest, distinctions between the human and the animal realm, the world of human artifacts and that of nature, the living and the dead, seem to be much more blurred than in modern industrial society. We sense this right from in the opening chapters of Dynasty, when the man who appears to be the protagonist of the story, the elderly village headman Sarabu Saonta, collapses and dies; nevertheless, his presence echoes across the 600 pages that follow. “Sarabu Saonta loved this earth,” we read. “He did not know how to love with discrimination. Life was truth, beauty; let the old body be destroyed, he would be reborn in this beautiful land.”

After Sarabu dies, his son Diudu, daughter Pubuli, and daughter-in-law Puyu are left to carry on all the rituals and reveries of their realm: the forbidding and enchanting forest, with its light and shade, cooing birds and hungry tigers.  In one scene, reminiscent of the story of the killing of the male krauncha bird and the grieving sounds of its mate that inspired Valmiki to invent the shloka meter of the Ramayana, Diudu kills a bird on a hunt and, reaching it as it lies thrashing on the ground, thinks he sees a cloud rising in the pupils of its eyes as it expires—an astonishing image. There are other thrilling hunting scenes, in which the contrasting energies of human social dynamics and violence towards beasts are mingled as expertly as Leo Tolstoy did in Anna Karenina (Mohanty was a voracious and cosmopolitan reader and even translated War And Peace into Odia).  

In choosing characters who approach the business of living with such rapture and intensity, Mohanty reminds one of other twentieth-century artists and philosophers who, in an ideological age, have resisted the reduction of life to any system – people like the French film-maker Jacques Becker, who declared, “In my work I don’t want to prove anything except that life is stronger than everything else”, or the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who after being incarcerated in prison comes to the paradoxical realization that “the meaning of life is life itself.”

The forest is the realm not just of food-gathering, of the hunt, but also of love, the place where human beings succumb to “the instinct of eternal nature”. It is the place, in other words – and this is where Mohanty’s focus on a very particular social world at a particular historical moment acquires a universal resonance – where man and woman become Man and Woman, carrying on the eternal dance of life and creation.

Repeatedly in Mohanty’s novels, we are given this sense of what one might call deep time, the sense of an archetype playing itself out repeatedly across the centuries. The young people falling in love for the first time thrill to this new emotion; the storyteller, meanwhile, thrills to the sense of the very same figures becoming indistinct, bringing the past to life within the folds of the present. “Then the dialogue of Kandha courtship through question and answer ensued, the exchange of words from time immemorial; thousands of years had rolled by in the formulation of such exchanges.” For his characters the link to the past is not a matter of the historical record but rather an imaginative one rooted in a feeling for nature and the cosmos; it is in this sense that the tribals with their short life-spans and many hardships are nonetheless “the dynasty of the immortals”.

In 1953, a letter of complaint arrived at the office of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, sent to him by the land-owners and moneylenders who comprised the elite of Koraput. The letter said (I take this from an essay about Mohanty written by the critic JM Mohanty) – “To our great calamity and disaster Sri Gopinath Mohanty is posted here as the special assistant agent at Rayagada. He is always fond of hillmen and behaves like hillmen himself. He very little respects other classes of people before them. He behaves as if only born for Adivasis."

Perhaps the letter had an unintended effect. When the Sahitya Akademi was founded in 1954 to award literary achievement in the 24 major languages of India, Amrutara Santana was judged the first-ever winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for Odia literature. It has taken sixty years to produce a worthy translation in English (marred, sadly, by the terrible layout and copy-editing that has unfortunately come to be the general standard for Akademi publications). The wait, though, has not been in vain. Mohanty’s ecstatic vision, shot through with light and dark, sings here on every page. In time, the world will grant that this contemporary of Garcia Marquez and Vasily Grossman had a vision of life no less original and enduring than them. But for now, let at least us Indian readers ignore no more this marvellous hillman standing at our very own doorstep.  

Conjugal and Fictional Possibility in Perumal Murugan's Kali-Ponna trilogy

One reason why we gravitate to fiction is for the pleasure of entering imaginatively into a highly worked-up moral field that is not our own and often very different from it. In fact, fiction reassures us of the plasticity of our own consciousness: after only a few pages of acquaintance, we are able to bind ourselves with the point of view of one or several characters. Even if they themselves seem trapped or bound down by a situation, a city, or their own natures, in living vicariously through them we experience the space between own imaginative life and theirs as freedom, an enlargement and deepening of our own sense of life and of our awareness of cause and effect. No reflective reader deeply stirred by a novel ever quite relinquishes the trace it leaves behind, and when those novels do not supply a neat closure we often "carry on" the lives of the characters in our own minds beyond the point at which the writer left them. Having once made the story the object of our reading life, we now make it a part of our reading of life itself. It is perhaps the greatest compliment we can pay a writer.

Ten years ago, the writer Perumal Murugan proved himself worthy of just such respect and reverberation – left us tantalized with the sense of a book having ended when the story had in a way only just begun – with his 2010 novel One Part Woman (in Tamil, Maadhurbaagan). Set in a village in western Tamil Nadu some time in the early part of the twentieth century, the book illumined in a torrent of exquisite, empathetic detail the predicament of a peasant couple, Kali and Ponnayi, deeply (and for those around them, often provokingly) in love with one another but unable after twelve years of marriage to conceive a child. 

Although Kali and Ponna are utterly rapt in one another, the norms of the world and the tongues of people around them always remind them of what is missing from their lives. The child-shaped hole in their lives is brought up in nearly every social encounter and finally in their own dealings with each other, although never to the point of breaking the bond between them. If anything, Kali is repeatedly counselled to take a second wife, but refuses to do so. Instead, he grows ever more reclusive, spending all his hours in the barnyard that lies a little distance from his home, tending his fields and his animals. Meanwhile, Ponna, compulsively scratching the wound, turns every subject to the question of children: "The plant that we plant grows; the seed that we sow blooms; is it only me who is the wasted land here?" 

When all patience and propitiation has been exhausted, one final option, if extreme, presents itself. At the popular annual chariot festival of the half-male, half-female god Ardhanareeswara – in his encompassment of both sexes into one whole, the very emblem of conjugal felicity – in the nearby town of Thiruchengode, there opens up on the final night an abandonment of all norms and the erasure of identities. Then, any man and woman may consort with one another in the dark, and children born of such encounters are held to be bestowed by the god himself. It is suggested to both Kali and Ponna by her own brother Muthu that she journey to the festival all alone to find a man on this night to be impregnated by him. It is very hard for her to contemplate this act of tawdry yet potentially liberatory adultery, but she wonders if she would do it if her husband gave his permission.

The tension between the present and the future, the individual and the couple, between sexual fidelity and the need for children, is thus strung by Murugan to the highest pitch. In the end, as the result of a misunderstanding orchestrated by Muthu for what he believes to a good cause, we see Ponna going to the festival and being seduced by a man believing her husband has discreetly consented to it, and Kali belatedly discovering what he then takes to be the greatest of all betrayals. One Part Woman ended with an image of Kali, drunk and devastated, in the very barnyard where he and his wife had spent so many happy hours, and looking up at the portia tree that he himself had planted many years ago – the most prominent motif in the book: a symbol of pleasure in the natural world, of Kali's own capacity for creation and nurture, of the passing of time, and of the slow ramification of of events. What would happen next? Would he take his own life? We could not say: people need air to live, and characters their creator.

And what was happening to the creator? It is clear Murugan himself was exhilarated by his own story in One Part Woman and unwilling to take leave of his characters. In fact, he had generated such a cloud of possibilities that in the years that followed, he came up with not one but two sequels, now ably translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan as Trial By Silence and A Lonely Harvest. What is thrilling about this follow-up is that the books are not contiguous. Instead they audaciously take they take advantage of the freedom that fiction allows and life does not, and explore two versions of events arising from the same narrative crux: Kali and Ponna sundered by the eruption in their lives of a single night's events and their consequences. Some events are common to both sequels – in both, for instance, Ponna discovers she is pregnant – but the meanings and feelings they generate are very different because of the circumstances in which they transpire, allowing us, in effect, to choose a path on a fork on the road, then come back and take the other one.

In Trial By Silence, we see Kali where we left him, now attempting to kill himself by hanging from a noose on the portia tree. But his mother arrives just in time and saves him. Shortly afterwards Ponna arrives home from her night at the chariot festival and is shocked both by his brush with death and by her discovery that he had never given his consent. She is branded a whore by her husband, who refuses to touch her or converse with her and retreats into a private universe, stewing and suffering silently in his barnyard with his animals and becoming even more estranged when it turns out she is pregnant. Ponna herself cuts off all her ties with her own family for having plotted the destruction of her marriage. In this way an entire web of connections is broken up; the world of the family becomes a set of solitudes.

And the other book? In A Lonely Harvest, we find that Kali succeeds in killing himself; the grotesque details of his grimace at point of death and his cadaver are no less unsettling in light of the knowledge that he continues to live in another book (which experience leads to the insight that the "reality" of fiction is of a different order than that of life). Ponna is left a widow with a small farm, an aged mother-in-law, and (soon) a child in the womb. But she refuses to leave the barnyard where Kali spent all his days and in fact moves house there, seeing his presence in every small detail and especially in the portia tree. 

We are thus made spectators to two kinds of tragedy. In one, we see how lonely and riven two partners in love and domesticity may become while keeping up a kind of perfunctory life in the world together. In the other, the desire to perpetuate life results instead in the snuffing out of a life, and in the desperate efforts, pervaded by regret and yearning, of those left behind to patch together an existence that will never yield the pleasures of the past. These are exquisite formal patterns.

And they are realized in writing of great involvement and fidelity to point of view. Nowhere is Murugan's mastery of his material more evident than in his depiction of space as a reflection of human personality, and in his intricate braiding of the human and natural world. In a seemingly artless, low-key "village prose" that is nevertheless limpid and expressive, he makes us partners in the peasant's endless round of chores, showing how in his imagination the possibilities of trees and soil, birds and beast, water and stone, sun and season, are channeled into mutually supportive combinations. Raising livestock and working his fields in One Part Woman, Kali is a master of creation who is yet mocked by the world for being impotent; then in Trial By Silence, his decision to abandon his crops and cattle and let everything decay around him in his beloved barnyard becomes a metaphor for the blighting of his mind by the plague of cuckoldry; then in A Lonely Harvest, he kills himself in the very same haunt, and the control of the space passes over to the two women of his house, who in taking it over and adapting it to their own needs and capabilities discover its pleasures all over again while finding in it disturbing hints of his presence.

There is much to admire also about the equity of empathy distributed by Murugan between his male and female protagonist – sometimes expressed in very shape of the story, in the form of chapters alternating between their respective viewpoints. And, given his own starting position, his extraordinarily layered and lucent exposition of female subjectivity and agency in the characters of both Ponna and her mother-in-law Seerayi give the lie to what has regrettably become an axiom of modern gender politics and of some strands of feminist literary criticism: that male writers can never write truthful portraits of female characters because they somehow “just don’t understand”. (If the only identities we could depict truthfully were our own, there would no point in writing fiction in the first place.)

If anything, the most powerful emotional effect of the book is the sense that in their long years of mutual adoration and affectionate mockery (of which many lovely scenes fleck all three books) both Kali and Ponna have become, like Ardhanareeswara, half-man and half-woman, able to treat gender and sexual difference as a bridge to the other and not as an island.

Kali was intimately familiar with every inch of Ponna's body. He did not even know his own body that well. There was one little lash on Ponna's eyelids tht was thick and slanting away from the other eyelashes.  He sometimes held it between his lips and tugged at it. She once said to him, 'Let me know if you want to remove it.'But he replied, 'It is my most favourite piece of hair, let me tell you.'
He also liked to play with her tongue by keeping his finger on it. She would pull it in at his touch, and he would ask her to bring it out again. 'If feels soft, like touching a snail,' he said once.'See, now the snail's going into its shell!' she said, and closed her mouth. 
He loved the fine lines on her lips. He once counted them and said, 'Fourteen.'She said, 'You are crazy.' And he agreed. 'Yes, indeed I am.'

And, as an extension of the same experience of reaching out, both parties are able to marshal imagination and memory as an antidote to pain – and even as a substitute for embodied presence. “She pervaded his thoughts,” we read in One Part Woman. “She came to occupy them so much that he could tell her every movement and gesture.” And in a startling scene in A Lonely Harvest, we see Ponna going into the fields after Kali’s death and finding a brinjal patch that had been lovingly planted by him. The effect gradually metamorphoses into the cause; creation back into the creator. “Ponna caressed the bristly stem of the brinjal plant. It felt like she was caressing his arms. She held the stem against her cheek. Definitely his hand….She kept walking through the plants. How many hands did he have!”

Is this one of the essential works of Indian fiction in our century? It absolutely is.

Basanti's Dream: Reading women in the early Indian novel

A striking feature of early Indian novels – novels published, say, between 1880 and 1910 in English, Bengali, Urdu, Odia, or Malayalam -- are their readers. By this, I don’t mean, however, readers of these novels: students, intellectuals, the educated upper class – the natural constituency that early Indian novelists sought out. That readership was almost embarrassingly small – inevitably so, because the writers were working in a form alien to the very people whom they wished to depict and sometimes provoke. And in any case there was often little for that readership to savour: the writing was earnest, clumsy and derivative of the English novel in language, form and content.

No, what is fascinating about these novels, when read at a distance of a century, is how often contain scenes of characters reading books – very often western literature, and just as often novels. Sometimes the most important thing a protagonist does to assert him- or herself in early Indian fiction is just read. This was not just an ingenious kind of self-publicity – the desire of a new and novel literary form to validate itself by representing common people engaging with it. Rather, reading is often a controversial, provocative activity in early Indian novels, as sexual experimentation and drug-taking might have been in the novels of the post-Independence generation. To show a character – especially a woman – reading was to show her thinking, reasoning, reconsidering her position in society and her relationship to patriarchal tradition, and becoming, page by page and line by line, an individual in ways newly sanctioned in the West but unfathomable or undesirable in the social world in which the early Indian novelists lived.

Reading, then, is rarely a benign detail in early Indian novels: it stands for a revolution within the spirit, and therefore potentially in society. As soon as a character is shown reading, we know that a faultline, a thread of self-consciousness and potentially of conflict and alienation, has been opened up between her and her world; they will never be joined up again in perfect comity, and even if they do then it is us, the readers, who will mourn the cost at which they have been brought back into line. Even the tawaif Umrao Jaan Ada in Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s book by the same name loves to read, slowly substituting books for men as she ages, saying of her former admirers, “When they began to drop out of my life one by one...I developed a taste for books.”

By showing their characters reading books, the early Indian novelists – almost always male, we must remember – wished to imply that these fictional (in every sense) women had the same aspirations to intellectual independence and linguistic power that they had themselves, as readers, witnessed in female characters of English novels of the day. A woman who read was a woman whom both the male hero – himself often somewhat alienated from tradition by an English education – could desire and the reader could love. She was a person who could validate the very existence of the novel itself.

This viewpoint, we see, is almost never shared by figures of authority in the novels themselves. To them, to allow a girl an education, and especially an English education, is usually seen as fatally corrupting (although it was fine for men to study English) and radical. To allow them to read novels in English was to reach the heights of libertinism. “I lately found her reading an English book,” complains the old patriarch Panchu Menon of Indulekha, the spirited 16-year-old heroine of O. Chandu Menon’s novel by the same name in 1890. “She told me the story was only a made-up thing, but...just consider the consequences, my dear Panikar, if girls are allowed to read such trash.”

Even writers who did not share the general consensus among early Indian novelists that western education is good for young Indians – for instance, Bankimchandra Chatterji – can be found populating their books with images of women reading. In Debi Chaudhurani, Bankim’s most radical vision of a martial Bengali nationalism, the humble female protagonist Prafulla, cast out of her marital home by her in-laws, becomes a bandit in the forest under the tutelage of a Sanskrit-speaking brigand who teaches to fight – and also to study the Gita. A program of reading was essential for any woman who aspired to agency in the world. Only the choice of books differed.

This stark divergence at the turn of the century between the generations on the matter of female education and learning the language of the coloniser is both made a tragic crux and finessed for comic effect by the authors of Basanti, an Odia novel first published in 1931 and just translated into English by Himansu S.Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre. In Basanti, the disapproving matriarch Subhadra Devi – mother of the idealistic zamindar Debabrata, who seeks to marry the highly educated and capable (if socially marginal) young heroine Basanti – is appalled by her son’s choice of consort.

“Yes, it was good for daughters-in-law be well-read,” we read, following the lines of an argument still widely echoed in familial and conjugal reasoning in India nearly a century later. “They ought to be able to sing the Bhagabata and read out Kesaba Koili and Jema Dei Kanda for their mothers-in-law. But then, heavens, what was all this! Learning English, learning Bengali, reading newspapers, singing – what on earth was all this!” Basanti’s reading life is connected up to her lack of compliance with social norms for women. “The thing she disliked most about Basanti was such a grown up girl, far from speaking softly in hushed tones from beneath a foot-long veil, wore nothing on her head and her words rang out loud and clear.”

To be sure, this scene in Basanti is echoed by situations in many Indian novels of the time emphasizing a progressive view of women and encoding a critique of Indian tradition into their plotlines and narratorial ruminations. But there is still something unique about the book that should give it pride of place in any essay (such as this one) or reading list focussing on the theme of reading as a road to independence and female emancipation in the Indian novel. For what is most exciting about this ironic recapitulation of the critique of “reading girls” in Basanti is that it is not composed by an English-educated male writer with a progressive outlook (which would give such scenes a certain meaning), or even by a rebellious female writer with feminist leanings (of the kind who would arrive in Indian fiction within a generation). Rather, this novel published in 1931 is written collaboratively by a group of young writers who might be said to be the very kind of people of whom the first generation of male Indian novelists sought to produce an image in their writings.

Nine young Odia writers of the 1920s  (six men, three women, some of whom, like Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, Annada Shankar Ray and Sarala Devi, went on to have significant literary careers) come together in Basanti to write a story on the theme of gender for the youth of India. In keeping with the spirit of the novel form, which is always aware of ambiguities and of discordances with any idealistic project, the book is also a richly imagined scenario of the pitfalls that might lie in the path of this Indian new compact of love, compassion and intellectual companionship in marriage.

At the beginning of the novel, we see young Basanti, a spirited, book-loving girl in the town of Cuttack, left orphaned when her beloved mother passes away. No matter: she has many well-wishers, and none more than the good-hearted college student Debabrata, who greatly empathises with her difficult position in the world. Debabrata loves reading, writing and social work – and is apparently a feminist to boot. In an early scene, he is seen giving a speech to the student union of his college on “The Duty of the Student Community with Regard to the Autonomy of Women” and is laughed out of the room, partly because some of the other students allege that he thinks what he does because he is in love with Basanti.

Despite these challenges, Debabrata and Basanti come ever closer together, the only hurdle in their way the skeptical figure of Nirmala Devi, to whose village household Debabrata must return – and perhaps take Basanti – when he has finished his studies. Eventually, this is what happens, although it is Debabrata who announces unilaterally to Basanti that he has decided they are to get married – the first sign that he may not be as immune to the old complacencies of masculinity as he fancies.

The novel is a very sensitive rendering of what happens to a intellectually agile woman when subsumed to the hoary old pieties of family life – because no other choice is available to her. Basanti’s life in the village becomes a never-ending round of service to her mother-in-law, in the hope of earning her approbation. But this is merely to cede power to the institution and authority she has reluctantly embraced. Even Debabrata begins to feel guilty for suppressing his wife’s individuality and intellectual spark, but nor can he criticise his mother.

The writers of Basanti take turns to show how their heroine slowly loses her sense of self in her new surroundings. The two secure sources of solace in Basanti’s life are her old friends and her books. In a key scene in the book, we see Basanti reading Tagore’s Gora, a novel she greatly loves. She tells her new friend in the village, Nisa, “As I was reading this book, the thought came to me that like the characters in this book we too could do something” – the clearest sign possible of the early Indian novel’s desire to light a lamp for a new path in Indian history, and also an indication of Odia writers fashioning their own Indian novelistic canon. Basanti thinks of starting a school for the village girls – an idea that sends her mother-in-law into a fury.

Matters eventually come to a head, turning once again upon an act of reading or writing. Debabrata comes across an article written by Basanti in a literary magazine. There, he questions the pervasive patriarchal cast of the world and asks, “Why is the idea that women are subordinate so lasting and all pervasive? Why has no one imagined a distinct and independent identity for women, separate from men?” Ideals clash with reality: he takes this as a personal criticism of him. When we hear him say, “Now Basa, please tell me what kind of autonomous life you would lead that has nothing to do with me,” we know that, whatever the state of their marriage at a legal and social level, the marriage of minds that the two of them had once dreamt of is over.

Basanti, then, is a book about the recasting of the balance of power between man and woman in modern India. Most interestingly, it is written in a self-reflexive way that greatly deepens the relationship between reading, selfhood, freedom and agency so prominent in the early Indian novel. While reading the novel, we are always aware, every time we start a new chapter and see that the narration has changed hands, that the nine men and women who wrote it come together in the book not just as writers but as readers. In order to take the story forward, since each one had first to absorb the character and narrative cues set up by his or her predecessor, and to work in a spirit both of individuality and partnership. All nine of them were Basanti by turns and together, sometimes as writers and other times as readers.

In an echo of Prafulla’s fate in Bankim’s Debi Chaudhurani, Basanti, too, is cast out of the house by Debabrata. Eventually, the sundered couple are reunited – but in a somewhat melodramatic way that goes against the realistic spirit of the first half of the book, and that may have been a concession to readerly expectations.

Basanti’s dream of a world in which women may have their own identity, however, rings as clear as a bell long after one has put the book down – as does her idea that men and women may reshape their historical relationship by reading and reflection. Echoes of Basanti’s dream can be found in Indian novels all the way through the twentieth century, such as in Yashpal’s Jhootha Sach (1955).

There, the protagonist Jaidev, a journalist, mourns the loss of the great love of his life, Kanak, because of Partition, as the loss of a marriage in which both husband and wife would have been equals, if not in the eyes of the world, then certainly within their own home. “Had she been there, they would have worked as one and achieved great new heights. Kanak's dream was to have a house of their own, both of them at their desks, writing and creating.” The new translation by Mohapatra and St-Pierre restores to the Indian novelistic canon a text that represents a kind of apotheosis – both in terms of the story and the conditions of its composition – of a grand theme of the early Indian novel: women who read so that they may imagine a new womanhood, and world, into being.

[A slightly different form of this essay appeared recently in Open magazine under the title "Basanti's Dream".]