Puritanical nationalism and woeful anatomical complaints
Set on Campbell Road -- an apparently ordinary residential street in Bangalore, Brinda Charry in Naked in the Wind (Penguin India, 2007) introduces us, one by one, to its far from ordinary inhabitants, all brought together by a single, significant, event -- the return of Venugopalan Vasu accompanied by his quietly ominous side-kick, Anand. The narrative voice shifts as the story unfolds along the street, observed and recounted, almost cinematically, through the various eyes of its residents. From Vasu's quietly beautiful wife, Shanthi, who has been mourning his absence for the past fifteen years, to her seductive maid, Rani, all the way along the railway track to the mad beggar woman who sits with her sari around her hips, and the trapeze artists, dwarves and eunuchs who populate the parallel world of the nearby circus. The individual stories demonstrate the difference of human identity; they are punctuated with Hindi, English, Tamil and Kannada but as the plot develops we are awoken to sense of a shared sense of community -- a "common childhood." Charry is caught in the conflict between difference and unity. Vasu and Anand have become intoxicated by the promises of Hindu nationalism -- a dangerous dream that she shows to be illusory, picking apart individuals' attempts to deny their inherent position in a community. "They shrug off home and the tireless bonds of duty and love, and went looking for something that they all called by different names. Did the peace they found in their travels and the shattered lives they left behind balance each other out, cancel each other in some larger, indefinable scheme of things?" Charry writes with elegance and the multiplicity of the narrative shows off her skilfully stylish ability to conjure character through internal monologue. But there is a violence in the undertones -- a violence that has been brewing since the beginning, with portentous newspaper reports of nuns raped in convents and missionaries burnt alive. It is a violence that represents the dangerous ramifications of puritanical nationalism, culminating only in the final scenes. We are left, at the end of the novel, with a call to the heavens as one of the protagonists, Marie, appeals to a "God of thresholds," beseeching Him to "let [her] see in more than one direction, [to] let us all stay multiple." In Perineum, Nether parts of the Empire (Penguin India, 2007), Ambarish Satwik has created a delightfully irreverent fictionalised history of colonial India. Told from the perspective of British governors, viceroys and kings, Satwik takes us on a blistering journey from the beginning of the Raj through to independence. India herself is presented as a perineum--"the narrow region between the proximal parts of the thighs" and each chapter contains a woeful anatomical complaint nestling neatly between the legs of the subcontinent. From Colonel Robert Clive's circumcision to King George V's swollen pus-filled scrotum, we see the undressing of Empire, the reduction of grandeur, pomp and ceremony to its bare bodily and ugly reality. A surgeon by profession, Satwik nails his subject to the treatment bed with rivets of historical fact and revels in the gross anatomical dissection of stories, as if they were body parts, smothered in diseased blood, faeces and mucus. Nothing is sacred; no haemorrhoid is left unturned. The result is a curious mixture of medical textbook, historical source and pornographic fantasy. There are moments of grotesque humour, sadness but the overriding sensation is of squirming disgust as we see how the destinies of millions was determined by mere men--flesh and blood, slave to their own human senses. The account of the removal of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1912 is interwoven with the twisted testicles of King George V, who is haunted by the phantom of a poor child he saw seven years before. The ceremony, durbar and rousing music is reduced, on the day, to a "testicular denouement." The Constitution, rooted in an honourable belief in the "inalienable right of the Indian people to have freedom" takes on a different flavour when the draft sits adjacent to an idly jotted erotic ditty inspired by a young beauty glimpsed by the author in Lahore, with the foul taste of onions on his tongue, and his daughter asleep in the room next door. Too often, the dense anatomical description hinders the pace of the stories themselves, which has an oddly dislocating effect on the reader. But structurally, the novel is fascinating, and the narrative reflects one of Satwik's own characters' storytelling--"an exalted form of rumour-mongering [that] involved the abstraction of fiction from its ore; real people, real places, a bit of folk-lore and the manufacture of quotidian legends"; he makes "vectors out of the listeners, carriers of the tales."
Extract from Perinium
Diary entries of Honoria Lawrence, married to Henry Lawrence--seconded to the Revenue Service--on 21 August 1837, whereupon they embarked "on a pinnace that took them up the Ganges to Revalganj, whence they went by land to Gorakhpur." October 15thThe pudendum, in this heat, gives an execrable smell. It is the smell of the river with its fish, of rotten almonds and of a crimson dye called Heena. Sometimes my Indian rubber shoes, when I am sweaty, smell similarly. The fetor has been admitted to my world of similes and oils of sandal can't rid me of it. I wonder, for our sakes, if I can ever belong to these plains. There is something strangely obscene about our lives here. The river is wider at Monghyr and there are other boats with us now. A tall, white-headed grass called Moonge is seen on the banks. The forts of Monghyr have been mouldering away. We are on the deck and Henry is busy writing. The pornographer, I feel, is the second self. His reason for being is to afford a certain kind of pleasure. But it is the alter idem, and others like him who can recognise it and partake of it. There is the hubris of religion in it and that sort of thing is more than I can divine. But I do give myself to it. I am Henry's little sacrificial animal.... Isobel Shirlaw is a freelance contributor. She lives and works in Dhaka.
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