Print Email to Friend| From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 20, Dated 19 May 2012

CULTURE & SOCIETY   BOOKS

Feministory

Saswati Sengupta’s strong storyline and keen questioning of accepted mythologies is undercut by other agendas, says Arunava Sinha

Photo: Vijay Pandey ALSO READ Doing discourse doggy style ‘First step to counter extremism is to fight poverty’ The Attack of Incense The Song Seekers Saswati Sengupta Zubaan Books 300 pp; Rs 395

TAKE A powerful idea. Add a dash of melodrama in the beginning. Chop mythology and put in the pieces. Sprinkle symbolism generously. Cook it all in the oil of history. On a high flame of feminist rebellion against traditional male dominance. And serve… a part overcooked, part underdone work of fiction.

English professor Saswati Sengupta’s first novel, The Song Seekers, starts with a horrible murder — an act representing the concentration of generations of prejudice and oppression — that sets the whodunit agenda for the book. As the history of the Chattopadhyays of Calcutta — where every male from Nilkantha down is named after Shiva — unfolds, the critical question that hovers over the household is: how is the murder of a seven-year-old child bride connected with the family?

It is the larger question, however, that’s more intriguing: how the figure of the militant goddess, who subdued the mythical demon, is subverted into a conveniently compliant, middle-class-compatible, mild feminine firebrand? Pitching this as the central motif of her layered novel, Sengupta answers the question through the construct of a family, into which steps the new bride named Uma, armed with the novel novelist’s mandate to stir the cauldron till the truth emerges.

The journey toward this revelation is fused with the intellectual discovery on the part of the women of the household — that the militant goddess was not actually the figure that the Bengali Brahmins made her out to be. This smothering of the facts is captured in the version of the Chandimangal (religious verses tracing the exploits of the goddess) written by Nilkantha, which Uma begins to read to her audience of three every day.

The framework for fusing the larger question with the specific discovery of the family secret is thus wellestablish ed. The disturbing presence of the old woman with green eyes — just what are green eyes doing in a lineage of ‘kulin’ Brahmins anyway? — is the catalyst for the skeletons to come tumbling out of the cupboard. The plotting in this work of fiction set against facts is remarkable. Why, then, does it not come together as the equally remarkable novel that it could have been?

Part of the reason is the lack of pace and rhythm. The entire story is told with the same, unhurried cadence that is reminiscent of Ashapurna Debi’s colossal works, but lacking the sharpness of observation and the pithy asides. An added problem is that in a novel strongly set in actual exchanges between the characters, the dialogue must be pitch-perfect. This is where the suspicion that this novel was thought in Bangla but written in English takes root. The registers of speech are far too flat for the scenes to come alive.

Moreover, the parallels are overdone, turning irony into banality. The house is, inevitably, named Kailash. That the bride’s name is the same as that of the mythical Uma, wife of Shiva, is bludgeoned home instead of being illuminated subtly. And, of course, Ashutosh’s wife has to be named Shivani, another alias for Shiva’s wife Parvati.

IT TAKES a delicate hand to blend the larger issues behind a work of fiction smoothly with the events and characters of a story. The issues that The Song Seekers deals with demand critical and cerebral engagement, with an understanding of historical and market forces. Sengupta does not shy away from confronting these factors, including them in her narrative through interstitial passages and by taking the storyline back to the past whenever necessary. But somewhere in the process, it becomes too granular. The novel stops becoming the story of the people who occupy it, giving way instead to the issues.

Still, it should be read for the light it throws on an aspect of religious mythology that Indians often accept unquestioningly. Sengupta asks all the uncomfortable questions. And, through the green-eyed woman in white who forces the Chattopadhyay men to confront their shameful past, she gives us some pretty discomfiting answers too.

Sinha translates contemporary and classic Bengali fiction into English