English sensibility, Indian ethos
This is the first page, and she has already told us what the novel is to be about. On the same page she introduces her parents: "Beautiful, intelligent, moving ahead faster than the country." She also describes her seduction, or attempted seduction, by a fellow college student. She chooses him to be her first lover as he is more mature than the other male students: he has a moustache and smokes cigarettes. Once in bed, he invites her to admire his penis, but does not know what to do with it.
That concludes the first brief chapter and, as can perhaps be deduced by now, the novel, into which it leads us moves at speed. An incident takes place, is deflected into a sequence of eccentric musings: then almost without realising it, we are in the midst of another incident. These incidents are mostly to do with the narrator's enormous family, with her career as a resentful schoolteacher, and with her life in a provincial Indian town. Occasionally, the narrative slides out of control. The reader, as though forced on to a rollercoaster, ceases to know where he is, or even to care very much. He is brought back to the book by a sudden sharpness of observation, a happening which surprises him by its delicacy of perception.
What interested me about this very readable novel was that the sensibility of the writer, her processes of thought, the way she perceives herself, are so very Western—more particularly, so very English. This has gradually become observable in good literature written by Indians in English. The first well-known novelists, like Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, had an identifiably Indian sensibility. So in poetry did Nissim Ezekiel. A.K. Ramanujan did not have this, neither, of today's youngish poets, does Jeet Thayil. Most of the current crop of novelists possess a kind of international sensibility. Arundhati Roy is a perfect example of this. But Dharker, like Anita Desai, seems English. This English sensibility is that of an otherwise very Indian woman.
For, a great deal of this book is concerned with matters that would be wholly alien to most Englishwomen. The joint family, or the spectre of it, form an important part of this novel. However liberated Dharker is in the persona of a narrator, the woman who is the I of this book is terribly trapped within the monstrous fetters of Hindu tradition, unimaginably heavy because the elder members of her family have fastened them in her mind.
The book ends in the burning of the ancestral home, cluttered with superstitions, family legends and the bric-a-brac of generations of minds who were all mentally bound to the same wheel of life. If the beautiful but decrepit house symbolises the burden of tradition, its destruction by fire may be an intrinsic part of a new freedom for the narrator. Yet, she cannot help but sorrow for the house. Male writers in English do not seem to have this deep emotional involvement with tradition. For women it will take another generation to disentangle themselves.
The possession of a Western sensibility together with a Hindu psyche must be almost impossible to unravel within oneself. In a sense, that is what Ms Dharker's book is about, and apart from this it is permeated with style, dash and humour. I hope it will have its successors.