An unusually powerful book. It grips attention. Tightly.
History records these changes; it records the emotions of judges, criminals and the families of victims, of watching mobs even, in response to the ultimate penalty. But it remains silent, with a very few exceptions, on the views of the man who carries the bloodguilt on behalf of all society.
With Hangman's Journal, a fictionalised, if brilliantly researched, account based loosely on the life of Janardhanan Pillai, the last hangman of Travancore, Shashi Warrier breaks that silence. In the process, he adds a work of understated but awesome power to the corpus of Indian English fiction.
The book starts with a death-not a hanging, but that of the protagonist from old age. It is the first hint of the many fine touches of irony in this novel, and it sparks off a narrative that deals with the two opposed acts that define the life of the hangman. His job, as the man who hanged 117 people over three decades, is the centre of his world, shaping it with the business of death. An encounter with a writer forces him to emerge from retirement into a painful quest for understanding through writing, which is a business of creation. In time, these two contradictory forces will ignite a meditation on nothing less than the human condition itself.
The narrator's story is a subtle twist on the usual tale of a peasant bonded by tradition and poverty to the work of his fathers. The job of the royal hangman has been in the family for generations. One branch has inherited the attached perks in the form of land and respect, while the narrator's father has inherited the job itself along with the slender assurance that he will never go hungry. It is this peculiar blend of dharma and the knowledge that the hangman's family may never be rich, but will never be destitute that compels the narrator to pick up the burden. Over the years, he performs his duty with a painstaking attention to detail, sensing but not comprehending the ways in which his work changes him and the reactions of those around him. The arrival of a writer who probes relentlessly but with sensitivity into the hangman's life forces him to examine aspects of his nature and of his job that have been buried deep.
Introspection follows description. Speaking of the ancient rituals that served to absolve the conscience of all involved, he observes: "And only the hangman would go home with blood on his hands and a life on his conscience.... Strange, isn't it, that the rituals took care of the king and the messengers and the superintendent, but ignored the hangman, the only one who cared?" Even as the act of writing brings him relief and comprehension, it dismantles the scaffolding of his life, bringing disruption along with the creativity it unleashes.
Warrier has always been a quirky writer, worth reading even when he's writing below his natural level. With Hangman's Journal, however, he creates a work of intense passion unsapped by sentimentality, that inexorably forces change on the narrator, the fictional writer and the reader. It is a brilliant execution.