Remembrance Of Ghosts Past

At a time when the national literary sphere was rocked by a movement called award wapsi, I was driven to ponder over a different kind of award wapsi that happened in Gujarat almost a decade earlier. Barely three years after the publication of his first collection of short stories, titled Dhal Kachbo (2002), and at a time when he had already won two prestigious awards—Katha Award (1997) and Sanskruti Pratishthan Award (1999)—Nazir Mansuri threw away the former as the organisation wanted to publish the English translation of a short story by Mona Patrawala, whom Nazir had nominated for the award, with stylistic modifications. The contention of the editors was that the story, deeply rooted in a rural locale and a remote ethnic subculture, needed to be urbanised for potential readers, while its language required naturalisation into a register of English that was most readable and acce­ptable to the m­onolith of the target readership they had in mind.
I wondered if these two acts of writerly self-assertion and conscientious defiance could be compared within the dialectical framework of ‘commitment’ that Theodor Adorno elaborated in his eponymous 1962 essay. However, one can say with a measure of certainty that what Nazir was trying to safeguard in his protest was what Adorno called the ‘autonomy’ of art, a set of complex and profound internal relations that constitute the totality of a work of art. That apart, the form of resistance Nazir had foregrounded, was not only against the neoliberal onslaught on art and artists, but also against the society “in and of itself”.

One wonders if a different kind of commitment is required to embark on a project of writing the longest novel on earth, one that has already surpassed Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The answer is an emphatic yes, at least in the case of Nazir, given his uncompromising notions about art and artists. Working tirelessly in the shadows of literary marginality for about three decades does entail a nonpar­eil commitment and single-minded devotion that many in today’s literary world are incapable of. The novel I am talking about, one which is slated to be a bomb in the history of Gujarati literature, nay world literature, is his magnum opus titled Jamjaal, a work-in-progress only a few of his close friends are privy to. Expected to run into 35,000 to 40,000 pages upon completion, it captures two centuries of lives lived by marginal, coastal communities in Kathiawar. It affords the inside story, a deep peep into a robust, seafaring tradition; the community’s intimate relationship with the sea, their normative values and noble worldview, their moral stamina and human longings, and so on.

Nazir’s fiction stands as a seminal milestone in the tradition of Gujarati literature bec­ause it brings to light a hitherto neglected, vibrant sub-culture of fishing communities, living in straggly villages on the seashore of Diu. Laid against a rustic, marine locale, Nazir’s work gives an unprecedented insight into a typical dialect, myths, lifestyles and existential predicaments of the people who live a primitivist and dark life away from the hustle-bustle and dehumanising politics of urban life. His plots unfold in the back-of-beyond, gigantic, seaside ranches where elements of nature, both meek and ferocious, co-exist and fight for survival. Eerie ranches sprawling across hundreds of acres, chock-a-block with palms and indigenous fruit trees, become a theatre of ceaseless struggle for survival amid cocks and hens, ferocious wolves, birds of prey like sea hawks and kites, tom cats, human beings and “the nature red in tooth and claw”. His is a brave new world, a densely packed primal world, where strapping fishermen go out fishing and engage in bloody feuds either with gargantuan sharks and whales or with the whirling sea itself; where voluptuous fertile women and serfs slave untiringly in ranches, gorge away a lot of food, down vast quantities of liquor and indulge boisterously in carnal desires. Largely untouched by the winds of alleged development, this neolithic world seems to celebrate primal instincts over sophistication, id over superego and primordiality over civilisation. Simultaneously, this world throbs with black magic, talismans, magical threads, sorcerers, witches, ghosts, possessed women, witch-doctors and above all, an unpredictable sinister fate.

Arguably, the predicament Nazir’s characters live through is an outcome of the condition of modernity, even post-modernity. For example, the quest for love, engagement with sexuality, crippling loneliness, alienation, victimisation by oppressive social structures, identity crisis and psychological scars left by colonial encounters are thematic threads that weave a mesmerising artistic tapestry in his short story The Whale. Lakham Patari, a child of miscegenation between a Portuguese officer and a local mother, is a figure torn between traumatic past and alienating present. His half-racialised body, at once an object of desire and revulsion for his sister-in-law Rani and the entire village, undergoes sexual exploitation, first at the hands of Rani, and then a gang of hijras who kidnap him at a tender age. Lakham’s seething outrage against his Portuguese father, who tortured and abandoned his mother, as well as against his abused body, finds outlet in the frenzied and scary ways in which he hunts gigantic whales at sea. Rani, on the other hand, has been pining for her husband Punjo, who has not returned from sea for years, and is forced, as per the local custom, to marry Lakham, Punjo’s younger brother. Their intertwined lives, haunted by demons of the past and troubled by a struggle to come to terms with their repressed sexualities, find a complex articulation through the recurring metaphor of the whale, a dense web of symbolism and archetypal narrative.

Nazir’s fiction sprawls on a massive canvas, an indispensability for the deft, artistic exploration of such complex, interconnected themes in symbolic and cinematic modes of narration. Vesh Palato (2009) and Chandal Chakaravo (2009), his hefty novels set in the same locale, run into about 500 pages each. The former undertakes an in-depth, psychological probing of secret bi-sexual and lesbian relationships of five characters—two Portuguese and three local—languishing for love and emotional compatibility in their conjugal lives. Through deft interweaving of tropes of transvestism, fluid sexuality, feminist sisterhood and strategic deployment of the symbols of giant tortoise and the whale, the novelist brings out inscrutable complexities of human emotions. Intersecting histories of colonialism and traditional society add enriching semantic layers to the novel.

Chandal Chakaravo, on the other hand, is a ghost story that recounts the lovelorn lives of three ghosts who trespass into the real world to consummate unfulfilled desires. Restrictive social mores, patriarchal stranglehold on women’s lives and subtle, radical feminist subversions, constitute interlocking ground for erecting intricate thematic and discursive structures in the novel.

Notwithstanding the scope and size of his projects, Nazir’s creative process has remained unbelievably strenuous and elaborate. Before going to print, his texts run into a cycle of drafts—at times as many as 20—revisions and summary overhauling, until he is personally satisfied with the quality and unity of the artefact. The writer is now on the verge of publishing eight novels in one go, a work running into 12,000 pages in all. Undoubtedly, the novels are raring to take the Gujarati literary universe by storm. However, it is Jamjaal, his magnum opus, which will trigger tectonic shifts into the way we conceptualise world literature today.

Spanning over 200 years of mytho-poetic history of the interrelation between the colonial Portuguese and local societies, the novel presents a highly complex account of life-histories of nine protagonists and their doppelgangers. The seed of the diversified narratives lies in the historical event of 1813, when Colonel Grant, an imperial official, laid siege to a village near Diu to cleanse it of pirates holed up there. In the crackdown, the army arrests a host of women and their lovers, some of whom worked for the colonial army, and buries the men alive. The disconsolate women, in turn, drown themselves in the mangrove swamps. After a pre-destined lag in time, ghosts of the dead come back to live in the real world of the 1960s along with the protagonists. The nine protagonists, employed in their previous lives either in colonial or Gaekwad’s army, or as captains of ferry ships, set out in search of their relatives who didn’t return from the sea after decades. When they return after 12 years, they come back as doppelgangers of the ghost characters, who, revived to life, have been moving in and out of the material world. Similarly, the novel weaves together the stories of nine women ghosts, the doppelgangers of their real-life counterparts. The thematic thread that binds all the life-stories together is the radically progressive, non-conformist and anti-establishment outlook these characters have towards life. They literally wage wars against the patriarchal social culture, indulge into same-sex, even incestuous, relationships, and exhibit an ethical ideology that flies in the face of the ossified, ‘civilised’ society. The central eponymous symbol in the novel, an old-style bunch of hundred fishing nets, traps histories of individuals alongside those of colonialism, patriarchy, race and sexuality, and investigates the themes of structural hegemony, coercive domination and power play in a mix of narrative styles that employ techniques of magic realism, fantasy, existential psychoanalysis, dream sequence and a postmodern blending of the real and the surreal, normal and the paranormal, physical and the metaphysical.

When I asked Nazir about the historical research he conducted for writing the big one, he smiled and said, “I did consult historical material available in the libraries of Diu, but the crux of what I am talking about comes from oral histories I had heard from locals; old women in their eighties and nineties, who kept waiting for their husbands to return their whole lives, and the haggard sailors who spoke to me about their escapades at sea.” At present, Nazir is half-way through, and given his tendency to revise and rewrite, the novel will take a few years to hit the bookstores. However, it will be worth the wait as it’s not every day that a Marcel Proust is born to a language. Hold your breaths, dear readers, for the Indian Proust.

(The contents of the article are for the exclusive use of Outlook and the writer)

Hemang Ashwinkumar is a bilingual poet, translator and academic