The Lady Dances In The Dark

n 2007, Anjana Basu wrote Black Tongue, a searching examination of political and moral bankruptcy in West Bengal, set against the background of the three-decade long Communist rule of the state. Rhythms of Darkness is a sequel of sorts, but holds up equally well as a stand-alone work. In it, Basu takes up the story of one of the characters introduced towards the end of Black Tongue, Shyama, who comes of age and becomes “the woman who destroyed Bengal”.

Most readers will find a more than passing resemblance between Shyama and the politician who heads the current dispensation in West Bengal. Rhythms of Darkness swirls together a heady cocktail of regime change, Maoist violence and civil society politics to produce a compelling political novel, a genre which has perhaps not received its due from Indian writers in English. Basu is an honourable exception, though, and both her novels negotiate a devilishly difficult terrain with great skill and narrative imagination. But while Black Tongue was recent history in slow-motion, a painstakingly detailed look at the fault lines between urban and rural Bengal, Rhythms of Darkness is history speeded up, even hurtling towards a violent, retributive climax.

Some of the plot elements in Rhythms of Darkness may appear implausible, and they would indeed be flaws in a realistic novel. However, Basu has treated contemporary politics not as straightforward narrative datum but as basis for a fable, where the same story is told over and over again from many perspectives. In Black Tongue, this elliptic form of address serves to build a sense of numbness and stasis, where political and civic will is flattened by the juggernaut of one-party rule. But in the sequel, the real-life process of regime change is mirrored in a more urgent, vivid style of story-telling. As the novel progresses, the figure of Shyama occupies more and more of the narrative space, much in the same way that Mamata Banerjee has come to occupy the political space in contemporary Bengal.

One of the most intriguing features of Rhythms of Darkness is the portrayal of Shyama, and the ability which propels her to the highest echelons of politics. Shyama—another name for the goddess Kali and literally meaning ‘dark’—is a compulsive dancer, one who is able to dance up a storm wherever she goes. She dances by herself, in front of party functionaries, for the Maoist fugitive-turned-party boss who meets her in the forest, even at press conferences. It is tempting to read her dance as a metaphor for regime change, and as a reworking of the myth of the goddess’s dance, but it works equally well as something which Shyama does really well and works hard at, from being an anonymous face in a conga line to the raucous energy of an item number. And while the world around her tries to make sense of the new didi, the ghosts of old politics still linger in the background, refusing to fade way, biding their time. The more it changes, the more it remains the same.