Where is the novel?
|
Renowned novelist S.L. Bhyrappa's latest work Aavarana has a weak plot
|
Aavarana
Sahitya Bhandara, Rs. 175
Can hate speech masquerade as a novel? Every common reader would encounter this inexorable question after reading "Avarana", a novel by the renowned writer S.L.Bhyrappa.
The novel has been acclaimed by a section of the press and public as an epic by a saint of the modern times (that is what the IT baron N.R. Narayana Murty and wife Sudha said at a recent felicitation).
"Avarana" means that which is masked. The author explains the intent and meaning of the novel in his introduction, which reads like a hate speech by hard-core Sangh Parivar leaders or an excerpt from the history texts prepared by them! According to the author, the novel is intended to unmask real history (and not the story!) of India under Muslim rule, which is masked by the pseudo secularists and successive governments. Having said this, the author commits himself to the task of recreating history, abandoning the storyline as well as the formal attributes of the form itself, by claiming historical authenticity for fiction.
This makes any critique of the novel redundant as the focus shifts from the authenticity of the novel, plot, characters, conflict, setting or theme to the authenticity of the author's so-called historical arguments. But the arguments in the novel do not rise above concoctions in the absence of a definite historical method. The historicity of the novel is confined to quotes from the books of historians who either have a clear Hindutva agenda or their very reputation as historians is redoubtable. This technique of clubbing fiction and fact together is an age-old technique of saffron forces to hoodwink scientific scrutiny of their claims.
The story is inconsequential and thus the narration of the plot in the laborious 270-page novel, occupies but a few pages. Most of it is one-sided monologues by the protagonist Raziya, formerly Lakshmi. She is the only daughter of a Gandhian farmer hailing from the vokkaliga caste, the new and promising recruiting ground for communal forces in Karnataka. A trained filmmaker in FTII, Pune, she falls in love with a Muslim classmate, marries him in spite of opposition from her father. His objection to this marriage is purely for communal reasons and fails to reflect Gandhian liberalism even remotely! There is a strain in her relationship with her father, which hits Raziya in the face, when she embarks on a backward journey after her father's death. He leaves a treasure of history books. The plot is so fabricated that the novelist forgets to incorporate even one single title that a Gandhian would probably like to have in his collection, leave alone leftist historians, but is full of books of hardcore Hindutva persuasion. The actual plot of the novel is this reclaiming of Lakshmi, now an ardent follower of Hindutva politics. Rest of the story, if any, is a kind of unauthentic drama intended to make her and the cause a martyr and depicts "others" as amoral animals! The entire novel is so one-sided that it is reduced to a piece of cheap Hindutva propaganda or at best a collection of hate speeches even as it postures itself as a historic novel.
The argument, however, does not deny the existence of great works in the genre of historical and political novels. Such works have in no way concealed the author's ideological bias, but have managed to command highest respect and appreciation. Because, even in the genre of realism, it is impossible to completely ignore tenets of humanism, and all great novelists who have written in this genre, consciously or unconsciously, have been humanists. If Bhyrappa's novel fails completely, it is because it is a malicious campaign against a community, and suffers from the lack of humanism. A novel, that too by a veteran novelist like him, becoming a useful tool of fascist propaganda is possibly a unique, but a dangerous experiment.
SHIVA SUNDAR
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Friday Review
Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
