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Literary Review
FICITION
Glimpses of eternity
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`Despite its noble and even edifying intentions, however, ... it turns out to possess two of the most endearing features of a novel, an erotic interest and comic irreverence.'
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"THE girl-child, in all stages of her life, is the perfect picture of... the self-luminous reality of selfhood, Atman"; she is the "unexcellable portrait of Atman". This repeated formulation could be said to be the main impulse of this book, daringly connecting the eternal with the contemporary, the highest attainable human ideal with the violently foul treatment we hand out to our women whom we consider to be an inferior species.
Philosophical fiction
This is, however, a work of fiction, and therefore both the Atman and the girl-child are given a specific human identity. The spokesman for the Atman, or at least a seeker of it, is a 58-year-old professor of philosophy named Ravi Srivastava, fondly called "Babu" by the girl-child, who herself is a 22-year-old Indian graduate student in America named Ananya and is similarly called "Muniya" by him. She is the daughter of an old friend of his, and had not spoken a single word until she was six, having observed a maun (like a muni); he then taught her to say "Aum". Now, after long years, they meet again in California, where she has just walked out of her viva, and he has finished a stint as a visiting professor. On the first anniversary of 9/11, they fly back together to India; it is a symbolic coming home.
After setting up this situation, the novel reverts in time to fill us in on the many past pilgrimages of Babu in quest of the Atman, following in the footsteps of Jnaneshwar, Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi and, above all, Ramana Maharshi. Babu's devotion to these spiritual figures is apparently profound, but we are not told precisely what he gains from them. Especially in the case of Ramana Maharshi, Babu's feelings seem to be (to use a bhakti metaphor) like jaggery to the dumb; he can taste the sweetness but cannot describe it. The novel is full, nevertheless, of long indented passages which are the "talkative" Babu's philosophical reflections and speeches, including several morally exemplary episodes he recounts from the Mahabharata. One of these passages is acknowledged by the narrator to be a "piece of philosophical-spiritual autobiography," and the gap between Ramchandra Gandhi the author and Babu the protagonist is never wide enough for this book really to be able to take off as an independent work of fiction.
An interesting example of this conflation is the long introduction that Babu is given by the chairperson at a speech delivered by him at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in London; it is but the thinly disguised curriculum vitae of Ramchandra Gandhi himself, with a few fascinating wishful correctives. Ramchandra Gandhi did his D. Phil. at Oxford and then taught at St. Stephen's College in Delhi; Babu, however, is given a doctorate from the University of Aberdeen and made to teach at Hindu College, instead! The moral inference — which the author affirmed at the launch of this book in Delhi — is that had he not turned his back on both Oxford and St. Stephen's, he would not have evolved into the kind of person that his alter ego in this novel, Babu, is.
Novels are commonly supposed to be light reading, and philosophy heavy reading. This novel is a bit of both, and thus a piece of what one may call "phiction." Despite its noble and even edifying intentions, however, it is not merely a spiritual tract or a pravachana, for it turns out to possess two of the most endearing features of a novel, an erotic interest and comic irreverence. On their slow journey home via London, Babu finds that notwithstanding the gap in their ages and his avuncular relationship to her, he has fallen in love with Muniya. This is, of course, spiritually most fitting, as representing the longing of the dvaita for the advaita; he invites her, indeed, to "celebrate with me a life of non-dualist, non-ageist love". But she, being a wise girl-child, very nicely puts him off, and shortly afterwards, as the novel ends, he dies, or as the novel puts it, is "absorbed in Ramana".
Comic irreverence
As for the comic irreverence, there's a chapter here titled "Was Gandhi a Fraud?" and another titled "Could Ramakrishna Have Been Gay?" (Both turn out, of course, to have been rhetorical questions.) But my favourite moment occurs early in the novel when, starting on his first beer of the evening in a bar in San Francisco, Babu silently dedicates the first large gulp of the brew to his great guru, Ramana Maharshi: "Aum Ramanaya Namah." A novel can hardly get more spiritual than<243>
this — in both senses of the word "spiritual".
Muniya's Light: A Narrative of Truth and Myth, Ramchandra Gandhi, IndiaInk/ Roli Books, p.248, Rs. 350.
HARISH TRIVEDI
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