A rambling read
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
|
What Mahasweta Devi's Salt did to dramatise the plight of the landless peasant, this complicated cast of characters fails to achieve.
|
Harvest Song; Sabitri Roy, translated from Bengali by Chandrima Bhattacharya and Adrita Mukherjee, Stree, Pages 373 , Price Rs. 350
SABITRI ROY'S books reflect the Bengal she grew up in — A Bengal where communist ideology was beginning to take root; where peasant movements combined with anti colonial protest to electrify an entire countryside. It's hardly surprising then that Roy's stories are set in these inspired times.
Harvest Song opens to communist activist, Partha, crossing an icy river in the dead of the night. He must wait outside his old schoolmaster's house, calling out to the schoolmaster's daughter, Debaki, for shelter for a night. Partha is a visionary, tall and broad-shouldered and very dear to the women he encounters.
Encounters
These include little girl Debaki, who in the course of the novel is married off with disastrous results and Bhadra, the upper caste wife in a limbo. Bhadra has been rejected by her scholarly husband, who set sail for England shortly after their marriage, only to write back confessing his love for a French girl.
Here are two women at opposite ends of the spectrum but each seems miserable in a similar way — Debaki's good-for-nothing husband, Rajen, bullies and beats her; Bhadra's husbands commits suicide because Bhadra cannot divorce him. Each woman in an unspoken, inexplicable way commits herself to Partha. But he, Buddha-like, must renounce womankind, wedded instead to protest, progress and the road ahead.
So they plod on gamely, in a worthwhile-woman sort of way. Bhadra writes pamphlets and poems for "New Light" and "Aruna", while Debaki, who has been thrown out of her in-law's home, moves to Calcutta and becomes a nurse in a tuberculosis hospital.
Their goodness becomes more apparent when contrasted with Ketaki, the girl who enjoys her looks and dressing up. That Roy doesn't approve of frivolousness is obvious, as elder sister Debaki finds Ketaki corrupted by the city, "reeking of cheap perfume". Later she laments Ketaki's elopement with the lascivious Dulal, a development we know must end in disaster.
The other protagonists in this agrarian un-idyll are Lata, the wonderfully educated college girl who moves to the village and its crushing penury all for the love of Sulakshan, her activist-husband whom she waited six years to marry. But Lata becomes frail and undernourished. Sulakshan looks at her, she's wearing "a blouse cut out of one of his torn shirts, threadbare in places. He knew the grinding poverty that had dried the milk in her breasts", and she frets over her young son Daku who is constantly ill. Activism claims its victims, not the least of which is marital bliss and Roy is remarkable in her portrayal of this very unlofty reality.
Relationships in the book either remain unconsummated like those that revolve around Partha or those budding moments between Bhadra and O `Neill, a sympathetic Irish poet-soldier Bhadra meets on the train from Calcutta. The only couples that emerge happy are the poster couples, and these too more through narrative necessity than ground reality. Saraswati and Sarathi is one such poster couple — Sarathi rescues Saraswati from a violent marriage — and Ali and Meghi. Ali, a Mussulman marries Meghi, a Brahmin widow, a trangressive miracle facilitated not unexpectedly by the admirable Partha.
No action
Harvest Song is a rambling read. If it eschews the lengthy didacticism of a Premchand plot, it also misses the sharp outlines and inspired action of a Karmabhumi-like novel. No lower castes storm a temple in this tale, the action is always one step away seen through the telephoto lens of a Kunal-the-photographer. The characters tend to crowd the canvas, unlike the trenchant simplicity of a Mahasweta Devi sketch.
So what a single family in Salt could do to dramatise the plight of the landless peasant, this entire complicated cast of characters fails to achieve. And then there's the backdrop — Calcutta and rural Bengal.
This is the territory of the rejuvenated-by-film greats like Saratchandra and Vibhuti Bhushan, a land of paddy and of ponds and a Piscean sort of luminous intensity. A great place to set a tale in, but Roy's rendition is awfully uncinematic. Still it's pleasant enough if you must plough through.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
