Fiction
Philosophical dialogues
AJIT DUARA
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Govardhan's Travels is more of a philosophical treatise.
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Govardhan's Travels, Penguin Books, p.438, Rs. 350.
GOVARDHAN'S TRAVELS, a novel by P. Sachidanandan, was originally published in Malayalam as Gowardhante Yatrakal. The work is more philosophy than novel, more dialogue than fiction. The book is based on fiction though, and is an ingenious take-off on "Andher Nagari Choupat Raja", a satirical play by the great Hindi writer Bharatendu Harischandra (1850-85). In this dark play about a blind State ruled by an insane King, an innocent citizen called Govardhan is sentenced to death by hanging for the only reason that his neck happens to fit the noose. None of the accused are of the right fit!
Across time
Sachidanandan, who was born in 1936 in Kerala and is still writing, speaks to Harischandra across a century and a half of time — time and space being no barrier to creative individuals — and requests him to release the innocent Govardhan from his prison cell in the play. After some persuasion, Harischandra agrees and flings the gates of his fiction open. Govardhan is now free. Or is he?
On the contrary, Govardhan is now appropriated by P. Sachidanandan and will be moulded into a central character in his new novel. He has been freed from the imagination and sensibility of one author only to be transferred to another: "He (Govardhan) was not free. The noose, far more terrible than prison walls, still hung above his neck. While time stood still, hosts of people from mythology, history, literature and society came from either side of the road and joined him... and thus began Govardhan's travels."
Sachidanandan, simply known as "Anand" in Malayalam literature, is concerned with the irrationality of all systems of justice, but is particularly incensed with injustice in Indian courts. He fumes: "Lakhs of pending cases requiring the examination of millions of witnesses who had to be dragged into the towns from distant villages; judges who did not know the languages the witnesses spoke and were dependent upon wily interpreters... these courts transported me not only into the notorious inertia of the Indian legal system but also into the mind of an ancient India devoid of a sense of time and space". The author sends his symbolic victim of absurd justice, Govardhan, on a journey through Indian history where he encounters some of her more outrageous violations.
Confronting the past
We meet Ali Dost, the soldier commissioned by Emperor Humayun to blind Kamran, the emperor's own younger brother. Is fratricide the only way a king can secure his throne? Then a flight of imagination takes us through 1857. We meet Mirza Ghalib, struggling to maintain his financial solvency with poetry. We encounter Mirza Mohammad Ruswa, author of "Umrao Jan Ada", and then his muse, Umrao Jan herself.
On a few occasions we get a visa stamped on our passports and meet men like Galileo, the great astronomer and scientist. Faced with the inquisitors in 1633 he surrendered and recanted. For a short while in human history, the earth did not revolve around the sun after all.
Then, miraculously, Galileo meets Ramchander Mathur, mathematician and intellectual in the Delhi of Mirza Ghalib. Galileo explains to the Indian: "I came to know later that the Church punished me not for making the truth public but for the insolence I showed in doing so... What the Church hates is not the truth itself but the courage people display when they speak out the truth."
Novel practice
As is evident, the writer engages in direct dialogue with the reader in Govardhan's Travels and that is not what we are accustomed to in a novel. In this sense, the book is more of a philosophical treatise. Other works in English literature, notably Jonathan Swift's third chapter in Gulliver's Travels, "A voyage to Laputa", is also about the absurdity of extreme logic and illogic in a kingdom of impossibilities. But Swift retains his fiction and does not address the reader as directly as does Sachidanandan. He keeps his identity as a supreme satirist intact.
Similarly, in his short story ,"The Country of the Blind", H.G. Wells maintains his fiction of a land where blindness is the norm and where the idea of sight is so crazy it is considered abnormal and in need of correction. These kingdoms of the absurd work as satire or as allegory.
Not so with Govardhan's Travels. As a consequence, what we get to read is esoteric and heavy going. The idea of appropriating a character from another author's work and introducing him into new fiction is brilliant. Govardhan has been liberated from a play and transported into a novel written more than a century later. We get the writer's point when he says: "there is no escape, no freedom, for the Govardhans of this world". True. But Govardhan's role in the novel is closer to polemic than it is to fiction.
Though Gita Krishnankutty has done a reasonably good job in translating Sachidanandan's prose, Govardhan's Travels is perhaps too abstract in execution. When the average reader needs to consult a glossary to read a work of fiction, there is a slight problem.
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