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HISTORICAL FICTION

Inner ferment

Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash

Interesting writing:K.R. Usha at a book reading session.

Excerpts from an interview

When you look at your books, what changes do you do you see in theme, structure, style, voice, characters etc?

I like to think that I have grown organically through my three books. The story-telling is more nuanced, the approach to the theme more textured.

While The Chosen is more complex than Sojourn, the narrative style is linear in both.

A Girl and a River has two strands, the ‘historical’ past worked linearly, through a third-person narrator and the ‘present’ unravelling backwards in first person.

This is also the first book in which it is central to the story that the protagonists are women. This book could only have come after the first two.

What special problems did blending fiction into history and vice versa create in writing and research?

The first challenge was that of melding the vast amount of historical ‘research’, the documented facts, with the fiction.

It is not enough to get the facts right, the quality of your characters’ lives has to be authentic – and not having lived through those times, having to depend on second-hand accounts, makes it more difficult.

Second, was the balancing of the two voices. While I found narrating in the first person very liberating, I had to find the right balance between the ‘warm’ tone of the past and the cold, distant, pared-down voice I had chosen for the present.

And then there was the plot. You must provide enough ‘clues’ for the reader to structure the story on her own, and yet keep her guessing.

So, how much do you reveal, where and how? And how to make the whole a human story and not a clunky formal exercise?

How was the book born?

I had decided that at some point I would write a ‘historical’ novel. Over the years, I had heard members of my family making casual allusions to events that we have come to know as ‘history’.

For instance, my aunt said, I remember seeing Gandhi at the maidan near our house … it was very dusty and I couldn’t understand what he said because he spoke in Hindi …

It was the ‘innocence’ of such utterances that made me think that there could be a story here.

And when I looked for novels in English with a 1930s-40s Mysore setting, the only one that stood out was Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, written in 1938, before the country became independent.

Of the many elements in K.R. Usha’s writing that make it interesting, the one I especially like is its deliberate, self-conscious crafting, which clears room for the writer’s virtuosity but also ensures that the reader has enough space to adventure in the words on the page. For a writer, holding back just that little bit to balance expressing herself to her best advantage and also giving the reader something to do is not an easy thing, but Usha manages very well.

With A Girl and a River, it looks like Usha has crossed some sort of rite of writing passage, for here both material as well as form have moved out into a much wider, deeper, perhaps more obstacle-ridden field.

A Girl and a River is set in a small town in Karnataka, just before India’s independence and the mood of the freedom struggle permeates the book; the characters in one line of the narrative are all directly affected by the encoun ter with it and this effect is felt in retrospect by characters who come chronologically later, but appear parallely in the narrative.

So while one part shows us Kaveri and her mother and the impact of Gandhiji’s visit to their town, and the catastrophic effect that the freedom struggle has on Kaveri’s life, the parallel line reveals how her granddaughter experiences its after effect as a sort of vague absence in her own life.

The setting makes the plot stimulating, because the reader is entering the narrative armed with information about the causes and the writer is constantly challenged to present these events in ways that correspond to the major effects, which appear in plot, action and character.

The story’s twin strands weave in past and present, private and public histories and bring together the missing pieces in a jigsaw that leaves us guessing throughout and only finally connects the book’s three central characters, all women. Rukmini and her daughter Kaveri, along with several others have lived through the freedom struggle and have felt the impact of Gandhiji’s public programmes for arousing the Indian’s desire for self-determination.

They have both suffered from the cataclysmic impact of these events, and their suffering and loss hang over the book like an unhappy ghost, a contaminating spirit which touches the youngest of the women characters, whose search to fill in the blanks in her own history is the other narrative strand.

Both story and plot in A Girl and a River hinge on the inner ferment of individuals touched by the call to freedom and this requires a delicate fitting of fact into fiction and a moulding of fiction into the glove of history, and Us ha stitches the two with delicate, strong seams.

However, it is to be expected that when large facts, large emotions, large transformations are funnelled into the limited grids of plot and story; it is not possible to completely avoid a slight feeling of paraphrase. In A Girl and a River, this feeling appears largely to stem from what the reader is able to see of Kaveri’s ‘situation’.

Kaveri is the daughter of Rukmini and Mylariah — the one an ardent Gandhi, khadi, swadeshi devotee, the other devoted to the idea that hope for the future of India lies in the civilising power of the British. As she tries to b ridge the two, one catches a resonance of a certain well-worn (A.K. Ramanujan) construction about the ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ worlds of that generation.

Kaveri’s encounter with what corresponds to the paternal, disciplined, English, ‘up’ is a little trite, with Kaveri’s reactions seeming to lean far too heavily on the actions of her father, Mylariah. On the contrary, Kaveri experiences and uses the maternal, affectionate, vernacular, ‘down’ with greater ease and more variety.

Since the characters in A Girl and a River could only have come from that specific historical situation and the shape of their lives is influenced and changed beyond repair by the flavour of that situation, the reader is conscious o f searching for authenticity in the depiction of those times and this is done without labouring the point. Mention of a particular vintage of car, a particular café of Bangalore, of certain ways of spending the summer holidays all serve to evoke the mood of the period.

A Girl and a River makes excellent reading and Usha keeps the plot so well in control that not one but two lines of suspense are running together at the same time; try as you may, it’s difficult to guess ahead or to draw a logica l conclusion as to the surprising turn of events in either narrative strand.

The writing is supremely interesting; that a book whose language is so slow and measured as to border on being staid create such tension in the reading self is a measure of the writer’s craft.

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