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The ghost of Rajnikant, the film
star, despotically rules over the imagination of the kids. Shiva
would slip on the fake Nike T-shirt, would toss and light the
cigarette in Rajnikant-style, and Chinnamani would form the
"first ever Indira Gandhi Slum Cricket Team." The kids
learn capitalist calculations when Perumal, the rich carpenter's
son, offers a cricket bat and buys captaincy. And what of
Rukmini?: "She looks at everyone, smiles at everyone, talks
to everyone. She confuses me."
It is the prospect
of owning their own pucca houses that energises the
adults. But it is found in the end that the relocation is also
politically motivated and does not fulfill the demands of the
Utopian imagination. Slum burns only to be substituted by a new
colony ironically named 'Swarajpura' — another Marxist gesture
that would ensure the continuance of the oppressive strategies
of power. Swami is caught in this slum development programme but
shifts his ideological position from being a rationlist to an
idealist and finally back to a disillusioned pragmatic
rationalist. As the kids find Rukmini coquettish, Swami finds
Sumathi a callous creature: "Why did he have to lose his
heart over this insensitive, haughty, upper-class bitch? No, she
had no feelings."
This is the stuff
that forms the narrative that is told through different voices.
There is no single central thread running through the narrative
and the novel does not have a conventional ending. We find
Chinnamani and Velu running towards a new-found, albeit dubious
freedom in the end. But the matter is not as simple as that. The
author does not seem to have the aspired authority over the
contents of the novel. The personae and situations are not
symbolically, psychologically, or even ideologically innovative
enough to require any elaborate comments or a deep analysis.
Even these routine
affairs could have been livened up but the language does not
permit it. The very dullness of such proceedings is a problem in
itself but the problem has compounded on account of the language
used. The diction that the novelist uses is not the one favoured
in slums and the matter is further aggravated when the spoken
language is sought to be adapted to what is taught in
classrooms. Consequently, the language struggles. Utterances
like "Give me your slipper let me use it on myself,"
"You've quenched your thirst what about your child?"
and "You'll be the captain, Perumal. Who else?" are
jarring. An excessive use of expressions like "as if",
"instead of" and literal translations like "Money
will come, money will go" and "I'll break your leg and
give it in your hand", are awkward. In fact, the portion of
the novel that is devoted to Swami and does not deal directly
with slum-life is more convincingly rendered and is a source of
some delight.
However, despite
the various pitfalls of the novel at various levels, it should
be given due credit for an important question that it raises:
High civilisation creates itself by marginalising its slum-like
accursed self, but is not the accursed self already working in
the very foundation of the so-called high culture? Neither the
kids' world nor the adults' world can satisfactorily answer this
question .
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CHINNAMANI'S
world is a world of Indira slum of Bangalore. However, it is not
presented through the eye of Chinnamani, even though the title
suggests that. The narrative voice shifts and identifies itself with
different personae active in the slum: Chinnamani (11-year-old
bright schoolboy), his mother Parvathi (daily wage-earner at
construction sites), his father Thangamani (vegetable hawker), Velu
(Chinnamani's friend, a Rajnikant fan), Asaithambi (the beggar-boy),
Shiva (a scooter mechanic), Yellanuna (the canteen owner), Rukmini
(the coquette), Isthri Selvan (Thiruvalluvar fan who irons for a
living) the carpenter, Rowdy Muthu (the ruffian) and Laxman
(lottery-ticket seller). Besides these we have Swami and Sumathi who
work for the uplift of the slum.
