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The Inheritors. by Aruna Chakravarti. Penguin. Pages 340. Rs 295. Chakravarti has chosen to map the history of a Vaidic Kulin Brahmin family through several generations as it grows and spreads out from its local roots in a Bengal village, through the once imperial city of Kolkata, to Delhi, Mumbai and Cologne. The rituals of orthodoxy are not just motions confined to ceremonies but threads in the loom of life that get woven into complex and constricting webs to bind men and women to lives that wound reason and desire. Life and society is a cauldron seething with oppression, perversions, madness and much else that is waiting to break out, but is held in by the weight of myth, memory and force of patriarchal authority. The survivors in this system do not fare any better than the victims and liberation is a result of fortuitous circumstances because it cannot even be dreamed of. Sati, child marriages, child widows and the life of unremitting agony and torment that especially women were subject to are but a few of the ugly cults dredged up to show where we come from. Yet, this is not an ‘oppressive’ book. It is a very readable family drama, eschewing judgment while leaving the reader in no doubt where Chakravarti’s sympathies lie. The story is brought out through the character of Monomohini who sets out to write a book on her family and its origins with all its skeletons, secrets, scandals, longings, bigotry, prejudices, ugliness, beauty and perversions. In the process she gives it a distinct Bengali flavour, the sights and smells of a Bengali family, its culinary delights, festive indulgences, ceremonial preoccupations and puritanical excesses. The gentle treatment of the history makes the narrative appealing. The periods are a bit crowded with people and events and the writing is overblown at places but this is only to be expected when one goes back in time that is not linear. Excerpt ‘Good. Don’t forget your ancestry, Shashi. We’re Kulin Brahmins descended from the great pandit and royal priest Srikrishna Tarkapanchanan. A glance at our family tree will tell you what an illustrious family we are. There are so many nyayaratnas, tarkaratnas, tarkabhushanas, bisharads, shastris, siddhantas and kabyatirthas that you would lose count.’ ‘I know all that. I’m
proud of the scholarship of my forefathers but not of my kulin ancestry.
I detest the Kulin Brahmins for their arrogance and their treatment of
their women.’ |
AT
a time when revivalist hordes from the fringe are moving centre-stage
with their clamour for a cultural reprocessing of the republic, Aruna
Chakravarti does well to turn the focus inwards — on the dark recesses
of the culture we are heir to. Though her book is about Bengal and the
evolution of a Bengali family from just before the end of the 19th
century to Y2K, her story is resonant of life, as it was, elsewhere too
in much of this benighted subcontinent.