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Novelty returns to
Indian novel Over to you Kadambari
Though both were eminently successful with their first-ever efforts, leaving fiction behind, Arundhati moved on to social activism and discursive essay, while Alka stayed on with fiction and over the years, has moved from strength to strength. In less than seven years, she has produced three novels and two collections of stories. Products of the post-liberalised India, both Alka and Arundhati negotiate this complex equation between the global and the local in their own distinctive ways. While Arundhati’s solo effort dented the global consciousness with her well-crafted local narrative, Alka creates global consciousness within the framework of her equally well-designed local narratives. A true native, she has displayed amazing grit and staying power. No wonder, she is being hailed today for breathing new life into the jaded Hindi novel. The extent of her popularity can be judged from the way her works have been extensively translated into several Indian and European languages as varied as Tamil, Telegu, Spanish, Italian, French and German. Though averse to labels, Alka prefers the tag of a humanist to that of a feminist. However, Shesh Kadambari, her second novel, is most explicitly a feminist work. Focalised in the consciousness of Ruby Gupta, a 70-year-old rich widow and social activist, this novel explores the interior spaces of her heart with rare deftness and control. Her story marginally intersects and overlaps with that of her granddaughter Kadambari, a Delhi-based journalist. Two generations and lives, separated by time and space, make up the warp and woof of this novel. It traverses the familiar alleyways of Kolkata with the same élan and ease with which it negotiates the distant lands, peoples and continents. Puzzling over her suffering, Rubydi is still struggling with the question of whether or not to document the story of her insipid life, but her granddaughter simply goes ahead and puts together a pseudo-fictional account of her errant mamu Dev Dutt’s life. Shesh Kadambari is our desi version of a postmodernist novel; something that our Hindi heartland had been waiting for several years now. Its characters are no more than scraps of consciousness, and come from Kolkata-based marwari community, the class of people Alka knows rather intimately and also belongs to. But she is no navel-gazer or a hard-nosed regionalist. Floating freely between personal and historical, she maps out those rare spaces within Rubydi’s consciousness that a lesser novelist would have feared to tread. A cartographer of silent zones, Alka weaves a rich, many-layered narrative, exploring the depths of fiction and history with compassion and delight. Alka’s mode of narration is complex and so is her understanding of human situations and motives. Avant-gardism of Bengali culture is as much her inheritance as is the rootedness of the Hindi heartland. By making this novel available in English, Katha, a Delhi-based organisation, has certainly done a yeoman’s service to the cause of Indian literature. Vandana R. Singh deserves full marks for her extremely fluid, competent and graceful translation. It’s a must read for all lovers of Indian English fiction, especially they who often dismiss Indian novels in regional languages for their lack of novelty. For this, one could easily
shame the most die-hard critics of Indian literature, even the tin-pot
dictators of contemporary Indian English fiction. |
The year was 1998. Alka
Saroagi wrote her first novel, Kali Katha: via Bypass, in
Hindi. Arundhati Roy, too, had published her first novel, The God
of Small Things, a year earlier, but in English. Understandably,
Arundhati went on to win the Booker, while Alka had to stay content with
the Sahitya Akademi Award.