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In search of self Shakuntala: The Play
of Memory
The beginning is a neatly plaited tale of Shakuntala’s life, the novel’s protagonist bound with her namesake from Kalidasa’s work. The strands that bind them both are the "samskaras of abandonment". Whereas the mythical Shakuntala suffers abandonment at the hands of parents and husband, here she abandons a secure life’s monotony more than once. The braid comes undone as the story progresses. The myth-fiction (mythification?) hybrid soon gives way to an experimental "ending" where the author shuffles the narrative like a pack of cards and offers alternative conclusions for the reader to choose from. Paradoxically, it is this masterly technique that redeems the novel from total "abandonment" by the reader. Shakuntala’s is a lonely life, with her brother renouncing the world to become a monk, her father dead and her care-worn mother’s faded enthusiasm for life bordering on nonchalance. Marriage to a rich, elderly and caring widower doesn’t slake her wanderlust though. Her journey in search of her self is more of an escapade, meandering and retracing its own course, making loops for memories to hang on to. For if you snuggle closer, two anomalies surface. Shakuntala’s world may be gender unjust, but she is as much a perpetrator as a victim of "abandonment". Whether as a child/bride/wife/companion (?) her runnings away are nothing but temperamental cloudbursts. The pattern soon runs out of steam. In the final stretch, memories coagulate and dissipate like beads of mercury on a shiny surface. Total pleasure is all she seeks, which for her is, "...a pursuit, in its moment of consumption, its victim is already seeking the next desperate experience". Bracketing her with women "whose desire to live on (her) own terms is thwarted at every turn by circumstance and the age in which she lives", as the jacket of the book declares, is a fallacious assumption. Her "terms" are mere bouts of recklessness where she is trying to "run away, always, (to) run away from the self", making her adventures all sound and fury signifying nothing. Another jarring note is the adoption of Kalidasa’s epic as a suprastructural prop that hardly lifts the tale from plinth level. The book owes its beauty to the descriptions of age, time and seasons. The backdrop of spread of Buddhism, the angst of Brahmins, the wandering of Greeks and the pan-Indian kaleidoscopic environ are dealt with adequate poetic flourishes. It is in describing the koel’s song and the drumbeats of gathering clouds that the metaphors come rolling smoothly like snooker balls. For all its subtlety, the theme of lust/ rejection/ escape/ negation could well have come by the ladleful from the theme-pot of Western writers-minus the chandan and amalaka, of course. Which is why this good piece of fiction remains just that, a good piece of fiction. Coming from the pen of the talented Gokhale, it’s pity to see so much effort wasted. The novel merely reiterates the universal truth that freedom and womanhood are (still) mutually exclusive. Shakuntala’s release through acceptance could have stalled the journey downstream, who, like driftwood degenerates and disintegrates with every knock. Her unbridled passion merely titillates and is as real as the Emperor’s new clothes. Erotic and exotic, wish the novel could "confront life" and not end up being quixotic. |
A good
book, like a parcel from grandma, has something for everybody—the more
we find ourselves mirrored in the book, the better we grade it. Part
picaresque, part myth and part fiction, against a backdrop of two
religious philosophies—Buddhism and Hinduism—punctuated by the
travels of a lusty Greek, this novel all but promises the moon.