BOOK REVIEW                

 

The Inheritors
By Aruna Chakravarti

 

Chakravarti’s work is a rare literary feat, unmatched yet in Indian writing in English
says Antara Datta

Bengal at the turn of the 19th century is admittedly one of the most potent sites of the emergence of nationalism, conflicts around issues of caste, women’s education, social reform and modernity. Vernacular Bengali literature captures this moment of history with vividness but it is only with Aruna Chakravarti’s aptly titled novel, The Inheritors that this historical experience has been for the first time, articulated in all its complexity in the English language.

Chakravarti’s novel is epical in scale as it traces the historical shifts in cultural and political sensibilities over a period of almost a hundred years.  In terms of structure, the novel moves back and forth in time that creates a context of critical distance from both the past and present. As the title of the novel suggests, the novel is primarily about the relationship between tradition and modernity and the inheritance of a difficult past that comes to a post-colonial author only in fragments, stray memories and disjointed narratives. The novel is meta-fictional and begins with Monomohini, a writer in the work, deciding to delve into her familial past, to understand her place in the world she inhabits. But this past is revealed to her in fragments, in half sentences, that she realizes she can complete only in the act of constructing a narrative. The novel eventually becomes for the author, an act of remembrance in the widest sense, an attempt not only to write a personal, family memoir but a narrative about an important moment in history, a memoir of civilisational decline.
The novel traces the complex history of a Kulin Brahmin family in Bengal in the dying days of the nineteenth century. The story opens in the ritual- bound household of   Nyayaratna Bishnupada Deb Sharma, scholar of great repute who is an uncompromising traditionalist. Chakravarti’s work exposes with remarkable deftness and poignancy the tragedies that an unflinching adherence to tradition brought to several lives that find little mention, or remain merely statistical figures, in the records of official history. The figure of a Kulin Brahmin Scholar is the subject of much valorization in traditional Bengali narratives. Chakravarty’s interest , however, is to reveal the sacrifice that this attractive, disciplined, principled observance to tradition demanded, chiefly from the women of these illustrious families of high-caste, scholars. Through the characters of Radharani, Nyayaratna’s daughter, a young widow and a mother, Chakravarti demonstrates the plight of high- caste widows in 19 century Bengal. The character of Radharani is unforgettable as she moves from being her father’s favourite child to a young widow relegated to the margins of her own house. The resistance to the cruel rituals of widowhood in this context, Chakravarti indicates, is permissible only in madness, and repressed female sexuality can find expression only in communion with a divine lover. Radharani’s inability to cope with the demands of tradition and her unconscious subversion of the same is shown in her madness, her imaginary conversations with Nature - (which becomes a substitute for a companion), and her ultimate self-annihilation. The shocking death of Radharani drives away her young son Shibkali from the tutelage of his hard, unrelenting grandfather to the city, where he is immediately accommodated in an affluent family because of his Kulin lineage. Shibkali is married to a reluctant Giribala, the daughter of the house and what follows is a tale of frustrated ambitions and a life-time of suppressed anger. The story moves on to tell the life-stories of Shibkali’s children and their varied trajectories - Shashishekar the oldest son and the conventional choices he makes, the radical younger son and his failed idealism and political engagement, and most importantly - Alo-Shibkali’s daughter who is a victim of her husband’s depraved sexuality. The novel, however, does not make a neat separation between conformism and deviance. Shashishekhar clearly emerges as a modern in his attitudes to women’s education and regressive traditions even though he chooses to refrain from engaging in nationalist politics directly. The novel illustrates the ceaseless conflict between tradition and change and shows the irony of how the burden of inheritance falls heavy on both trajectories.

The most interesting story in this chronicle is Alo’s narrative. Alo’s life - narrative is articulated in her private journal where she records freely her childish desires and her attempts at understanding the difficulties of an impending adulthood. Alo’s act of writing her life-story can be seen as a radical attempt at giving voice to women’s experiences that have gone unrecorded or remained suppressed in mainstream histories of societies and nations. Alo’s journal becomes the central narrative peg for Monomohini who discovers that she has perhaps inherited her choice of vocation, her desire for self-expression, from Alo, her aunt. Alo’s journal, however, is unfinished. And it is up to Monomohini to complete her story. Alo is trapped in a sexually exploitative marriage where she is forced to trade herself for the sexual perversities of her husband. This relationship exposes the depravities that are concealed under the veneer of respectability and tradition. Alo revolts against her situation through silence and quiet resistance. The discovery of Alo’s story enables Monomohini to enter those aspects of her familial past that have been deliberately silenced. It is finally a narrative of discovery and reconciliation as the novel ends with Monomohini visiting her ancestral home where she hears voices that only she can understand.

Structurally, the narrative alternates between the present and the past, documentary evidence and individual dreams, conventional aspirations and repressed desires. The novel is a complex rendition of individual lives caught in the cusp of apocalyptic change. But most importantly, what the novel is able to construct is an archive of memories, desires, repressions, and tragedies of an entire community marching towards an undefined, unfamiliar modernity. Chakravarti’s work is a rare literary feat, unmatched yet in Indian writing in English.

Antara Datta teaches English Literature to undergraduates in Janki Devi Memorial College, DelhiUniversity.
She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on contemporary travel writing.

The Inheritors published by

Penguin India
New Delhi, 2004.
Pages: 365.
Price: Rs.295

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