Unequal men, forgotten women

The novel, built around one man’s revenge fantasy, explores what it means to be authentic when taking moral responsibility for one’s choices.

Devibharathi, Sahitya Akademi award-winning Tamil writer.

N. Kalyan Raman has translated a number of Tamil writers from Salma to Ashokamitran and Perumal Murugan, who all have distinct styles of their own. He translated a collection of Devibharathi’s short stories titled Farewell, Mahatma, followed by The Solitude of a Shadow,which is Devibharathi’s first novel to be translated into English. As with his earlier translations, Kalyan Raman has again managed to fluently capture the mood and idioms of the original with economy and precision without compromising its readability in English.

The novel is a subtle exploration of what it means to be authentic in terms of taking moral responsibility for one’s choices. It reminded me of Devibharathi’s title story “Farewell, Mahatma”, which explores the failure of Gandhism as an ideology of non-violence to prevent communal riots on the eve of Independence. There are two failed impersonations in the short story—Mahatma Gandhi’s inability to live up to the ideals of his spiritual guru Leo Tolstoy and Gandhi’s followers who dress up exactly like him to avail ticket-free rides on the train and thus fail to live up to his ideals—that illustrate the dissonance between ideals of non-violence and politically driven communal hatred and corruption.

The Solitude of a Shadow

By Devibharathi; translated by N. Kalyan Raman

Harper Perennial India

Pages: 202

Price: Rs.399

We are not sure of where and when Devibharathi’s novel is set. There are no markers of time or place; perhaps the temporal and spatial anonymity of the novel only reinforces the fact that the world of the entire novel is a projection of the narrator’s all-consuming revenge fantasy and the all-pervasive presence of caste. The protagonist of Devibharathi’s novel is an unnamed narrator who nurses a desire to avenge his sister Sharada’s rape by an influential dominant-caste man named Karunakaran. Sharada is determined to ensure that Karunakaran meets a horrible end but she is not the one who tries to avenge her rape. When the narrator accidentally meets Karunakaran three decades later at a government school where he works as a clerk, he is reminded of his vow and his sister’s determination to punish Karunakaran.

The narrator’s revenge fantasies ebb and flow throughout the narrative as he thinks of ways to expose and murder Karunakaran, which are foreclosed by the fact that Karunakaran is a powerful dominant-caste man. What is remarkable about the novel is that the narrator not only fails to realise his desire even when he has the opportunity to kill Karunakaran, but also ends up taking care of Karunakaran and his family when he is appointed as his accountant. There is an unmistakable irony that constitutes the narrator’s self that is reflected in the contradiction between the narrative of revenge and the plot that reflects the narrator’s inability to act on his desire that only ends up bringing the two men closer to each other.

The narrator loses his moral integrity when he rapes Karunakaran’s daughter Sulo and later has an illicit relationship with Sugandhi, a married woman. He refuses to take responsibility for both these women who are pregnant with his children. The narrator realises that he is no different from Karunakaran. While Karunakaran seems to redeem his past by relying on, and taking care of, the narrator, the narrator’s plan to kill Karunakaran by winning his trust with his apparent loyalty is never realised and he ends up nursing the dying Karunakaran towards the end of the novel.

Finally, only the victim/survivor and the perpetrator have the power to forgive or punish or take responsibility for what they have done or has been done to them. But this is possible only in an ideal situation where there is equality. To the narrator, Sharada appears to assume control of the narrative towards the end of the novel when she meets Karunakaran for the last time and casually tells the narrator that the man who raped her was another man by the same name. I believe there can only be one convincing interpretation of Sharada’s words: she has no choice but to forgive her dying rapist if she is to achieve any sense of closure.

The novel thus raises certain important questions: what does it mean to seek revenge, especially when one is avenging someone else’s pain and humiliation? In other words, what does it mean to witness an act of sexual violence and can avenging an act of sexual violence with murder offer moral retribution and justice? Is revenge-as-punishment even possible in an unequal world divided by caste? Can one realise one’s desire for revenge without compromising one’s own moral integrity and losing one’s life in a caste-ridden world? And finally, as the novel seems to suggest, are empathy, the willingness to take responsibility for one’s actions, and forgiveness the only morally authentic responses to violence or are they signs of resignation and defeat?

A sustained sense of emasculation

The narrator’s sustained sense of emasculation is constituted by his poverty and marginalised-caste identity, which is foregrounded by Karunakaran’s wealthy and influential dominant-caste status. The narrator is made conscious of his own insignificance when he is introduced as a “lowly” clerk while Karunakaran is a wealthy businessman and the president of the Parent-Teacher Association at the school where the narrator works.

The novel deploys objects and creates situations that reinforce the narrator’s emasculation: his namelessness and growing self-estrangement in the novel, his gradually unravelling and reiterative memory of his boyish inability to defend his sister when she was raped, his old scooter that always coughs and sputters, his inability to take care of his ailing mother and younger sister that adds to his perceived failure as a son and brother, his caste identification with Karunakaran’s loyal and servile barber, his childhood memory of hunting for nasuvakuravai birds (literally, “barber-birds) with his friend who belittles the birds as easy and lowly catch, and so on.

The women characters in the novel either reinforce or become scapegoats of his revenge fantasies. Sharada incites the narrator to avenge her humiliation until she probably realises that only she has the power to forgive Karunakaran. The tipping point in the narrative is when the narrator rapes Sulo who falls in love with him (for some inexplicable reason, she neither tells her father that she wants to marry him nor does she tell him he raped her); the description of sexual revenge uses the same stock phrases and metaphors that are used to describe the narrator’s memory of Sharada’s rape: “I grabbed her breasts, which were like two upturned yellow chrysanthemums.”

Sulo is later married to a poor man whose mother humiliates the narrator for belonging to a marginalised caste, which compels the narrator to tell her that he is the father of Sulo’s unborn child. Sulo’s rape coincides with Karunakaran’s financial decline when his son is sentenced for murdering two of his classmates. The narrator later has a sexual relationship with Sugandhi who is trapped in a loveless marriage. The relationship is initially a source of freedom for the narrator who realises he is not obliged to provide for her until she grows attached to him. He deserts her when she is pregnant with his child and her husband dies. He never takes responsibility for what he has done to Sulo and Sugandhi. He realises: “I used to think of Karunakaran as the embodiment of evil…Now I felt that I had become exactly like Karunakaran; in fact, in terms of morality, I had fallen far lower than him.”

For characters like Sharada and the narrator, the structural inequities of class and caste foreclose the possibility of seeking revenge without being punished or risking their own lives. It is the vagaries of time (the murders his son committed) and not Sharada’s (or the narrator’s) ability to punish Karunakaran that are responsible for his decline and near death. When a marginalised-caste woman is humiliated and assaulted, her assault is seen as an affront to the masculinity of her caste men. Sharada seems to assume control of a narrative by forgiving Karunakaran, but in the end, she and the other women in the novel are scapegoats and casualties of inter-caste animosity between unequal men whose concerns remain unaddressed.

Kiran Keshavamurthy is Assistant Professor of English at IIT Guwahati and a scholar of modern Tamil literature.