David
Davidar attempts a South Indian epic, narrating the story of the
Dorai family over three generations, from the late 19th
century to the the middle of the 20th. The family has its
roots in the upper-class, rural (or quasi-urban/moffusil),
recently-converted Christian milieu in the imaginary seaside village
of Chevathar, in Kanyakumari district. The story is divided into
three parts, one for each generation. The first is set in Chevathar,
where the chief protagonist is the village headman, Dorai, who tries
to maintain peace between the two major castes, which are in a
perpetual state of antagonism that frequently breaks out into open
and violent quarrels. Dorai, though, is not above being casteist and
fiercely feudal himself, and, when he thinks it necessary, he fights
to assert the superiority of his caste over the other. Davidar
comments, in passing, on the irony of a Christian community being
divided by caste, but seems to accept this as an essentially Indian
phenomenon. Davidar himself hails from this milieu, and probably,
though perhaps unconsciously, intends Dorai to represent his own
caste – which, I guess, is Nadar. The antagonist caste may be
Thevars, though they are not so well known to be converts to
Christianity. In fact, in current day South Indian politics, the
Thevar caste largely supports Hindu right-wing fundamentalist
ideologies, and political parties that espouse such policies.
Historically, in the late 19th century, the southern
regions of Sivakasi and Tenkasi, among others, witnessed large scale
clashes between Nadars and Thevars (or Devars), both Hindu castes, as
a result of which the Nadars, who were considered low caste,
converted to Christianity and Islam. This fact is mentioned by
Davidar, but the Dorai family are involved in a caste conflict of
their own, with another Christian, not Hindu, community. It is also
possible that the Vedhars in the book actually are an amalgam of
Thevars, Vellalas and the 'untouchable' castes like Pariahs, among
the last two of whom there were large scale conversions. But these
questions of caste are only a part of the large range of personal and
community interactions in that milieu described by Davidar, I think
authentically. He also describes the interactions within the family,
and between the family and other members of the community. It
happened that I spent a day in Nagercoil even as I was reading the
book. I tried to get a sense of the background atmosphere to the
book, but I could gather not much more that what I knew from previous
visits to Tirunelveli, Tiruchendur, Tenkasi, etc. What I found
surprisingly missing in the book are descriptions of the scenic
beauty of the place, with rocky mountains, dappled with large, green,
forest patches, running down almost to the seashore. Portions of the
district are now thickly covered with windmills, generating in a good
season, more than half of the total electricity consumed in the
state.
The second
part of the book describes the establishment of Doraipuram, by the
patriarch Dorai's second son, Daniel. Daniel trains as a Siddha
doctor, and, in a passage underlain with comment on present-day
social practices, Davidar describes him inventing a fairness cream
that makes him very rich. His wealth allows him to try and
artificially recreate his father's naturally developed community. He
buys vast acres of land, which he then resells to members of his
greater family, creating a kind of fiefdom with its own set of rules
and traditions. This story plays out in the background of the freedom
struggle, and there are descriptions of protests, assasinations,
prisons, police brutality and so on. Though Daniel is not directly
involved in any of these, his elder brother Aaron is, and the latter
eventually dies in jail. There are a few set pieces here, including a
description of the different types of mangoes found all over India.
There are many descriptions of the interactions of the main
characters with Englishmen, mostly antagonistic. We are also
introduced to Kannan, Daniel's son, who figures largely in the third
part of the story.
Kannan
obtains an undergraduate degree from Madras Christian College, in
surroundings personally familiar to me, though from a time a few
decades earlier than when I was there. Kannan falls in love with an
Anglo-Indian girl from the railway colony, and marries her. He gets a
job as a very junior officer in a tea estate in a place that's
probably Munnar (called Pulimed in the book). Now the story takes of
in a different direction, all about life on the tea estate, with the
English lords – and especially ladies – and masters slowly coming
to terms with having to give up their privileged positions at the top
of the heap, as India moves towards freedom. These tensions are well
described, though only Kannan and his wife represent the Indians in
the interactions. There is also a somewhat boring, but probably
realistic description of the tiger hunt. Eventually the tensions get
too much. Kannan's wife divorces him and gets back to Madras. Kannan
himself sticks around for some more time, before he returns to
Doraipuram to try and revive his father's ambitious project of
establishing the community.
Davidar
writes well, and the book is very readable. It however falls far
short of the breathless hyperbole on the blurb, comparing it with
'Midnight's Children'. It does not even compare well with most of
Amitav Ghosh. I think the reason I am dissatisfied with it is that it
has no real story or message to give. It follows, probably, all the
rules of good writing, as taught in 'creative writing' courses, and
has also obviously involved a great deal of research, if only in
libraries. Futhermore, Davidar apparently knows what he's writing
about from personal experience. But the problem is that there are too
many threads, too many storylines, none of them explored in depth.
None of the characters stand out, and even someone like Helen,
Kannan's Anglo-Indian wife, who should have been an clearly etched
out creation, turns dull and drab after an exciting introduction. Again my expectations of an exploration of the interface between Christians and other communities, or intra-Christian politics are belied. In
a word, the writing is too shallow to be compared favourably with the
best of modern Indian writing which I have read – Vikram Chandra or
Arundathi Roy, for example. Certainly it is nowhere near books with
similar themes such as 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' or even 'The
Galsworthy Saga'. But if we do not make such comparisons, the book is
good, and worth reading once.
