The House of Blue Mangoes. By David Davidar

The House of Blue Mangoes

David Davidar

Penguin Books. First published 2002.

David Davidar attempts a South Indian epic, narrating the story of the Dorai family over three generations, from the late 19^th century to the the middle of the 20^th. 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 19^th 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.