Human Bonds

Kavery Nambisan’s eighth novel wears its expansiveness, its decades-long arc, and its insistent concern with historical events with a lightness that never verges on levity. Composed in understated, accomplished prose, it is both radically empathetic towards its characters, yet strangely detached from their fates. The setting is rural Karnataka, a hundred years ago, in a fictional village called Kesarugattu, riven by the usual schisms of caste, community, and tribe. As I was drawn into this world by Nambisan’s unself-consciously conversational narratorial voice, my mind searched for parallels to other works that depict similar lives.

It is easy, perhaps facile, to think of RK Narayan’s novels and short stories, for the identical geography and period, but also for their closely observed portrayals of domesticity; or OV Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Itihasam, for its deep immersion in village life, centred around the market teashop; or even UR Ananthamurthy, who painted with pained precision the claustrophobic grip of ritual on residents of a Brahmin agrahara. These comparisons, while helpful at first, soon fall to the wayside, as the singularity of this work, and its own, unique preoccupations come to the fore.

The story revolves around a Brahmin family, led by the tightly wound patriarch Devaraya, who supplements his income as a clerk/ office boy at a Mysore bank, by running a flour mill and a small, but surprisingly efficient money-house in the village. His wife Gowru was brought up in an orphanage for girls, and married to Devaraya before she turned 15. Their two sons Nanju and Annaiah, and ‘half-daughter’ Chinni, form the rest of the household. Chinni’s mother was Gowru’s best friend from the orphanage, and had eloped with a young Malayalee boy from a community of fisherfolk. Marginalised and harassed by the caste-conscious villagers, the couple end up mingling with the Ai tribe.

The narrative is both spacious and malleable enough to allow for multiple protagonists, before congealing around one figure towards the end. We get to hear Gowru’s story, as well as that of the woman who ran the orphanage she grew up in, the elder son Nanju assumes centre-stage for a short period, while Devaraya’s life and worldview are spelled out in great detail. The deep friendship between Anna and Chinni, the ‘half-girl’, remains the affective heart of the story, rising and falling in prominence, but never entirely disappearing; like many friendships themselves.

In the backdrop to these intimate and mundane micro-happenings, is the larger tide of history, moving the country inexorably from colonial subjection to the peculiar post-colonial mingling of tedium and hope. History intervenes in these lives, but in modest ways, allowing the world of at least some of the characters to expand beyond the village, to Mysore, Bombay, Bangalore, and even Delhi. Towards the middle of the story, a revelation from the past appears like a thunderbolt and splits the novel in two. That wound too mends gently, if not entirely, with time, thanks to a remarkable show of tenacity, and the characters’ capacity to carry on with their lives.

We too are carried along the flow of these lives, witnesses to the many disparate occurrences, episodes, and relationships that comprise them. As a novel about status and identity, its loss and pursuit, and how it makes and unmakes the bonds between people, Rising Sons has few parallels in contemporary Indian prose. While a novel of this length and complexity is surely a slog to write, it never once felt like a slog to read. More than anything else, I was carried along and seduced by the language of the text, whose simplicity masks a fierce control and mastery over craft. In this, it mirrors its carefully etched protagonists, whose simple, quotidian lives conceal enormous reserves of resilience and wisdom.

booksIndian societyKarnatakaKavery NambisannovelRising SonsWeb Exclusive