Book Review | The '30s-born Bihari man's best life

Meet Jadunath Kanwar, aka Jadu. Born 1935 to a farmer couple in a small village in Bihar, far from anything modern, he moved to a city to study, married, had a daughter, and grew into a teacher of history. He witnessed all the tumult of the birth of two countries, many wars, and all the ups and downs of the first seven decades of his own country’s life as a republic. He fell victim, among millions of others, to Covid-19 in 2020.

Amitava Kumar has written a history of a historian, a Fulbright scholar who lived through the making of history, and his legacy, in the form of a daughter. The daughter, Jugnu, has her own space in the book: a trained journalist, her history is different because she tells it herself, giving the reader a very sharp picture of the contrast between what Jadu was to himself and to his own daughter.

Jadu seems destined to succeed. His mother, pregnant with him, survives a cobra bite, delivers him, and, in later years, delivers two more children, both girls, one of whom dies after a mysterious encounter with a “fox”.

History appears intertwined with Jadu’s life, sometimes as Jadu’s meetings with the famous: it seems contrived at times. Jadu meets Tenzing Norgay while a student. Jadu meets JP, the activist. Jadu knows Ramdeo Manjhi and Jagannath Mishra.

The war, with China, of 1962, brings the death of his wife Maya’s brother, his burnt body returned in box packed with ice and wrapped in a flag. The declaration of the Emergency coincides with the time Jugnu, as a child, is hospitalised with illness.

Meanwhile, other events tell of the times. Jadu withdraws his life’s savings, to give Jugnu’s prospective father-in-law as dowry. Forced by the arrogant bank clerk to wrap the money in a kerchief and carry it with him on a bus, Jadu finds the money stolen. Jadu has the strength to continue with the arrangement of the marriage, grateful that his wallet remains, so he doesn’t have to borrow the bus fare home.

That Jadu is extraordinary comes through strongly in Jugnu’s story. She has settled in the US after her marriage breaks up. She lets a call from him go to voice mail and goes back to sleep. When she calls a couple of hours later, she finds that he has passed. Not long after, she recalls Jadu’s comment on her mother’s passing a couple of weeks after Jugnu arrived in the US: “She kept herself alive to make sure that you started a new life...”

Kumar writes simply and powerfully, and he is intensely aware of caste formulations underlying life in his native Bihar. The closing is an enigmatic tailpiece, in the voice of one Maati, formally, Karuna. Maati is the result of what ended Jugnu’s marriage, the rape of her maid, a tribal girl, by Jugnu’s husband. Brought up by her mother and an uncle in rooms adjoining a printing press, Maati’s story, too, is poignant and well told, but I was left wondering whether it really belonged.

My Beloved Life

By Amitava Kumar

Aleph

pp. 348; Rs 799