Book review: Rediscovering a master storyteller

The Indian English novel may have a vibrant presence in the international literary scene today, yet it’s worthwhile remembering that it had a late start; it developed to become a major literary form only by the 1930s. So Sudhin N. Ghose’s tetralogy of novels published within a six-year span commencing from 1949 places him among the earliest Indian writers of the genre — and one of the few writing in English.

However, while he was hailed as one of the greatest Indian English writers of his time, his fame has diminished over the decades, and his celebrated tetralogy is often dismissed as a set of “autobiographical sketches” rather a contribution to Indian fiction. Editors of collections of early Indian English writing, and literary essayists on the era, have overlooked him routinely. So, the reissue of Ghose’s classic tetralogy, after over half a century, is an attempt to reverse the neglect of an early pioneer of the Indian English novel.

Sharing a historical era with the freedom struggle and subsequent Independence of the country means that the inception of the novel has been tied to a brand of social realism that somehow adds up to nation-building. In these concerns, Ghose is similar to contemporary writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Anand, Raja Rao, Attia Hosain and Kamala Markanday. Despite spending most of his adult life in Europe, Ghose’s fictional world remained the India of his childhood. It was the villages and small towns and cities in Bengal that he brought to life, weaving in mythologies, folk tales, and legends into his sprawling epics.

What becomes apparent, on reading And Gazelles Leaping (1949) and Cradle of the Clouds (1951) — the first two novels in the quartet — is that Ghose isn’t constrained by the structure of the novel as it generally exists. His chapters are somehow akin to a traditional stage performance where several, if not all, characters overwhelm the protagonist. Nor are things strictly linear, by book two. His work is full of picaresque adventures that evolve, each flowing into the next with such fluidity that it is hard to be hung up on plot progression or even tell when the narrator has changed.

Scenes are not held up to the usual standards of novel writing — where everything must push the protagonist forward into action. Rather, they exist for and by virtue of themselves, and are a celebration of a multiple viewpoints, including those of women, minorities and tribals. Ghose pours in what seems to be an easily recognised mix of autobiography along with the wink-and-nudge of a comic puppet show, or the expected exaggerations of a street play.

The first book, And Gazelles Leaping is more straightforward, and more content with juvenile themes. It achieves some striking contrasts in its build-up of conflict between innocence and worldly desires. It follows the life of a young orphan child growing up in a kindergarten run by foreign nuns. Almost anything seems possible and in that special gloss of childhood magic — saveable. Land grabbers with an eye on the reservation come head-on in a battle against the wisdom of the Rani’s endowment, and the quick-wittedness of an illiterate woman in Penhari Parganas, a district in pre-Independence Bengal. The orphan child, awash as he is in nature, loves a stunted elephant named Mohan. He tries to keep him from a bunch of itinerant delinquents, who wish not only to capture the elephant but to castrate the young hero and add him to their vicious menagerie. Peacocks and monkeys, bulls and birds all play their role in his adventures.

Very much a part of his society, the child is prone to the vagaries of adults — and sadly to the abusively puritan notions on child rearing as well, giving the book a heart-breaking tone at times.

The second book, Cradle of the Clouds extends a feature seen in book one, and perhaps takes it too far. For the young child’s forays into the adult world of politics and mores and philosophy has him on the receiving end of many meanderings, digressions and conversations that take place with a variety of local characters. So visits to book binders, potters, carpenters, school masters, and of course the local chai shop result in a flood of advice and sermonising, or a full-scale war of words as two different members of society represent a clash of civilisations. Foreign padres, local pundits, the atheist communists, and others enter the melee, from which women seem somehow largely exempt.

Women serve important roles, however, as masters of some ceremonies and guides to the young. Less obsessed with Cromwell, and communism, and the major political occurrences of the land, Ghose shows them as having an intrinsically subversive and more sensible aspect. At the denouement of the Ploughing Ceremony, the young man relates:

Probably no one had warned the Second Master about the overpowering potency of soma-rasa. This was not surprising. The Santal matrons were in charge of his anointing ceremony, and they were immune to all drinks. They would be the last people to dissuade anyone from quaffing a heady potion.” This leads to a memory of a grandmother who handed him a small glass of siddhi when he was a mere toddler stating. “I want to see how you behave when you are drunk… if you cease to behave as the person you are, I shall give you a thrashing. Drunk or sober, you must know how to behave.

Refreshing in small bouts and often thought-provoking the stories are cluttered together in a way that makes it difficult to grasp a larger thematic picture. Ghose is undoubtedly a master at celebrating a milieu but it is a confusedly ordered one and so much richness of meaning remains out of reach. To read one of these novels is to breathe in a whiff of chaos and contradictions and a kind of colourfulness that amounts to more than high adventure. It is tempting to imagine what careful editing might have done for this collection of a fast disappearing place and time.

The writer is a Mumbai-based book reviewer and author of I See You and Don’t Look Down