Book Review | Portrait of an open wound

In many ways, Sharankumar Limbale’s novel Sanatan is a history of the present, examining as it does the fate of several generations of a family belonging to the Mahar caste across parts of the 19th and 20th century — equal parts reclamative Dalit history and an account of the deep, enduring evil of caste violence in India. The novel appeared on the shortlist of this year’s JCB Prize for Literature, though that is a meagre honorific against Limbale’s singular gravitational presence within the universe of anti-caste literature. Here, in his own words, he attempts to write into existence “a new, progressive social order; written with the idea of a new human formation”.

Translated from the Marathi into English by Paromita Sengupta, it is clear Limbale anticipated this novel reaching a very different demographic — upper-caste, English-speaking — to the one he writes of. It has often been iterated that it isn’t the novelist’s remit to educate the reader — not least one whose work has in so many significant ways already paved the way for greater understanding of a Dalit literary consciousness. Yet educate it often does.

To borrow, again, from Limbale’s own formulation, the emphasis here is on experience over consciousness — anubhava over chetana. The story churns around a community of Mahars in a village called Sonai, located in present-day Maharashtra: their relentless persecution at the hands of upper-caste villagers and rulers, as well as the numerous resistances they mount across the span of three generations in colonial India. The depiction of the brutality of caste, its multifarious deprivations, is rendered in stark, unflinching historical detail in a style that is at once spare yet suffused with the music of folklore. Characters often break into reverie, returning to folktales relayed across generations. Occasionally, the writing rises to a percussive symphony:

“He struck the wood with his axe. The strike ignited a spark. The wood was hard. He kept hitting it. The sun shone hard. The wood was hard. Bhootnak kept hitting the hard wood with his axe in the hard sunlight.”

Along the way, in brief snapshots across history, Limbale pauses across significant events almost as a larger corrective to the historical narratives that overwhelmingly sidelined Dalit figures. There are sections moulded around the 1818 battle of Bhima Koregaon, the sepoy mutiny, and Rani Laxmibai, carrying into fiction ideas that have otherwise remained the preserve of subaltern academic histories. But the narrative struggles to reconcile the expository burden of these events with the free-flowing folklore of its early sections. One wishes the dots wouldn’t connect quite as cleanly as they often do.

We understand the contemporary novel to be a product of modernity. The author’s ideas for “a new human formation” directed towards the “creation of a great country” echo Benedict Anderson’s dictum that the novel represented “an imaginative technology for the form of the nation”. In the delicious interplay on offer here – between modernising missionaries and armies, incipient technologies of caste resistance, and twinned colonial and Dalit modernities, each moving at different speeds and within their own temporalities, is situated a compelling articulation of politics and polemics.

Sanatan

By Sharankumar Limbale

Penguin

pp. 248; Rs 599