One of the characters in Alka Saraogi’s Hindi novel Kulbhushan ka Naam Darj Keejiye – translated into English by John Vater as Register Me As Kulbhushan – is Malli. Malli is born to the Hindu Amala, whose affair with her Muslim neighbour Ali ends in tatters, leaving her pregnant. But the washerman Shyama, dark-skinned and pockmarked, marries Amala and dotes on her as well as the baby she bears. Malli – her name a portmanteau of Amala and Ali – is his daughter, even if he did not father her.
It’s an interesting idea to mull over: who are we? Malli may be half-Muslim, half-Hindu by blood, but the man she knows and loves in her early years as her father is Hindu. Or is he? Because Shyama, while brought up by a lower caste dhobi and his wife, was not really their child: he was given to them as a baby (and already circumcised: therefore Muslim?) by a kanfata yogi. And when tragedy strikes, Malli is brought up by a man with an even more complex relationship with names and identities: Kulbhushan. Kulbhushan Jain, aka Gopal Chandra Das.
The double lives
A Marwari, his family originally from Rajasthan but settled in the East Bengal town of Kushtia, Kulbhushan is the youngest of his siblings. When Register Me As Kulbhushan opens, it is in the Kolkata of the relatively recent past, and Kulbhushan, in conversation with a journalist, is looking back at an eventful life. The narrative weaves back and forth: across the decades, across the border with Bangladesh, across two main lives, those of Kulbhushan and of his dearest friend, the dhobi Shyama.
There is Kulbhushan in 1946, accompanying his mother to Kolkata, to which his siblings have already shifted long ago. His father stubbornly refuses to leave Kushtia, and Kulbhushan, arriving in Kolkata, finds himself having to rely upon his siblings and their families to help him make his way through life. But this is no predictable relationship, and Kulbhushan (or Bhushan Chacha, to his nephews and nieces) is the man they turn to when there are chores nobody else is willing to take on. And Bhushan Chacha, too, is the one they turn to – with suspicion – when something goes missing, because he has had a track record of pinching things. What’s more, Kulbhushan leads a double life: he is married to a Bengali woman named Reema, and lives in a Bengali neighbourhood where he calls himself Gopal Chandra Das.
Back in Kushtia, the story is told of Shyama: of his one-sided love for Amala, his marriage to her to “protect her honour” and give her baby a father. Of the rising tension in Kushtia in 1964, when the theft of the prophet’s hair from Kashmir’s Hazratbal caused turmoil as far afield as East Pakistan. The narrative follows the loyal, sensitive Shyama as he turns from dhobi to rickshaw-puller; as he sees his world begin to fragment around him, and decides to do something about it.
Critical political events – the Partition, the bloodshed of 1964, the Bangladesh liberation movement – form a vital part of Saraogi’s novel, but are always seen through the lens of their effect on human lives and human relationships. The trauma as families are torn apart, the grief of seeing a dear one killed in front of one’s eyes. The frantic chasing up-country and down, as Kulbhushan travels all the way to the forests of Dandakaranya in search of a friend who might have been sent there as part of India’s tepid efforts to resettle refugees from East Bengal. The fear, the pain, the anger and sense of betrayal are vividly portrayed through these chapters of upheaval. Portrayed, too, are the moments that speak of humanity: an orphan finding a loving home, an ailing old Hindu man looked after by a Muslim. A kind word, a good deed in the midst of a conflagration.
A metaphor for resilience
Register Me As Kulbhushan, given the traumatic times its characters live through, may well have slipped into melodrama. But Saraogi’s sensitivity and her ability to tread the middle ground between emotions, thoughts, and personalities – her nuanced, balanced narrative – makes this an extraordinary novel.
This balance comes through in many ways. There is, for one, the careful characterisation of the people who inhabit these pages, Kulbhushan himself a case in point. There is a balance between past and present, between anger and forgiveness. Between looking out for oneself and sacrificing oneself for another. Between remembrance and memories on the one hand, the attempt to forget on the other.
Very early on in the book, we are introduced to what helps keep Kulbhushan – and Shyama, who lets him in on the secret – sane: the “button of forgetting”. Shyama tells Kulbhushan: “…The Creator has installed this one special button in our bodies! All you have to do is press it with your thumb, then poof! You will completely forget how other people snub their noses at you!…”
It is this imaginary button, “pressed” at traumatic times, that helps Shyama and Kulbhushan surface. It is a metaphor for the resilience that shines through a lot of this book, a paean to the human ability to adapt and to survive.
Register Me as Kulbhushan is searing, memorable: an important book. In the English language, most novels about Partition tend to focus on the western frontier of India; while there are books about the Partition in Bengal (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence and Bhaswati Ghosh’s Victory Colony 1950 are two of the more recent ones), they are few and far between. John Vater’s translation of Saraogi’s book helps to fill that gap.
If there is a lack in this translation, it is in the shoddy proofreading of the book. Many errors dot the pages of this novel. If the care taken in translating the book had been equalled by the care taken in proofreading, it would have been faultless.
Madhulika Liddle’s latest novel For The Love of Apricots was published in 2025 by Speaking Tiger Books.
Register Me As Kulbhushan, Alka Saraogi, translated from the Hindi by John Vater, Penguin Random House India.
