If there is one literary form that is truly indispensable in a democracy, it is political satire. Sadly, that is also the one form we have far too little of in the annals of contemporary Indian literature – at a time when the events in our country scream out to be satirised.
The rare exceptions are all the more to be welcomed, and it is therefore with delight that I read the first novel of award-winning Malayalam short-story writer Unni R, ably and fluidly translated by J Devika under the arresting title The Cock is the Culprit.
The Cock is the Culprit is a triumph of satire at its most elemental. Unni has taken a seemingly simple story – that of a rooster which crows at inconvenient times and disturbs important events in a Kerala village – and written it brilliantly to work at multiple levels of meaning and resonance that go well beyond the surface details of the story itself.
The village that isn’t India
The tale unfolds with the simplicity of fable. The rooster crows inappropriately at a memorial ceremony for former soldiers, interrupts the singing of the national anthem in the village school, and disturbs the religious ceremonies of all three religions in the village, Hindu, Muslim and Christian. So a campaign to eliminate it is launched. As failures and frustrations mount, the search for someone to blame begins, the cause is taken up unanimously and spreads through the village. Mobs are formed, a culprit is quickly identified and unjustly persecuted, absolutely without evidence. The offending rooster himself remains unscathed.
It’s a story that works brilliantly: Unni’s achievement as a satirist is to raise and tackle key questions about today’s India without actually talking about them at all. The novel tells a story about a village, about the ordinary lives of its loveable, ordinary, understandable inhabitants, and about an irritating rooster. A child could read it with pleasure, but a thinking adult can hardly avoid the satirical import of the incidents described in the story.
The village is populated with interesting and believable characters behaving perfectly naturally and perpetrating a monstrous injustice for a preposterous reason. The Cock is the Culprit questions a number of fundamental aspects of the way in which our society is functioning today. It manages to be about free speech, fake news, the ways in which mobs are formed, the manner in which collective judgments are passed, and the ease with which blame is placed, without mentioning any of these things. As a result, the book is a chilling reminder of the society we live in in today’s India.
Nothing is mentioned, but everything is included
The satire is both in the allegory and in the way it is told. The book doesn’t refer to television, describe screaming anchors or organised trolls in IT cells, but it reduces them all to the space of a village and its humdrum concerns. In Unni’s book, no political party is named, there are no religious clashes and no explicitly political issues are raised or analysed – in short, none of the practical matters that the likes of me have to contend with, whether in my daily work or in my non-fiction. Instead, he has used satirical fiction to make us think about the things he does not talk about on the page.
The Cock is the Culprit is a very accessible story, made all the more so by the limpid clarity of J Devika’s translation. The great problem with many translations from Indian languages has historically been the difficulty in communicating cultural specificities and assumptions without weighing down the prose. Many translators have faltered in the attempt, either providing too many explanations or too many footnotes and glossaries, overloading readers with the burden of expositions and explanations in the narrative. That problem is not present in Devika’s easy-flowing translation of Unni’s new novel, which unfolds the tale smoothly with minimal fuss.
The Cock is the Culprit is also a short book, which in today’s era of minimal (and dwindling) attention spans, should make it easier to ensure that is widely read. Unni is a short story writer, and therefore a master of the very short form: his novel, which in English translation is only just over a hundred pages, is really a novella, but it packs an enormous amount of metaphorical weight.
For such a slender book, I was struck by its depth of detail and narrative construction. For instance, the penultimate chapter has a piece of news happening to two characters in the book whose presence I had not particularly noticed earlier, which prompted me to revisit earlier portions and realise that there were actually subtle indications by the author about what was to come, in a couple of sequences in which these characters made a marginal appearance. I won’t give away any spoilers for the reader, but it confirmed for me that The Cock is the Culprit is a very carefully constructed work of art.
The effectiveness of satire
Unni has himself said that satire is the most effective way to write about people who are intolerant of criticism and to laugh at their irrationalities. The Cock is the Culprit is a timeless story which could be set in any village anywhere in India irrespective of social or geographical differences. (It does not even feature any twenty-first century trappings: there are no mobile phones or internet connections mentioned.)
Like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Unni’s story can be read anywhere, at any time, in any particular geography, but reflects in every line that it was created in a particular political context. Unni’s story can and should be read fifty years from now, but to read it without saying that it was written in twenty-first century India around 2020, under a particular regime, and reflects a particular mentality pervasive at the time and the related pressure to conform, would miss the key point.
The use of the village as a metaphor for the whole Indian nation is an interesting device that reminded me of the debate between Ambdekar and Gandhiji. The Mahatma idealised the village, and argued that the future of India lay in self-sufficient village republics. Ambedkar, on the other hand, saw villages as sinkholes of inequality, casteism, discrimination and oppression. He wanted Indians to be free and empowered individuals who could escape the structures and strictures of village life.
Unni seems closer to the Ambedkar idea than the Gandhian ideal of the timeless verities of village life; he sees that this very ethos implies the continuation of timeless injustices. His uncompromising view of the realities of village life comes through even while he evokes its rural simplicity and charm.
Unni writes in the book: “All human beings have an innate ability to tell a tale. Some write it down and some just tell it. Those who are writing the tale become novelists and short story writers. Those who tell them are counted as liars. Because all tales are lies in the final analysis”. Yet The Cock is the Culprit is a fictional tale that tells very big truths, not lies. That is what makes it so amazingly interesting and relevant.
The Cock is the Culprit is an astonishingly good book. Every thinking Indian should read it.
The Cock is the Culprit, Unni R, translated from the Malayalam by J Devika, Eka/Westland.
