Among contemporary writers, no one quite captures the spirit of Bengal, its history and its women as finely as Aruna Chakravarti, who honed her craft translating Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay, and is well known as the author of historical fiction including the widely acclaimed Jorasanko and The Daughters of Jorasanko.
Suralakshmi Villa, though, is not based on historical characters. Yet, it manages to seamlessly weave many stories that bring to life a cultural history, of 20th century Bengal and Delhi (spanning a period from the 1930s to almost the end of the century), told in her characteristic compelling style that draws the reader inexorably into the lives of the myriad characters and their milieu.
Farewell call
The spirit that infuses life into the eponymous villa is that of Suralakshmi, who is a gynaecologist by profession. The house is left to Suralakshmi by her father, who gives a house each of her four sisters as well. The house nurtures and provides shelter to Suralakshmi’s husband, his family comprising his mother, first wife and their children, as well as Kingshuk and Eidun through the years. The house itself is one of the narrators (even as it is at the verge of demolition), and expresses a soul affinity with the unconventional and altruistic Suralakshmi, who abandons it one day when she walks out of her marriage and decides to leave Delhi to work at a free clinic for women and children in a remote village in Bengal.
Suralakshmi also leaves her five-year old son Kingshuk behind with her husband. All that the other characters know about this mysterious decision is her claim: “I hear the farewell call.” The reasons behind the impulsive move are explained only in the last section of the novel. Meanwhile, the reader is offered myriad perspectives about her personality via other characters’ voices, letters, and dreams, each of which also offers tantalising glimpses of family sagas.
These intersecting trajectories cover shared pasts: of families and their network of connections through many generations. Far from being pedantic, the breathless prose engages the reader till the very end and raises questions about national, communal and gender identities.
Secret sexual assault
Though the narrative touches many life histories, at its centre lies memoirs of two families: one of the upper class kulin Brahmin Hindu clan of Indranath Chaudhary and his five daughters; and the other of the poor Muslim Moin-ud-din the goatherd and his four daughters. It may be more appropriate to see Suralakshmi’s family as matrilineal, for all of Indranath’s daughters derive their names from their mother Lakshmi Debi and owe their high educational status to her resolve to never force them into arranged marriages, and, instead, to let them study and pursue careers of their choice in Delhi: “a thing unheard of in those times”
In contrast, Moin-ud-din and his much exploited and battered wife Ruksana’s daughters, who are ironically named after Mughal princesses, are forced to enter into lives of back-breaking drudgery and penury, both before and after their arranged marriages. And yet, the two chronicles have more in common than meets the eye. The class and religious identities are very different, but the violence experienced by the women and the expectations they negotiate are strikingly similar.
This is true especially of the character Eidun, who is sexually exploited first by her father Moin-ud-din and later by the suave, middle-class Moinak, Suralakshmi’s husband, whom Eidun addresses as Abba (father), because Suralakshmi had adopted her. Eidun is the thread that joins the two families, one from Delhi and the other from Malda in rural Bengal.
The novel oscillates between the past and the present, and between different parts of the country, but is held together almost like a double helix in its twin narratives that spiral around gender concerns. Suralakshmi Villa explores the contours of marital relationships through the motif of the philandering husband(s) and, above all, of the nature of love itself.
Eidun’s grandmother prophesises an extraordinary destiny for her: “You will live with someone kind and beautiful. You will know love such as you’ve never known before.” Her words come true as those of godmothers in fairy tales, and Eidun is forcibly kissed by more than one frog before she meets her soulmate. Truly a contemporary parable in which, under the veneer of tradition, there are surprises galore.
The lives of women
The novel features an array of interesting women characters, each embedded in their historical and cultural contexts. It celebrates female bonding as can be seen in the friendship of Nayantara and Suralakshmi and in the various wedding rituals. Sisterhood is explored as the women characters learn to introspect and discover how cruelty to fellow women stems from internalising of fears reinstated by patriarchal violence, as happens with Arjumand at the end of the novel.
Alternate healing practices by medicine women are also touched upon but not sentimentalised: while Ruksana’s genuine knowledge about herbs leads to her ostracisation as a witch, Eidun’s botched abortion is induced by Kairun Khala’s medicine.
Witch-burning appears not as a tale from the remote past, but is captured vividly in the iconographic scene witnessed by Eidun who gazes horrified at the vision of her Nani in a cloud of smoke next to her favourite tamarind tree: “Woman and tree, two charred old bodies, locked in an embrace.” The fairy godmother-like Zaitoon is hunted down and burnt at the stake. This image haunts the reader long after the book has been put down.
The cruise down the Ganges offers equally fascinating vignettes as Pratul, his wife Nayantara and Suralakshmi sail on a boat appropriately named Bhagirathi, and which enables a journey into Bengal’s rich and syncretic past. Here we meet a woman guide, who tells us of the widow Bibi Begum, the Hindu wife of the Muslim nawab Mir Adil Shah, who did not convert to Islam and had a Shiva temple built in Murshidabad, that lies between tombs in a ruined fort.
Equally fascinating is the story of the mystic Bishu Pagli, who unearthed the tomb of Pir Hafez Al-Salam Waidul and spent her life looking after the shrine. Complex religious identities and women’s histories that interrogate more binary narratives add to this novel’s relevance in contemporary times.
Writerly touches
The author has the delightful ability to sketch and bring alive history through a detailed description of feasts, culinary practices and get-togethers that offer insights into identity formation, as for instance the description of how Nayantara’s father Probhashchandra Ganguly negotiates his pukka saheb professional identity as a judge and his ancestral routine at home and showcases both in the parties he throws for his British and Indian friends in 1940.
The author’s keen sensitivity to flora and fauna is evident throughout this work. Suralakshmi and her father’s penchant for “exotic trees and creepers” seems to be the inspiration for the cover picture of the book, of sorrel flowers in their pink and green glory. She leaves certain Bangla words untranslated, which is the mark of a good post-colonial work that celebrates cultural difference and foregrounds the untranslatability of certain concepts that are culture specific.
On the other hand, she does translate certain things like old Bangla songs (like those of the boatmen) that add to the richness of the book’s texture. We learn, for example, that the bird with emerald wings and a long purple tail, the keenly observed beautiful sunbird, has the musical name moutushi in Bangla.
The germ of the story of Suralakshmi Villa first appeared in a story of the same name that was published in Chakravarti’s anthology Secret Spaces. It was on the advice of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala that the author reconstructed it into a novel pushing the setting back by a further 40 years and adding new characters and shifting time-frames. The result is a complex but arresting work of fiction.
Suralakshmi Villa, Aruna Chakravarti, Picador.