Reviews, Vol. I, Issue III
Winner ~ DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (2014)
The Sixties. The colorful and uncannily dangerous Sixties.
Nothing can describe the character of the age so aptly (of course, when
decontextualized from its immediate referent) than the famous lines from A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best
of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age
of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it
was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of
hope, it was the winter of despair…”. The countercultural and revolutionary
forces effecting, both ways, fundamental changes in life across the globe also
swept over India, especially Calcutta (now Kolkata, generally acknowledged as
its cultural capital) in that murky Sixties. Here it came in the form of the
Naxalite Movement. In 1967, the insurgent Naxalbari, a remote village in the
Darjeeling District, tucked into the foothills of Himalayas, set ablaze the
dissent’s voice throughout West Bengal, particularly Calcutta. Its lanes bore
witness to those ‘bloody’ days of revolution, to how the city’s intellectual
hubs- its universities, colleges – fell under its great sway under the leadership
of Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, and how the revolutionaries attempted a mass
mobilization against the local authorities in the hope of a better world and
what price ultimately they had to pay in the hands of the repressive state
forces for such a dream.
Many literary exponents have turned, from different
subject positions, to this potent revolutionary field to capture its various
shades. While works like Samaresh Majumdar’s Kaalbela and Neel Mukherjee’s The
Lives of Others give an almost full length detail of the Naxalite Movement,
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland does not
only project snippets of the fatalistic movement but also telescopes the
repercussions the movement had in personal life, highlighting the political
imbricating the personal. Of course, Lahiri, here, continues with her favorite
themes of diasporic displacement and alienation in lesser degree, but this extra dimension of the effect of
political in the personal sphere is something both new and radical, setting her
work apart not only from the works by the two mentioned but also from her
previous ones. It is a saga of love, endured and survived even after the
physical bond is severed.
The novel begins with an objective but precise
detailing of a lowland, spanning a few acres in Tollygunge (a place in south
Calcutta), of Tolly Club so as to initiate the reader into the very much
personal lives of two Mitra Brothers – Subhash and Udayan – in a small enclave
by this lowland. The narrative, sometimes elliptical, complicated, with shifts
more than often from present to past and vice versa, introduces the reader with
the childhood days of these two brothers, so much different in their
susceptibilities but again complimenting each other as if they are ‘mirror
images’: “Sitting over the chessboard they were mirror images: one leg
bent, the other splayed out, chins propped on their knees”, the narratorial
voice comments. While Subhash is more restraint and cautious; Udayan is a
daredevil and adventurous. But one is incomplete without the other. We come to
know both the brothers move to different colleges, befriending different pupils
there (Subhash to Jadavpur University and Udayan to Calcutta University): Udayan
gradually drifts towards leftist ideology and is finally hooked to the roaring
tide of the Naxalites, Subhas leaves for America to study marine chemistry.
This branching out at different directions shows their inherent differences,
but, as mentioned already, their mutual understanding and complementing each
other dismantle any reading along the line of archetypal sibling rivalry.
However, the narrative occasionally offers glimpses of the partition days,
crisscrossing the narratives of their growing up in those after partition days.
Again, there is reportage of events from both national and international
history, leaving the reader be deluded or read it like more of chronicle
initially than anything else.
But that it is not meant to be a chronicle
of political facts or a political uprising becomes clear as the story takes a
sudden twist, much before the book reaches its middle, in Udayan’s death
following this boisterous Mitra lad’s involvement in that Leninist-Marxist Naxalite
Movement. From now on, it focuses more on the psychological ebb and flow of its
character, of showing how this single event is to affect other characters and
events henceforth. Shocked at the news of his brother’s death, Subhash returns
home to sooth his parents’ heart but only to find himself unwelcomed, and moved
by the fear that widowed Gauri, whom his brother married much against the
displeasure of his parents, would face a life of hardship, he marries her again
to his parents’ objections. The narrative, henceforth, concentrates more
austerely on the repercussions of personal choices on the agents themselves and
on their near and dear ones too. Udayan’s political choice has cost him his
life, left his parents in irretrievable loss and shock they can never overcome,
left Gauri alone, bearing their child in her womb. Now this choice of Subhash
bears its own kind of fruits. It alienates him further from his parents. And so
far his newly-wedded relationship with Gauri is concerned; it ultimately turns
out to be the case of a disjointed couple, ever in search of love to dawn upon.
Though Gauri agrees to marry him and moves to Rhode Island, she is a girl more
at ease with philosophy, finds liberation under the alien sky, stats pursuing
higher studies, ultimately moves to California to lead a pure sequestered life
in the academia on her own liking.
The second half of the novel – after Gauri
gives birth to Bela– becomes more psychologically incisive and poignant. Here Lahiri’s
prose is so controlled, brilliantly precise and at the same time emotionally so
exhilarating. The issue of parenthood, her relationship with Bela, with her
past, with ghostly presence of Udayan’s memory and more importantly, with
Subhash, now her lawful husband – all these are explored compellingly enough to
provide us with contours of experiences the characters sometimes hold back
verbally. The dark secrets in their hearts, though closed to the other
characters, are unspooled before the readers through plain, suggestive,
easy-to-understand language. The narrative beautifully captures the trajectory
where Subhash, not the biological father of Bela, almost occupies the ‘fatherly
space’, executing all those duties a father should do, Gauri, the biological
mother seems to be detached, gradually drifting away from Bela, from all
parental concerns and rather erecting an insulated home in her academic
research. Towards the end where Gauri stands isolated from all, her portrayal
not only attracts readers’ pity for what she has done, for her and only her
choices, Lahiri, through an astute exteriorization of her thoughts, makes sure
she has a ground for her actions/decisions. Though sometimes a reader may feel the
portrayal of her character is failing, sometimes inadequate, Lahiri, apart from
this objection, cuts a fine figure in matters of characterization: the
portrayal of Subhash is dealt with sensibly and deftly.
The lowland with the description of which
the novel begins remains a constant recurring motif throughout the story. It
works as marker of change in a rapidly changing scenario of a city. But not
only has that, it, cutting across the barriers of time and space, become a
potent symbol, a haunting presence to the characters. Moreover, on stylistic
aspect of the novel, it can be said that the beauty of the text lies in its
taut structure, restraint but easy-to-follow language, self-assured prose
studded with bridled eloquence, and its suspenseful narratival pattern. The
psychological aspect adds a special charm to it. The impersonal style of its
narrative may sometimes read like a journalistic view but this detached,
matter-of-fact nature brings its own kind of elegance, providing an impartial
take on and description of the characters and events. Though sometimes
narrative may appear a bit stretched, it is absorbing otherwise. Covering
almost four generations of a family, Lahiri’s The Lowland, which has won recently the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (2014), is, as the back cover of the book says, “a tale of
two brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past,
a country torn by revolution, and a love that lasts long past death”. And its
finely-pitched absorbing narrative showcases one of the best story-tellers with
Midas touch.
Reviewed by Soumen Jana, Assistant Professor
of English, Subarnarekha Mahavidyalaya, Gopiballavpur and Research Scholar,
Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Paschim Medinipur, West Bengal,
India
