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Wednesday, January 09, 2019

A novel of people

Review of There’s a Carnival Today by Indra Bahadur Rai (Translated from Nepali by Manjushree Thapa), New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2017, Rs 350/


When I first picked up the Manjushree Thapa’s translation of celebrated Nepali author Indra Bahadur Rai’s There’s a Carnival Today, the first thing I remembered was reading Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin all those years ago, especially his concept of carnival as a social institution and his idea of novel as polyphony.

Perhaps the English title of the novel and the bright white, indigo and red cover, featuring a protesting mob, among others, were the triggers. As I read on, my hunch proved to be not altogether wrong, but not entirely correct either.

On the surface, the novel tells the story of Janak, a garment trader, and his family, his wife from across the border in Nepal, Sita, and their two children, Ravi and Divya making a living in Derjeeling, a decided British town, now a part of West Bengal, hosting diverse communities such as Bengali, Nepali, Lepcha, Bhutia, Tibetan, among others.

Dig deeper and several stories emerge. It is a story of a country in transition from independence to self-rule to development (The novel begins at the dawn of Independence when Janak returns home after completing his studies in Kolkata and ends during workers agitation in 1950s.).

It is the story of the struggle of the Tea Garden Workers’ rights that led to a full blown protest in Derjeeling in the 1950s. In one sense, it is a story of the communist labour union movement in the tea plantations.

It is also the story of building a cultural identity, the ‘Gorkha’ identity and the rise of the demand for a Gorkhaland state. At the same time, it is the story of cultural diversity, the comingling of different peoples — settlers from Nepal, who while using the language, formed a separate identity as Gorkha (which the novel highlights in the confrontations between Janak and his father-in-law, who is from mainland Nepal); Lepchas; Limbus; Bhotias; Bengali administrators and tea plantation owners (exemplified by Janak’s neighbours MK and Ajoy Dasgupta); and the Bihari and Marwari traders (as represented by Jayabilas, once Janak’s business partner, now his bitter enemy). There are also vestiges of the colonial past (the movie theatre in the market and even Goan Jazz).

This inevitably leads to another story, a story of clash of cultures, between the Gorkhas and their Bengali leaders ruling from Kolkata, between the indigenous population and the migrants, between the tea garden owners and the workers (This clash between capitalism and communism comes to a full circle in the clash between Janak and Ravi, a businessman and a teacher fighting for workers’ rights. The first half of the novel concerns Janak as struggles to build a perfect family while the second half shift towards Ravi, who against his father’s wishes, becomes a teacher and gets involved in the politics of the tea gardens.). At one point, Janak says, “Good habits are as useful as Bihari servants; bad habits are as evil as Bengali masters.”

Above all, There’s a Carnival Today is a novel about a city, known the world over for its tea and for the Kanchenjunga peak — a novel about Derjeeling, her people and their political aspirations. The story isn’t over yet, and Rai knew, as he ends the novel with Janak’s transition as a man without courage to a man acting as though he has courage.

So, we could perhaps read the novel using Bakhtin’s philosophy after all. For one thing, Rai’s narrative is classic polyphony. Unlike a classic western novel, which follows the protagonist’s journey, seeing the world from his point-of-view, Rai shows an unfailing curiosity towards all his characters, and their unique situations. The novel is purportedly centred on Janak and his travails, but Rai is in no hurry to narrate the story of his struggles — his identity crisis, his struggle to succeed in business, his conflict with his children and his doomed extramarital affair.

Instead, Rai’s narrative digresses at every possible opportunity to tell us more about the people in Janak’s life, his neighbour MK and his long-suffering wife Babuni; Ravi and his love for an anglo-Indian girl; Bhudev, Janak’s partner at the party and soon his bitter rival; Jayabilas, Janak’s business partner; Namgyal and his wife Yamuna, and even occasional Madhesi servants.

This apart from Rai’s interest in describing mundane activities in illuminating details, like shopping, food habits, drinking habits, customs and clothing, which he does in such a way that they take a life of their own.

In the introduction to the book in 1958, Rai wrote, “I saw that life was moving forward, but not in an organised manner, with everything falling into place. I have disarranged this novel in a similar way. I didn’t see life as a singularity, or as the chemical purity and unhindered progress of a single subjectivity. Love is the mother of all emotions: Touch it, and all of our other emotions awaken and writhe.”

Love, then, is the key to understand There’s a Carnival Today — the love that Rai’s characters display, and love that Rai feels for his characters, and their causes.

At this juncture, Bakhtin’s philosophy doesn’t help us much, for There’s a Carnival Today defies comparison to the western novel tradition, and we must read the book in its own term, in the context of its own creation.

Indra Bahadur Rai (who passed away this year) was the first Nepali-language writer to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for a book of literary criticism on Nepali literature, Nepali Sahityaka Adhaarharu, in 1976. Together with two prominent modern poets from Nepal, Bairagi Kainla and Ishwor Ballav, Rai founded the abstract ‘Tesro Aayam’ (Third Dimension) school of writing, introducing an abstract, modernist aesthetics to Nepali-language literature. Later, Rai invented the exuberant and lyrical deconstructionist aesthetics that he called ‘Leela-Lekhan’ (play-writing).

There’s a Carnival Today (the only novel by the author of thirteen other books), originally published in 1958, is Rai’s early work, and as such, instead of literally experimentation, we notice a rather plain narrative highlighted by his desire to do right by his people and his land. Here lies the pleasure of reading the novel, like a grandfather’s tale, without discernable beginning and end, yet each moment illuminated by lived experiences.

In this sense perhaps, Rai’s Derjeeling is like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the political struggles are like the numerous wars Colonel Aureliano Buendia fought. Yet’s unlike Marquez’s long passages, Rai’s narrative is filled with conversations, both as communication and as a code to understand character motivations. And Rai’s approach is joie de vivre. He approaches everything with a lightness of touch, never allowing the readers to get bogged down by the complexities of it, never allowing the proceeding either to turn maudlin or tragic. This masterwork of fine balance is one of the joys of reading There’s a Carnival Today.

In her note, the translator, Manjushree Thapa, writes, “There’s a Carnival Today doesn’t capture the wry tone of Aaja Ramita Chha, which deploys the word ‘ramita’— a combination of fair, a show, a spectacle or some fun— ironically.”

Yet, Thapa’s translation is on point. At no point in the novel you feel that you are reading a translated work — it flows perfectly.

{First published in Indian Literature, the bi-monthly magazine of the Sahitya Akademi, November-December 2018}

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