We just happen by some books, than finding them. There’s a roadside old books stall opposite the famous shanthi theatre in Chennai, it is where I found Damon Galgut, Mohsin Hamid, and Neil Gaiman. Thinking of the list, is it that women are better writers that their books never part from their readers?
Lords of the global village, which I have bought without much expectation for a 50 rupees is not the finest of storytelling, the story struggles to keep pace and might put the reader off initially. Later it was a quick read.
The narrator is an outsider, both as a man and as a caste hindu from another town, in a Adivasi land slowly devoured by the mining mafias. The Mining company powers from faraway, Systematic violence of the state, religious powers, casteists of the villages destroy the lives of an extended family the narrator who is appointed as a teacher in the Girls school for Adivasi children gets acquainted with. As his friendships with the community grow, he struggles with his own place in the hierarchy of powers and privilege. He is accepted by many of the women as a partner in secret or friend declared by rituals. In their everyday life and protests, he plays the role of a witness. He struggles to involve and restrain himself from occupying. This inward struggle though not explicitly talked about is an important factor about the novel. Problems with most mainstream voices that write about ‘other’ lives are they either mythologies and venerate and thus alienate them in the way opposite to the negative stereotypes they think they are breaking.
Ranendra quotes a lot of Native American history and works. I can’t help but think they were part of the author’s research process to understand the Adivasi world of India. Like a conspiracy of the lords dismayed in the title, globalization plays wicked roles. The limitations extend to the understanding of role of Christianity in Indian Tribal communities. The narrator and hence the novel, doesn’t engage with James or any other christian characters. There is also an offhanded remark, when talking of the criminal baba, about how one after another fooled and converted the people. Considering what the criminal baba is and otherwise lack of christian characters in the novel we can make some assumptions on the intentions of the sentence. So are the naxal movement which for the writer remains a myth in the jungle.
Though Lalchan da is a more leading character, the tragedy of Rumjhum’s fall is where probably the novel achieves its best for me. Also it is one thing that the narrator distances himself from from and afraid of, for his own role in it. Being a sanskrit scholar, from his introduction to his very fall, Rumjhum remains a tragic hero. But the Letter he writes to the Prime Minister was a disappointment the author has to be blamed for.
Lalitha, Etwari, Budhani Di deserve more than a mere bundled mention. But the complexities of their lives are lost on the narrator, or he is afraid of it. In the beginning he falls back to the linguistic differences with the world he know to understand the women better. But as time goes on, and his relationships with them grow, the novel fails to engage best with the characters. Still the Presence of Budhani Di is the most magnificient of all in the novel. Her and other women’s everyday optimism doesn’t appeal poetically to the narrator as Ramjhum’s desolation and pessimism, which the narrator finds echoes on Native american literature.
The narrator is mostly confused. He switches between story line and mere information from various sources. He wants to be part of something that he understands only as older than himself and intricately tied to the land he has moved to. But he often forgets his limitations and privileges. He even complains, in what I read as a bitter tone, in not being allowed on the frontline of a Asur protest. The book is an attempt with a clear intention to challenge some negative stereotypes, globalized power structures. But it stays a mere attempt and as a literary work fails to transcend many barriers and invisibility.
The novel as I said is a quick read. The story which is burdened by the privileges and prejudices of the narrator’s voice is still a story of the land, and has its own charms. The translation by Rajesh Kumar was fluent and uses the mixed words of different languages to its advantage.
