The Communist Cookbook fails to cook up a good story, says Sudhir Kumar
Publisher: Penguin, Rs 399
Sharmishtha Roy Chaudhury — a teacher of History at Emerson College, Boston whose debut novel The Communist Cookbook has been published recently — along with the members of the fast-growing tribe of Indian English writers would do well if they listen to how Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, the first Indian English novelist, addressed them in 1884, telling them “what to write and what not to write”. He said: “Do not write for fame. If you do so, it will not bring you fame and whatever is written will be of inferior quality. If the written work has proven qualities, it will inevitably lead to fame. Do not write for money, many in Europe now-a-days write for money... You must write if your writings contribute to collective well-being and the sense of the beautiful of the nation as well as humanity as a whole.”
So, literature occupies an important niche in society so long as it contributes to our efforts to attain swaraj (freedom in its widest sense) and sarvodaya (universal wellbeing) through its multi-faceted representations of satyam (truth), shivam (good) and sundaram (the beautiful). It is in this sense that The Communist Cookbook disappoints a reader.
The book offers us a classic model of self-imposed mimicry (similar to what Rabindranath Tagore designated as “bandarapan” in Gora, the fait accompli of most of the diasporic Indian writers itching to be acclaimed as new Naipauls or Rushdies), often camouflaged and sold as the postcolonial diasporic narrative. Going by the title, one looks in vain for a lively story of either a communist or a cook or even a cookbook! One wonders as to why the back-cover of the novel hails it as an “enthralling story of espionage and divided loyalties”.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of India’s freedom struggle in the 1940s, the rumblings of World War II, and the US-sponsored-anti-communist witch-hunts (McCarthyism), the narrative should have foregrounded the impact of these complex and multi-layered historical events on people’s lives and their relationships in the Indian/British/ American contexts. The apparently attractive title, no doubt, promises much and the reader expects to taste a platter full of aesthetic emotions, but the narrative delivers little on these counts. The stale and trite storyline — stuffed with a horde of stereotyped, cardboard caricatures. As for the title of the book, it derives from a mysterious cookbook, owned by one of the characters, which is considered as a secret code by the colonial intelligence agencies.
Its dull and dreary narrative, without even one “lively” character, hardly engages a reader. An assemblage of taffeta phrases and silken verbs and mere catalogue of historical names of people and events does not make for a good readable novel. Surprisingly the most stringent criticism of the British colonial rule/empire comes from an American woman, Anna Benson, who holds: “I hate the British in India, all of them. They represent the ugliest face of Britain. I can’t stand the calculated deception that’s built into the whole system here, it is unbelievable. Can a system be any good , which is based on deviousness and hypocrisy, all directed at maintaining a hierarchical society and a total servility among the ruledIJ”
The problem with this otherwise powerful anti-imperialist rhetoric is that it has not been integrated into the narrative as was done so effortlessly by Raja Rao (Kanthapura) and RK Narayan (Waiting for the Mahatma), to name just a few. The names of Gandhi and Nehru occur as mere entries as late as on page 162 and 270, the massive participation of the Indian people in the freedom struggle in the 1940s and its equally brutal repression by the British, the questionable role of the Indian communists during this period, and the role of the INA and the Muslim league — all appear as mere pieces of information, without being interwoven as causative factors or determinants in the novel and have little to do with the actions of the characters. All in all, The Communist Cookbook fails to cook up a good story.
The reviewer is professor of English, Panjab University