This novel addresses history and segregates personal, lived histories from umbrella narratives available in textbooks or circulated by the state to serve its own ends, writes MEHA PANDE
love and honour, might be dense philosophical or literary categories, however in popular and lay social imagination, the two are hardly separable. love contains within itself a transgressive potential, mostly threatening established codes of honour; conversely various ideas of ‘honour’ have served as controlling mechanisms to check the socio-cultural transgressions of love. As a subtle minister of the status quo, ‘honour’ enables society to deprive the individuals of their freedom to love outside social norms, in the process it perpetuates its own image over ‘individual’ choices, preferences and desires.
Anand Raganathan’s book brings to its readers love in several forms and suggests the various dimensions of honour. The novel opens with an operation being carried out by the Army against the MNF resulting in the death of the insurgents and a stump for Capt. Mehra’s arm. Soon after the operation ends, the narrative splits into two stories — those of Capt. Akhil Mehra, and Maj. Rahul Schimer, as both their lives are altered after the encounter. Capt. Mehra quits the army and walks away into a life of tea estates, plantations and mansions while Maj. Schimer feels compelled to return to the life he had left behind after the death of his parents. Capt. Mehra’s story progresses with a newfound acquaintance with his employer at the tea estate, Rai Bahadur, Indrani and Ipsita — his daughters, and Norden, their caretaker. Maj. Schimer’s life, in contrast, turns inwards, unaffected by the events outside ever since the day of the encounter where he unknowingly shoots his friend from childhood — ‘his brother Daniel’ — to rescue Capt. Mehra. The novel alternates between Maj. Schimer’s life, his memories of childhood, Daniel and Daniel’s mother (to whom he returns) and Capt. Mehra’s encounter with the Sen sisters — Indrani and Ipsita and his sexual and emotional involvement with them. Both these stories are yoked together through a tragic end — with death, hopelessness and gloom taking over the space which once belonged to Rai Bahadur’s ‘chirpy sparrows’.
Apart from being a thread which entangles the lives of its characters, love finds itself numerous passages where the author describes its meaning. The novel serves as the site for convergence of love’s several forms. It opens in Maj. Schimer’s love for Daniel and the pain it generates and goes on to show Rai Bahadur’s love for his daughters; the love of brothers and sisters; romantic love between Capt. Mehra, Ipsita and Indrani; Norden’s love towards the family he served all his life.
Ranganathan opens the idea of love, mostly liberating it of all conventions and/or moral inhibitions perhaps with the intention of presenting his readers an idea of unbridled freedom in love. At a point in the novel he claims, “What grows is a mother’s love for her son, or a son’s love for his father. But for lovers it cannot grow any further than what it was on that first sighting, that first glance, that first touch”. We have come quite a distance from a John Donne, who thought, “love is a growing or a full constant light, and his first minute after noon is night.” Ranganathan attempts to emancipate love of every possible constraint by separating the body from the sentiment. He does the same to the idea of honour, releasing it from the easy binary of right or wrong. Norden must protect Rai Bahadur’s honour and he does so till the end, rejecting the judgement of right and wrong both at legal and personal levels. Ranganathan’s book attempts to destabilise simple categories by projecting instances which are almost always judged by moral or social standards.
However, it seems to fall short of what it sets out for. That the carnal must/can be separate from the sentiment, that all sexual encounters lack an emotional meaning, that reproduction is only a mechanical process, and that love does not grow after the first spark seem to want to create a pretext for a liberated, ‘modern’ conception of love. However, this seems to rely solely on the machinations of corporeal desire (the kind that Wordsworth associates only with the senses, like that of a wild roe), and in fact this naturalism seems paradoxically to render the characters conservative-driven by and limited by, and bound to their physical desires.
What the novel does well though is how it addresses history and segregates personal, lived histories from the umbrella narratives available in textbooks or circulated by the state to serve its own ends. Ranganathan differentiates between the reality of violence for those who suffer it first hand by the army and the simplified, standardised kind of reality propagated throughout ‘history’. Maj. Schimer, his childhood memories of political tension in Aizwal and its neighbouring villages, his association with Daniel all strengthen the divide between the common perception of the insurgent forces and the lived experience of the North-East at that time. Maj. Schimer recognises and establishes this duality in his experience of life. He encounters this divide in Daniel’s death which he being an army man is responsible for. The serene natural spaces constituted of beautiful mansions, decadent architecture of villas, streams, trees and estates is juxtaposed with this harsh reality and the burden of multiple ignored histories of Mizoram: This juxtaposition also intensifies the violence and brutality in a beautiful State.
The novel presents a brave effort in addressing those ideas that continue to be most pertinent to our individual and socio-political existence. Its insistence on questioning and testing conventional ideas through situations which emerge out of historical and personal turbulence is welcome but it is found wanting in nuancing and layering its characters, who engage with these themes only cursorily. The narration is simple, making it a quick read. The plot has the usual turbulence and twists that are characteristic of climaxes but it doesn’t end at the climax. It seems to travel on, remaining open-ended regarding its rather precarious preservation of ‘honour.’