Nature, All Too Nature Human, All Too Human
By Shibu Shanmughom
14 April, 2011
Countercurrents.org
A critique Of Manoj Das’s A Tiger At Twilight And Cyclones
Book: A Tiger at Twilight and Cyclones
Author: Manoj Das
Publishers: Penguin Books, India-2010, Pages: 360, Price: 350.
Devdas is often engrossed in a fairy tale, or otherwise he kept close to the window and gaze at the woods lost in himself. As a lover of pastoral slowness he is always comfortable with solitude.
Sandip could merely tide over an hour in trance as a silent spectator to a fluttering butterfly or a frolicsome squirrel. As an eternal nocturnal tripper to the river bank he always ‘felt the need of a mother, to sink into her arms and shut his eyes and ears to everything around’.
They are the omnipotent and privileged protagonists in Manoj Das’s two novellas, ‘A Tiger at Twilight’ and ‘Cyclones. They look different in appearance, but similar in articulation; two sides of the same name that mutually exclusive and reciprocating each other in exchange. Besides that the author himself added a third dimension to the same coin, says in an interview, ‘Nostalgia can cast a spell on you and edit your memory. I voted for my impressions of innocence’. Writing came to him as beholding the splendour of a rainbow or the beauty of a garden. He religiously steers a dominant kind of interpretation that often veered onto the idealistic and metaphysical mire. For him nature is sublime that ‘we could devote hours to gazing at such minuscule marvels’ and people are impure and rude as he phrases them as ‘rapidly degenerating mankind.’
Both the protagonists inherited two massive mansions as the sign of centrifugal force in their respective villages, Nijanpur and Kusumpur. The places are disguised in a hazy mystical mist throughout or at length, submerged in the sticky liquid of dream and fairy tale, seldom come out to show its real face.
One can easily chart out the geo-political milieu of the locale thus: at the centre two imposing mansions and their masters overlooking the valley, then came the exotic flora and fauna, and in between lies a vast expanse of esoteric ethereal plane where spooks, spirits and fairies are real. And at last in the queue stand the mirage-like distant tribal hamlets hiding from each other. Against the rhizomatic texture of reality these four worlds are themselves engaged in shouldering each other for hegemony. Albeit, all of them get defeated one by one finally by an exotic intruder from behind: the arch spiritual sixth world.
In this imaginative landscape, every thing is embedded by its names and places: Kadamba flowers, Krihnachura trees, or even a dove got a princely name as ‘Princess’, and here heartthrob of the forest and the warbling of the sea have its own phonemes. But ‘houses are unknown and faraway’. Here the servant Subbu being scolded as a‘fool’ by his master Dev for his ignorance mistook the sounds of classical Sanskrit as violent stuttering. Thus at the margins of text things and happenings are not holistic and aseptic, but uncertain and subversive transgressing all the comfort zones of the narrative strategy. Here the text becomes the site of discursive ambivalence rupturing the grand narrative into splint groups.
The two novellas, in a sense, are set against the ‘transitional changeover’ of history. ‘Cyclones’, as an outscape, is closely-fitted for the onstage periodic freedom struggle and ‘A Tiger at Twilight’ is an inscape tailor-made for post-independence setting. In the latter one shikar was not yet banned, an erstwhile raja still ruled the heart of tribals and rigging the elections, a resort was set off when tourism was a far-off concept, and a marauding tiger prowling around the village… Then, at the end of a climactic hunting Dev killed the ‘loose’ women Heera and tiger at once in a single shot and steps back to his ‘venerated pure’ women Balika wearing blue sari.
‘Enigmatic’ Heera and ferocious tiger are interchangeable nomenclature in the narrative. And again female is divided in to opposing constructs, docile bodies and hysterical transgressors. In between shuttles an ambiguous type who wore trousers first and then shifting comfortably to sari for the sake of her dominant macho. And everything comes back full circle, cyclic rather spiritual.
In ‘Cyclones’, two cyclones have concurrently swept through the enclosure of text. One is tropical and the other is metaphorical or political one. The former collapsed everything like houses of cards and the latter triggered a seismic change across the political tectonics during India’s freedom struggle. Even so two things remain intact: the zamindari Chowdhury mansion which ‘not built with bricks but with dharma’, and the other is the finality of age old varnasramadharma, that of being sannyasa. To which, eventfully, the disillusioned protagonist apolitically returned after drifted away by the political storm. However, he had a premonition that the ‘tryst with destiny’ was about to be born with infantile disorders. Even though, he sidestepped them to embrace his ‘swadharma- the inner law of his being’. Here also the circle is complete with a sharp U-turn.
The two novellas can be loosely categorized with a ‘mourning after’ genre of nationalist literature that constructs along a subjective black reaction to independence and after. A smell of Victorian kitsch and a latent Orientalism with a tint of European Naturalism lingered on. And it is recycled here in a traditional Indologist package for domestic consumption.
Manoj Das is not a magical realist, as critics claimed, but a romantic insider who loves to be with the glossy essence of nature. After all magical realism, as Jonah Raskin put it, isn't simply a literary school or style, but a whole way of being in the world.
Shibu Shanmughom is a poet and freelance journalist based in Chennai. He is the author of Standing Right Next to You: Lives of HIV Positive People (jointly published by Concern World Wide India and INP+, Chennai-2009).
Email:[email protected].
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