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BOOKS
Postcolonial
Prancing
A fable
of loss and relocation in Lutyens' Delhi from a first novelist
By
Geeta Doctor
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The
Gin Drinkers
By Sagarika Ghose
HarperCollins
Rs: 295
Pages: 345
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It's
official. Pseud's Corner lives! The venerable British institution has
relocated itself within the sacred precincts of the India International
Centre, Delhi, and Sagarika Ghose, has staked her claim to be its chronicler.
Ghose's credentials are impeccable. As she shimmers onto centrestage,
a first time novelist about to grab her piece of the intellectual pie,
or should that read, roti, she does it in the sure knowledge that behind
her are a whole line of exquisitely tailored and suited civil servants,
who will greet her with the appropriate salute: "Cheers! Here's to
one more of us."
The gin
drinkers of the yesteryears may have gently trickled away, but they have
mutated very comfortably into the vodka-swigging chicks of today. It's
to this set that Ghose addresses her thinly disguised fable of loss and
relocation within the new Indian realpolitik. Her energy indeed is commendable.
Ghose could easily have played the Jilly Cooper game. Indeed, this is
what she is good at-rounding up the usual suspects as they make their
way up the social ladder. The difference is that whereas Cooper came in
from the outside and used her intelligence and energy to get into the
inside track, Ghose is very much of an insider.
Just as
there are multiple versions of the female energy, or Shakti, that manifest
themselves in times of dire need, Ghose deploys three different sets of
heroines. The youngest, Uma, is just back from Oxford. She's the virginal
one who suffers the most from the miseries of postcolonial angst. Madhavi
Iyer is the second of Ghose's manifestations. Madhavi is female energy
as intellect, a US-returned multiple PhD who is inflight from being a
trophy wife to her husband, Peter. To make her dilemma even more acute,
Ghose encumbers her with a baby, a girl child named Mira.
The baby
is the weak link here. We are not only given little snippets of baby think,
but in a moment of crisis, it's her preternatural bawling that awakens
Madhavi to her true role as Mother India who will go back to her roots.
Ghose's third creation is of Shakti as a hag. Pamela Sen, the much feared
and much loved academic, who has presided over the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation
for the past couple of decades, is in decline. Pamela belongs to the old
guard. She holds the key, or so Ghose suggests, to the existential dilemmas
of both Madhavi and her arch rival, Dhruv, for the post of director.
Dhruv, perhaps
the most cynical of Ghose's caricatures, even has an exquisite Muslim
girlfriend (with wonderful hair) whom he beds with consummate style and
ardour. This is how Hindu-Muslim relations are designed to be-equal passion
between unequal partners. The denouement that Pamela manages to engineer,
almost by default, suggests that in an ancient land, hags still have the
power.
If Ghose
had just stuck to a feminist fable, all might have been well. But she
is not content with just one or two narratives, she wants to tackle the
big picture. What are we going to do with the problem of India's untouchables?
Have we been fair to the dispossessed? What is going on in our rural areas?
How can we solve the problem of literacy? For the last, she has a really
hilarious solution that propels the book on a kind of whodunit track,
as people keep losing their valuable books to a gang of "kitab chors".
Her caricature
of Jai Prakash, from country hick to a Dhruv-wannabe, an academic of the
masses, with a potent folk tale about a goddess in the boondocks, his
particular mantra, is meant to be a classic case of levelling the playing
field. Of noblesse oblige, letting the bastards in, all the more to let
the fittest survive, as they have always done.
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