| |
BOOKS
For
God's Sake
Novel's
worst moment: comic-strip nirvana in Hindu India
By
S. Prasannarajan
 |
Shiva
3ooo
By Jan Lars Jensen
Macmillan
Pages: 325
Price: £9.99 |
Before
you enter the cosmos of Jan Lars Jensen, you are requested to suspend
your sensibility. You are entering a system of divine exaggerations, of
oversized gods in apocalyptic splendour and crazy humans in search of
some dharmic El Dorado. You are about to make yourself vulnerable to the
pornography of karma, to the seductions of salvation junkies. You are
entering the high-wattage delirium of a Canadian who has mistaken India
for an endless comic strip of superannuated deities and their demented
devotees.
This is updated
snakecharmer chic, lavishly marinated in mythomania. Isn't India, after
all, familiar with this fascination for the orientally driven? Oh, there
have been so many of them, travellers windowshopping in the nirvana bazaar,
souvenir collectors in the flea market of spirituality, redeemers in search
of wisdom buried in tea leaves and temple walls. They produced kitsch
as well as art. Art as in Herman Hesse, or, even in the recent Roberto
Calasso, whose Ka is a philosophical celebration of the Indian mind. And
kitsch, millennial kitsch, as in Jensen's Shiva.
Take this
from third millennium India, Jensen's godforsaken India. At the centre
of this picaresque fantasy are two uprooted men, united by gods and pushed
along by revenge. Rakesh wants to kill the Baboon Warrior, the hero of
India, who has the form of a man and the head of a monkey, and who is
apparently the physically altered son of the monkey god, Hanuman. He cannot
be killed by gods, so killing him is Rakesh's "dharma", and,
to make the mission human, there is a love factor thrown in. The other
is Vasant, an exiled engineer from the Delhi durbar, also the manufacturer
of a magical airship. He wants to redeem his honour and regain his royal
position.
Along the
way come the citizens of India 3000. The Kama Sutrans of simulated sensuality,
erotic conspirators who store passions in a device called the "capacitor".
The Pragmatics of Ranthambhore, who have "abandoned the idea of worshipping
any deity". Music, bread, wine, archery-they are monks as permanent
rebels. Brahmins and sadhus, rat-eaters and Buddha-baiters. Hindu India,
gods' own republic, is the home for mutant stereotypes. Jensen gives them
the gods they deserve.
And an overwhelming
god called Jagannath happens to be the chosen carrier of the protagonists.
It's a gigantic, carnivorous moving machine with so many interior chambers,
a bulldozer god marching towards Delhi. In the finale in Delhi, a De Mille
spectacle, gods and men join forces to kill the warrior who is neither
man nor god. And Shiva, so long in disguise, makes his appearance, makes
the deed deadly, marking the inglorious end of a boisterous novel, of
which the novelist has only this to say: "The author respects all
religions and does not intend, in his story, to cast any in a negative
light." As if it does matter.
To say that
Jensen's rhythmless tandav is an allegory of religious
India swayed by killing gods is to give some credit to his imagination.
There are fleeting passages of sociology-on caste, conversion and tolerance,
like this conversion bit, for instance, from the Kama Sutrans: "Oh,
we convert people, yes. For their own good and ours... You conservative
Hindus in your rages of chastity would imprison us, execute us, drive
us into the ocean." But as a novel, Jensen's Shiva cannot be accused
of converting the reader. His time travel is a movement in images he cannot
comprehend. Jan Lars Jensen is not Umberto Eco to make a cosmic joke out
of yellowing scriptures in the library.
Maybe Shiva
is kind to bad novelists.
Top |
|
How
can Non-Performing Assets of companies be cleared? By recovering what
you can, writes INDIA TODAY Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in
