Masculinity, Modernity and Other Miseries: Kiran Nagarkar's Cuckold

I have only one word to describe it.Stunning. I havent read anything like this before. I don't know why I did not read it sooner.Superbly dramatic in treatment, full of wicked twists and turns in its plotting, amazingly passionate, imaginative and heartbreaking, it is one of the best novels written by an Indian novelist. Nagarkar has put in an impressive amount of research into this novel. It is way better than the `NRI  and imported' navel-gazing 'diaspora exile' horseshit fiction euphemistically named as the post-colonial Indian novel. It is far better than pseudo-intellectual  wordplay and phoney `India' of Rushdie and company, which keeps po-co theory happy academicians contented. It bears no signs of what Meenakshi Mukherjee terms as "anxiety of Indianness", or colonial hang up of any sort. It does not deliver what the western readers want: a consumer friendly India which reinforces the existing stereotype image of India.

The story is about a hopeless love triangle, ` the stuff for a bad nautanki'. One angle of the triangle, the woman named Little Saint or Greeneyes ( more widely known as Meerabai)  is of one of the greatest poets on the sub-continent , the third angle of the triangle is none other than the Bhai of the Whole Universe Himself a.k.a Jagadish a.k.a the God with thousand names, and the angle from which the story is told is of an unknown figure in Indian history, the Cuckold, the Prince of Mewar, Maharaj Kumar, the narrator.

Maharaj Kumar is essentially an anachronism: a modern man trapped into a feudal society of 16th or 17th century Rajasthan. The narrator achieves immediacy by his predicament and by his colloquial, and ironic wit. He is living in a society which glorifies manhood, death in battlefield, bravery and machismo to no end. Maharaj Kumar appreciates none of these values. His role model, ironically, is the Bhai who he feels is having a steamy affair with his wife. The Bhai, also known as Ranchod,  we all know did not mind turning his back to  his enemy and running away from the battlefield for strategic advantage. Maharaj Kumar doesnt mind using some of the Bhai's strategies in politics and battlefield. Maharaj Kumar defies all conventions in personal and public life. He is interested in sewage systems of his town and acquiring newer technology in the battlefields, instead of living on jingoism of Rajput bravery. His military strategies are absolutely non-Rajput and ahead of times. Maharaj Kumar's stratagems seem to belong more to Kiran Nagarkar's ancestor - Shivaji- rather than the Rajputs who preferred to take huge armies head on  rather than retorting to guerrilla surprise attack-and escape tactics. Thus he invites sneer, contempt and charges of not being manly enough from his contemporaries.He is stigmatized as a cuckold, a `ball less man' in his personal as well as political life.
He is not a `good' man. He beats Greeneyes, he tries to rape his wife on the very first night and consequently injures his member. Virgins terrify him. He fails to `rise to the occasion' on the first night of his second marriage to another woman, who goes into the arms of his more `manly' brother Vikramaditya, thus getting cuckolded twice. The Prince goes on to dress as Krishna at night to win over Greeneyes, who one day dresses him in woman's clothes and she becomes Krishna herself as part of Bhakti frenzy!  This Maharaj Kumar is a victim of the patriarchal society as he fails to conform to the established norms of masculinity. He is humiliated on all fronts. Interestingly, Maharaj Kumar takes it with calm stoic irony, without self pity or melodrama. Kiran Nagarkar, a film actor himself, manages to enter the role of Maharaj Kumar and speak to us with great intimacy and humour. His story is an heart breaking story of a brilliant man caught in an old world which is to go away and the new world which is yet to be born.

The epic sweep of the novel reveals very vividly delineated cast of unforgettable characters, apart from Maharaj Kumar. His dad Rana Sanga, Kumar's scheming step mother Karmavati, Kumar's two wives, his mistresses,his friend Mangal and the nemesis, Badshah Babur, for whom Kumar feels affinity and who is about to change the history of the subcontinent forever. The plot is full of sinister intrigues, suspense, and very wicked and unexpected turns which keep you glued to the book. The end, of course, is as unexpected as it goes. Nowhere does one get bored by sheer number of pages.

The research is extremely meticulous and thorough. The battle strategies, court intrigues,games, religious and social customs, mores , research into town planning, espionage, cultural mores  are described with all vividness and freshness. It is a model for those who want to write historical fiction. It succeeds as fiction, first and foremost, and the historical research in no place jars or bores the reader. A must read for the readers who don't get carried away marketing hypes or are bored by Booker hyped `canned India' type novels and for those who feel that the great Indian novel in English has not yet arrived.

The novel can be contrasted with Nagarkar's Ravan and Eddie which is bawdy and hilarious celebration of the power of Mumbai over the lives of people.

The novelist who showed great promise as the writer of Saat Sakam Trechalis in Marathi with his intensity, craftsmanship and dramatic story telling skills ,has delivered his very best in English. The novel also is reminiscent of Nagarkar's colleague and friend Arun Kolatkar's treatment of history, myth and legend in his poetry.

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The Art of the Novel and the Novels of Art

I read three novels recently: one translated from French and other two in Marathi. One common thing about the three novels is simply the fact that they should have been read long time back. But then I hardly read to keep up with the jones because jones's tastes and intentions differ from mine. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide, Sat Sakam Trechalis by Kiran Nagarkar and Shyam Manohar's Hey Ishwarrao, Hey Purushottam Rao are three novels which can hardly be placed under a single category, except, of course, that of ` the novel'. This goes to demonstrate that there is no such fixed thing as ` The Novel' . Hence, I feel, the slogan that the Novel is dead is as meaningless as the slogan God is dead. These three novels, greatly different in style, theme e historical contexts , cultures and periods make strange ( should I say `queer'?) bedfellows. However, I discovered that there was a common preoccupation in all the three. Interestingly, while discussing the distinction between genre as category or type and particular texts as token i.e. the distinction between `poetry' and ` poem' or `drama' and ` play' with my students, I notice there there is no such distinction in the case of the novel. Nor can you discuss `fiction' as a category or type of writing and novel as its instance. This means there is no such particular fixed type of writing which can be classified as the novel in the strict sense to which particular novels can thought of as its tokens. This implies that with the novel there is no fixed mode of writing. Three novels which I read recently can be considered as an illustration of this fact.

Gide's famous modernist classic is not just a novel but also a very famous theory of the novel. Sat Sakam Trechalis is one of very important novels in Marathi, notable for its craftsmanship, style and intensity while Shyam Manohar's novel is remarkable because of its material which is actually unremarkability and ordinariness of day to day life. While the first two novels deal with extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, Manohar's novel deals with ordinary people in ordinary circumstances and what's more it suceeds in engaging reader's interest till the end. Written mostly in dialogic form with very little descriptive passages and interior monologues, Manohar's novel is almost a non-novel in which the things like style or technique seem to be conspicous by its proverbial absence.

The Gide's classic is the novelist's novel and the philosopher's novel because the subject matter is a complex philosophical question of the relationship between what is called ` reality' or `nature' and its representation, art or its `counterfiet'. And by implication, relationship between Reality and Art, and even Hetereosexuality (which is considered `real' and `natural') and homosexuality which is typically considered artificial, derivative and counterfiet. Gide turns the relationship on its head in a typically French way and demonstrates how the counterfeit is more real than reality and by implication, art is more real than nature and obviously,how homosexuality is more authentic than heterosexuality. Nagarkar's novel is notable for completely doing away with the traditional norms of fiction like linear plot construction, coherent structure and a fixed point of view and there-by implying that life also has no linearity, coherence and fixity. That life has no fixed formal logic is suggested in the title ` Saat Sakam Trechalis' that is `seven times seven is forty three'. Both Gide and Nagarkar are ` artists' who see their work as `art work' and lay great emphasis on craftsmanship and artifice. Manohar's novel attempts to capture reality without using any technical paraphernelia, including those found in realism. However, the novel does have an allegorical and philosophical dimension cleverly concealed in its apparent artlessness. The novel deals with a quarell between two higher officials of the agricultural department, Purushottamrao and Ishwarrao in a small village. These two officials were great friends once but now they are enemies. Their quarrel divides the office staff by forcing them to take sides. This causes huge amount of stress that affect the staff member's private lives. One of the chief official is fond of `adhyatma' or spirituality while the other one prefers to live practical and mundane life. One suspects whether Shyam Manohar is trying to suggest that the dichotomy between spirituality and the ordinary day to day life is cause of stress and disharmony by the means of covert allegory. The title ` Hey Ishwarrao , Hey Purushottamrao' suggests the split between the God and Man and by implication the spiritual and the mundane. If we read more into the novel, then we can say that it also deals with the split between art and life and Manohar trying to imply that this split is the cause of disharmony in our lives and society.

It seems that these novels seems to be preoccupied with themselves as novels, that is they are `metafictional' -overtly as in the case of Gide's gamey novel and covertly as in the case of Nagarkar and Manohar's novels.

However, I loved them for being so very different from each other and plan to take up Manohar's and Nagarkar's other novels in future.