The Pilgrim’s Path
We have left that era behind us, and have now begun to judge people by qualities more substantial than their ability to speak English with the right accent, writes author
We study history not so much to acquaint ourselves with chronologies of events that took place a long time ago; but much more so, to gain an understanding of the forces that shaped our past and may also be shaping our present and future. What better way to do this than through a deftly written, entertaining novel - Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri’s Swallowing the Sun (Aleph Book Company, 2024). This moves seamlessly back and forth from princely to British India and has it all: a village Dangal, romance, love, problems of adolescence, successful marriages, failed marriages, intrigue, agitations and protests. The main protagonist is Malati Desai, a feisty young Maratha girl who struggles to find her feet in the traditional patriarchal society that characterised pre- independent India.
Puri, the author, has had a distinguished career in the Indian Foreign Service. Although just a few months old, her book is currently quite a bestseller. Her readers would hope that she continues to write and make full use of her abundant talent.
The story starts with a small village fight in Ratnagiri. Malati and her elder sister, Kamala, refuse to be cowed down by a group of bullies and show that they can fight for their rights. Their father, an ardent believer in the education of the girl child, appreciates their courage. Soon after he gets his eldest daughter married to the finance minister of Vaishali, a princely state to the north of Ratnagiri, the girls lose their beloved mother in childbirth but gain a baby brother. Their father a progressive farmer then moves to Vaishali to practice modern farming and horticulture, but decides to send Malati and Kamala to a boarding school cum orphanage near Indore, run by Rani Ahilyabai Holkar. He reminds them of what Sant Tukaram once said: the best way is often the hardest. Theirs is the pilgrim’s path, he explains.
The girls excel at school and later, at Elphinstone College, Bombay. There Malati also distinguishes herself in dramatics, tennis and badminton. She ends up as an outstanding lawyer; Kamala, on the other hand, takes a master’s degree in philosophy and begins to teach. Both of them marry their college sweethearts. And so the family saga goes on, embracing the joys and sorrows of life- all this in the backdrop of the British Raj and the country’s freedom struggle.
This book will be remembered for the fine insights that it offers on so many different aspects of modern Indian society. While reading it, I recalled a conversation my mother once had with an elderly American woman in the 1950s. In my country, the American said, a woman has only three choices: she can become a secretary, school teacher or a nurse.
It is heartening that in India even in those times and perhaps even earlier, there were enlightened families who believed that women could achieve much, much more, if they were not discriminated against. The discrimination against them starts before they are born, continues throughout their lives and survives even after they die. Malati Desai’s father fought against this. He ardently believed that these attitudes were preventing the nation from realising its full economic potential. Though to a lesser extent, his analysis is valid even today.
Malati and her friends happily imbibed the best that western education had to offer; simultaneously they were patriotic and rooted in their own culture. Somewhere in the mid 1940s she detected an attitudinal change that was occurring in this class of western educated Indians . Why she asks her professor, do we judge our own culture by British standards?
She could hardly have predicted that the newly acquired power after Independence would corrupt some of these people to such an extent that they would became even more insufferable than the gora sahibs they replaced. They looked at every issue through western lens and formed a closed club that included journalists, civil servants, lawyers, army officers, managers in MNCs and others of their ilk. Their sense of superiority in some cases depended almost entirely on their ability to speak correct English. Hopefully, we have left that era behind us, and have now begun to judge people by qualities more substantial than their ability to speak English with the right accent.
