Pulayathara: It’s all about a home …

Normally, it wouldn’t take me more than two days to read a book running into 200 pages. Since I read Pulayathara, I have been thinking why it took me more than a month. The usual suspect, that is, the language, could not have been the offender here. This translation of the Malayalam novel by Paul Chirakkarode is in a simple, unadorned English that reminds you of the sparkling, unhurried streams of Kerala before they merge into a backwater lake. In fact, as I read the book, I was often captivated by the prose, like in the passage I am quoting below:

“Everyone chewed betel, spat the juice, and left. Night had fallen. Thevan spread a woven-leaf mat on the floor and lay down to sleep, but sleep evaded him. An overpowering loneliness filled his heart. That night Thevan longed for a companion in his life. A month later he got married.” (p6)

Rarely do you come across more articulate sentences with so few words. In fact, after I began writing this, I opened the book randomly and I found these lines:

“Thoma drew near. He had changed. He was no longer the handsome young man he used to be. The time when he had thick curly hair and an ink-black body, when he wore a checked mundu that was not smeared with mud, was gone. He looked wild. His hair would no longer lie neatly, even if patted down. Thin and haggard, his bones protruded. Life had appeared before him in its truest colour.” (p171)

It is a simple tale of the Dalit on the one hand and the ruthless hypocrisy of the upper-caste in the Indian society on the other. As you have seen, in this story, the journey between a young man’s longing for a partner and finding her has been told in two adjoining sentences. This simple tale narrates the simple, uncomplicated mind of the Pulayar, a Dalit caste of Kerala. And it had to be told in the simplest language.

A little digression into the caste dynamics in India may not be out of place here. Modern historians say that the Hindu period and Muslim period of our history are figments of the colonial imagination. The so-called Hindu Period was hardly a religious monolith, India was actually fragmented into many kingdoms that quarrelled and cooperated among themselves. If any stratification has been constant in the Indian society, it has been the caste.

The importance of caste is often not recognised, more so, in these desperate times of looking at everything as the Hindu versus the rest. Recently, I read the Bangla autobiography of a political activist, Santosh Rana (রাজনীতির এক জীবন). He says that in rural Bengal, an upper-caste landless labourer is often stronger than a Dalit land-owner. Romila Thapar said in one of her speeches that two Muslim sects respectively from Gujarat and Kerala were originally the same community in Arabia. But thanks to India’s all-embracing caste system, they no longer inter-marry; they now belong to different “castes”. Well-off Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh like to believe they are of Persian descent, and are at a higher plain than the riff-raff Muslims who had converted from the so-called “lower castes”.

It is no wonder then that Christianity too lost its egalitarian values on the tropical plains and low hills of Kerala. The story of two generations of Pulayars, Thevan and Thoma are almost identical stories of being dominated by Hindu and Christian upper castes. Thoma had converted himself to Christianity, and was baptised with a Biblical name, but he didn’t even get the whole of a “Thomas”. Not that it made any difference to him, but the irony of his deprived existence which extended even to the name he got cannot be missed.

The translator, Catherine Thankamma tells us in an insightful introduction that “thara” in Malayalam can mean various things such as home, platform, foundation, and floor. And pulyathara roughly translates into a Dalit home or just a raised platform covered by a rudimentary shanty made of bamboo slats and woven coconut sheaves. And the human being who starts off for a thara, any thara, ends up in a gloomy unending struggle from that basic burrow.

It is struggle almost without any hope. And this book is as fascinating as it is oppressive. If I took time to read it – I believe the reason was personal – it was for the same reason for which I don’t watch TV or read newspapers these days.

Truth can be suffocating at times.

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If I may end on a personal note, this wonderful translation (published by Oxford University Press) has been done by Catherine, a good friend of Arundhati and me. Her husband, Joe, a literature aficionado and brilliant wit, was one of my closest friends who passed away much before it was necessary. I wish Joe was there to read this translation.

But I do hope this translation will win the second Crossword Translation Award for Catherine, and maybe, much more.

Tuesday, 03 September 2019