Saturday 15 January 2022

                                                         

And Gazelles Leaping – Sudhin N. Ghose 

2017, Speaking Tiger 


This is probably not a singular event – but, Sudhin N. Ghose is an Indian writer (contemporary of Raja Rao, R K Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand) who has been completely forgotten in the annals of literary history.

I came across this book, And Gazelles Leaping because of the initiative by Speaking Tiger publications (https://speakingtigerbooks.com/) - having admirably taken the initiative to publish his tetralogy of coming of age novels for the first time in “more than half a century” (from the back cover).

 Sudhin Ghose hailed from Bengal and moved to Europe in the early 1920s as a student. Despite his lack of proximity with his homeland, he dived into his memories of the place of his growing up as the source material for his tetralogy of novels. This being the first one is from a fictionalized child’s point of view as he grows up amidst an idyllic rural life away from the city.

Immediately the readers are introduced to Sister Svenska’s kindergarten and its vividly colourful learners, the narrator included. The kindergarten is situated on an empty estate of the late Rani Nilmani who in her will had asserted to leave her vast property to the government except this one land. The condition being:

“One of her Estates should never be built over nor fenced off. It should remain the same for 150 years, open to all who wanted to cross it, and all the domestic animals would be allowed to graze in its fields and to drink from its ponds and waterways, and none of the tenants of that Estate should be turned out unless they behaved cruelly towards animals or children or their neighbours.” (45)

And so that is why Rani Nilmani’s Estate is an old sprawling village in the midst of an ever burgeoning modern suburb of Calcutta. In the current increasing climate of insularity reading about this idea of leaving behind your legacy for the good of a community who you never knew is indeed a ray of light spreading a kind of warmth to thaw the frozen sea of humaneness in every one of us. The descriptions, though not many, reminded me of a time we may have forever lost, because the kindergarten is run by a Swedish nun and has orphans, rich kids, Hindu Kids, Muslim kids, Buddhist kids, a Chinese kid a Manipuri elephant, a pet duck, a white donkey, a thorn-chewing billy goat, and so on. Being a secular land India did once boast of a conglomeration of all things coming together under the flag of peace & tolerance. It may have fast faded, since even in the book the forces of the modern world threaten to upset this delicate balance.

A word next on the children, their pets and the adults who people this narrator’s idyllic world. The narrator describes a few of the children, his classmates and friends at Svenska Bibi’s (as she is called respectfully) school and these include – Heera and her nanny goat, Mazdoor and his donkey (White Beauty), Tu Fan, a Chinese Boy, Soetomo from Java and his “tiger” (which is actually a bike, but him calling it his pet tiger is approved and imaginatively carried forward by everyone around).

The adults provide these myriad group of children a sheltered life, so much so that the narrator once remarks he has never ever handled money and didn’t know what they looked like. Karin , the sister’s helper, Moti-Didi the washerwoman and Peon-Dada the postmaster are the ones who the narrator keeps going back to whenever he has a problem that needs solving. For instance, when the increasing encroachment of modern developers hint at the idea that Mohan, the narrator’s pet dwarf elephant would have to be termed as a “wild animal” and not a domesticated animal and therefore barred from the land. He pleads tearfully:(note - Dada is respectful term for elder brother in Bengali, Didi is similar term for women)

 ‘Peon-Dada’, I said, swallowing my tears, ‘Peon-Dada, if Mohan leaves this place, I will leave too. Mohan is my Little Brother. I can’t let him roam about all alone in the world. He is too young to wander about by himself….I can’t let my brother go…’ (50)

Though it is Moti Didi who brilliantly solve this, the child narrator has people who understand how much this bond with Mohan means to him. I loved that. The book is more of a vignette of events not a continuous tale. It read more like a fable of a kind of childhood that was already under threat even then (it was first published in 1949),

The tetralogy is said to follow the sprawling narrative of a narrator who is simultaneously growing up with the marked effect of the changes around him. And I look forward to reading them all.