The Solitude of Emperors By David Davidar, Penguin, Rs 495

God and the gardener, and bearing witness — that rare moment of authenticity in compassion and courage — are elements in the fabular structure that lies embedded in David Davidar’s novel, The Solitude of Emperors. It is a well-thought-out choice of fable, for the story has as its background the demolition of the Babri Masjid, its aftermath in the riots and then the blasts in Bombay, all of which lead up to the action in and around the small town of Meham on the edge of the Nilgiris with its magnificent Tower of God cliff housing at its tip the shrine of a Christian martyr. That is to say, there is a lot of god to go around. Also a lot of gardens, flowers and competing gardeners in and around Meham, ranging from a retired brigadier who believes in the urgency of growing fuchsias as well as of separating his ravishing daughter from an unruly and charismatic suitor, or gardeners on the lawns of frigidly beautiful bungalows who feed morning-glory flowers to the fire as the only way to keep them from taking over the garden, to the enigmatic and eccentric Noah, who lives in the cemetery and nurtures an extraordinary garden of the rarest flowers and colours down a slope away from the prying eyes of Meham.

It is the narrator, Vijay, the young man from the small town of K—, and a journalist on the staff of the tiny but committed Indian Secularist in Bombay, run doggedly by Rustom Sorabjee, who ultimately bears witness to the culminating tragedy of the story. But as a reporter, he is witness to much else, such as the hideous violence of the riots following the Babri demolition. He courts such experiences as he wishes to be blooded as a journalist, but becomes a victim in an assault of murderous Hindus upon Muslims in a nightmarish episode that changes his life. This is one of the most vividly written sequences in the novel. Through it, Vijay is unceremoniously pushed into achieving a clarity of view about the nature of violence in the name of god. This makes his actions in the Meham sequence inevitable and tragic, when he struggles to convince the placid inhabitants of a hill town of the real danger to their prized Tower of God shrine from the highly respected Hindu businessman, Rajan.

But within these overlapping structures of experience, there is still more. Sorabjee has given Vijay a manuscript called “The Solitude of Emperors”. Sorabjee has chosen Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi as three great figures of secularism. In this novel of commentaries and definitions, secularism is pinned down as tolerance and equal respect for all religions while holding on to one’s own, as opposed to the Western sense of secularism as separation of Church and State. Ashoka, Sorabjee says and Vijay — who has the least to say among all the characters in the novel — seems to agree, is the Emperor of Renunciation, Akbar the Emperor of Faith and Gandhi the Emperor of Truth. But a reader looking for inspiration may be a little disappointed. Sorabjee’s prose is unbearably soporific, even if — and Vijay again bears witness — his intellect might be extraordinary and his thesis brilliant. The latter has an undoubted Carlylean tinge, reminiscent of the heroes-and-hero-worship theme. Sorabjee evokes these towering figures — and their moments of introspection preceding epiphany — to provide young people of the Babri-demolition age with role models.

To find Gandhi among actual emperors is rather more mystifying than revelatory. But the metaphorical basis of the empires of the mind is more firmly established at the end, when Noah, anti-hero and martyr, is benignly labelled the Emperor of the Everyday by Sorabjee.

Old ideas in almost new combinations swirl and eddy in the narrative without really offering the reader a discernible current to sail by. Meham and the Tower of God could have provided the particular personal point of view that the journalist-narrator thinks should be the correct approach to the understanding of the big picture. But in spite of Noah and his amorous hound, Godless, in spite of gardens and a flower-thief who stealthily transports blooms from garden to garden, in spite of the presence and absence of faith and many gods, and in spite of the presence of Rajan, who smoothly penetrates into the heart of the country with his message of patriotism and destruction, the immediacy of the experience slips through the fingers. All of Vijay’s activity and anxiety seem insubstantial, somehow dreamlike, always overtaken by Sorabjee’s manuscript, the brigadier’s harangues, Noah’s disjointed tales and Rajan’s cleverly modulated false-hearted arguments. If Vijay believes in the self-effacement of the reporter, he succeeds only too well. And it is Rajan, and not the alternative hero, Noah, who brings Vijay temporarily to life. His hypnotic reasoning demonstrates Davidar’s understanding of the roots and nuances of fundamentalist reasoning, its deliberate fudging of faith in god with faith in power, and the levers it uses to mobilize the frustrated and underprivileged against whatever is different. Vijay’s fears are justified because Rajan exists, and he stands behind every riot of which Vijay is just one of the victims.

But neither Rajan nor Noah, neither Sorabjee nor his emperors, can pull Davidar’s theme out of the journalistic frame onto a universal plane of the eternal war among faiths ever awaiting the messianic rescuer. The story sticks to its time-frame, in spite of the historic significance of the Babri Masjid demolition. In 2007, it has already dated.