I saw Avijit Dutt acting in the Hollywood movie, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in a Toronto cinema several years before I met him in Calcutta. His cinematic presence struck me. Dashing and endearing, he was playing alongside Dame Judi Dench.
The next time I saw him was when he launched his novella, Gajraj: An Elephant Remembers, in Calcutta last year. It was quite the performance with Dutt, his beautiful wife Piu next to him, and his daughter, Lyra, reading from the book.
Dutt is a stage, film and OTT actor who has performed in Madras Cafe and Jolly LLB 2, and many more films, as well as in over 50 plays. And he has written six plays. He started life as a schoolteacher in St. Paul’s School, Darjeeling, and later became creative director at an advertising agency. His work with the underprivileged resulted in his creation of Child-Line, which is active across the country.
Dutt continues his foray into fiction, and in his crisp and accessible style with a touch of acerbic wit, he presents An Odyssey of Love. It is about a quest by Keshava, an 11th-century citizen of a Southern Indian state who is a leader of his community that belongs to a lower caste, and who sets out to liberate the marginalised classes, which resonates with Krishna in the Mahabharata, who was from the Yadavas of the underprivileged, cowherd community that both speak with their own powerful perspective and lived experience.
A brilliant construction of history, Dutt’s telling of Chola history from the margins is innovative and formidably engaging. It is almost as if he learnt how to write the history of subterfuge. Whereby those, who are of a lower caste and were mistreated constantly, especially by virtue of our caste system, suffered unabated brutality.
Dutt constantly signposts that although the Brahmins and the lower castes shared the same epics, there was a perennial effort to keep the fringes to the margins. Keshava, in Dutt’s novel, is a traveller on a quest who leads several of a motley bunch of men on an “odyssey” like the Greek warrior Odysseus in Homer’s epic, The Odyssey. However, Dutt has crafted the ending to his own story somewhat differently. Keshava returns to his home after all his sea voyages and adventures through forests and magical mysterious lands to find the love of his life, a girl named Purna, his North Star, for whom he has endured suffering and pain, gone. No golden girl, no salve to his wounds, and certainly no living with his lady love hereafter.
Persuasively told, Dutt uses all the tricks he learned in cinema and the stage to vary the tone, tenor, and tempo of his narrative to make it compelling and exciting. It is a history told with remarkable verve, researched with outstanding rigour, and it is a staggering mélange of genres with poetry and politics often smudging into each other. Dutt’s craft is like oil painting, at once like a Senaka Senanayake or a genius lapidarist. The author’s journeys through the Malay Peninsula, Srivijaya, Sumatra, Chao Phraya River basin, Bali, Arakan, and Angkor have some thrilling intertextuality with Greek and English classics. Kesavan is much more than just a trader or seafarer from the time of Raja Rajendra Chola. It is more like Alfred Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, where Ulysses finds no peace or happiness after having returned from his travels and so embarks on more travels again. Likewise, the story of Keshava has him rethinking the caveat of the firesticks, where a return to voyaging to China, the home of the firesticks, is a distinct possibility.
The realm of Dutt’s storytelling is like meta-fiction with many genres — a melange of mythology, history, politics, and love. Add to that the love between Keshava and Purna, the traipsing between continents, and the movement of people, merchandise, and cultures by sailing ships, and this is a novel of globalisation.
Dutt’s tremendous craving for the South
Even from the beginning, as we meet Srihari and the bowlegged Malay sailor, the reader is seduced by the exotic and the dramatic reigns of Raja Rajendra Chola (I and II), wooing the reader to become a participant in the idli-eating competitions and tropical craziness. It appears that Dutt desired, even craved to write a gripping love story set in the Chola kingdom. For a Darjeeling-based scholar and immensely renowned North India-based teacher, advertising genius and legendary thespian, Southern India was far from home.
Dutt explains: “The many splendored country we are fortunate to be in is threatened today by a North India-based polity that advocates a uniform oneness that disregards our diversity. A lot of my consciousness is moulded by the ‘South’. I was schooled in Hyderabad, learnt Kathakali (for actor training) in Kalamandalam in Kerala and travelled in the wonderland that is the south of the Vindhyas. The sophistication of that part of the country has always enamoured me.”
Poetry in Prose
There is seductive poetry in his book, and passages like, “Dusk had fallen, and the scent of jasmine climbed petulantly up the stone walls; Rajshekhara reminded Narasimha of another poet-philosopher supposedly born into a lower caste, Thiruvalluvar (fifth century of the Common Era),” bring that out. Some other beautiful lines that left a lilting note included: “The living soul subsists in love; the loveless are but skin and bone.” And “He alone lives who knows that he is one with all; the rest have their place among the dead.”
All about the journey
How did the journey of this book begin, I asked. “It began as a script for a serial”, Dutt said. “As the research deepened, it curiously drew me further into its folds. The narrative emerged as if by chance once I had set up the conflicts of power, caste, and sheer greed. And the expanse of Southeast Asia and the sea became a seduction for me. The serial after the pilot episode was shelved, but the story remained. I brought it out and dusted the cobwebs. and began putting the spit and polish. It is an accessory to history, not presuming to be interpreting it from any set prism,” he added.
Greater human good
“The humanistic religion that has always been my lodestar has driven me on. After all, ours is a shared vision of the greater good for humankind. At least in the fictional world, it’s like looking for Rousseau’s goodness of humans. To quote from the Bard’s Gitanjali — ‘And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it is thy power gives me strength to act,’” Dutt reflected.
Travellers from the Past
According to Dutt, passports were only devices of self-preservation that saw their early beginnings in the 19th century CE, and the First World War necessitated the evolution of the passport. “Earlier, it was a Letter of Safety guaranteeing the protection of the bearer. Persia, it is said, did issue the Letter of Safety. But history doesn’t tell us about this part of the world, seeing the document in wide usage. Burma till the early 19th century, had Andhra rulers, signifying the great amount of movement between our country and others in the region. The dances, the cuisine, the arts (especially batik) all travelled freely to countries in Southeast Asia. The temples being built in far shores also meant an export of architectural brains. All of it is indicative of a great amount of globalisation where cultures embraced what was the finest in the region.”
He also added: “Ultimately, I did want to reach out to a greater audience worldwide. The genius of the Indian Navik has not had its due. The use of the geographical tryst with the nature of winds that blow in two different directions in the different seasons is quite sensational. The love between Keshava and Purna is the raison d’etre that is at the heart of the story, powering it forward. It is the universal power of love that is the cementing factor.”
Julie Banerjee Mehta is an author of Dance of Life and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Kolkata and teaches Masters English at Loreto College, is a literary columnist for t2-The Telegraph and curates and anchors the Rising Asia Literary Circle.