ASTRIDE THE WHEEL: YANTRARUDHA By Chandrasekhar Rath, Oxford, Rs 245

Sanatan Dase, the protagonist of this novel, is the priest of the Lakshminarayan temple in an obscure village in post-independence Orissa. He is pushing fifty, but does not look his age. The worship of the temple idols — a job handed down to him from his forefathers — has been an overpowering obsession for Dase, shaping his perceptions of reality.

Astride the Wheel: Yantrarudha by Chandrasekhar Rath is the narrative of Dase’s negotiations with reality. In doing so, it charts the transformation of his “aching loneliness” into a liberating one. Dase meets all the demands of life - he looks after his children and his ailing wife. He is also not impervious to events around him. The 1965 India-Pakistan war, the election campaign, poverty, hunger, jealousy and the gradual erosion of values — all these conspire to create a pattern of reality which weighs down heavily on Dase. He bemoans his helplessness against the depravity around him and tries desperately to break free.

The death of Dase’s wife, Tukur ma, eventually releases him from the reality to which he was chained for so long. Dase now sets out to explore an uncharted inner space. His journey through Dakshineshwar, Varanasi, Vrindavan and finally Puri, gradually awakens him to a profound metaphysical consciousness. The mystical journey is however conducted by Gangadhar Satpathy, a scholar-philosopher whom Dase accepts as his mentor. Satpathy acts as the catalyst in Dase’s spiritual regeneration and fades out of the novel once his mission is achieved.

Astride the Wheel is a mystical novel informed with the wisdom of the ancient Hindu mythological texts. The title is borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita, and highlights the transition of “the human machine” between the different layers of spiritual knowledge. In this transition, characters other than the protagonist have a limited role to perform.

However, the translation by Jitendra Kumar Nayak captures some of the lyricism of the original while tracing the protagonist’s spiritual odyssey. Prafulla Kumar Mohanty’s introduction puts the novel in its historical context. Mohanty projects this as “a thesis novel proving the Brahmanic soul of the universe”. This is an observation the socialists will have difficulty coming to terms with. However, Mohanty’s elaborations on the transformations in Dase’s “biopsychic” world are quite illuminating.