SWARGA: A POSTHUMAN TALE By Ambikasutan Mangad, Juggernaut, Rs 399
Recently the Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University has begun a commendable initiative to disseminate literature in Malayalam in translation, in collaboration with leading publishing houses. The most recent fruit of this project is Swarga, a novel originally published in Malayalam as Enmakaje in 2009 by DC Books. The original title simply referred to a real-life village in the Kasaragod district in Kerala but the translated title is more suggestive, hinting at both fable and science fiction. Since there is no translator's note, it is left to the reader to work out what is posthuman about the tale that follows.
The novel certainly begins like a fable, with a Man and a Woman - no names yet - frozen in a dramatic tableau. There is an infant with a mysterious ailment rescued by the woman, who is first reviled and then grudgingly accepted by the man. They are framed by what seems to be a primal forest - the Jadadhari Hills - abode to sentient monkeys and serpents. The hills are reached from a place called Swarga, which is connected to the outside world by an intermittent bus service.
The magic realism of the opening pages runs through the novel, despite the real world soon making an appearance, as Man and Woman acquire names - Neelakantan and Devayani - and a backstory. Their past lives in the city are not intended to be realistic, like a crudely painted backdrop on a theatrical stage. The real story concerns the suffering child and the couple's attempt to find a cure for its deformities. But soon they find that it is not a unique case, there is a whole village of children, women and men with misshapen body parts and creeping illnesses.
It is almost halfway through the book till the word, Endosulfan, occurs for the first time. But the dust jacket has already informed the reader about the central theme of the novel: "When the skies rain poison and our world turns into a wasteland." Anyone googling Enmakaje village will find out that the cashew nut plantations in the region were sprayed with the pesticide Endosulfan from the mid-Seventies, resulting in thousands of deaths and deformities. While Endosulfan was subsequently banned in most countries, India and China continued to use it even after the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2011. In 2012, the Centre had asked the Supreme Court to allow all states, except Karnataka and Kerala, to continue using the pesticide. The focus has now shifted to the relief and rehabilitation of Endosulfan victims.
It is not easy to turn a real-life environmental movement into a work of art, but Ambikasutan Mangad - who was himself at the forefront of the agitation - has been able to do just that. For this, he has had to eschew conventional realism in favour of an incantatory style, where every act of telling seems to be a sacrament to the forest. The forest itself is a treasure trove of myth and lore, and these stories are revisited in loving detail as the couple, along with their fellow travellers, wage an unequal battle against the State. The corporation and the State are represented in the figure of a leader who has no name. While many of the characters - on both sides - may seem somewhat two-dimensional, the fabular telling is able to disarm readerly scepticism.
What the novel sacrifices in characterization it gains in a richly polyphonic telling of the region's folklore. Both the flora and fauna of the land are active participants in the novel's action as well as metaphors to live by, with the metaphorical and real often merging. The Jadadhari Hills are redolent with stories of myth and legend, not all of which are related by human mouths. At the beginning of the novel, Neelakantan finds himself seeking refuge in the Cave which speaks to him, and chastises his ego. He returns to the Cave at intervals, a place where the past and present appear before him as choices. This none-too-subtle device works better than it should, with Neelakantan growing as a person with each encounter. In contrast, Devayani's portrayal is more stereotypical, and she is often reduced to playing a supporting role to Neelakantan.
As the novel progresses, the dreamlike ambience of the forest is peeled away to reveal the poison within. The disappearance of biodiversity from Enmakaje is described in a deceptively lyrical register, while the calculus of profit from the insecticide trade is worked out in chilling detail. As the evidence against Endosulfan piles up, one begins to read Swarga as a cautionary tale, alerting us to similar despoliation of nature. While Endosulfan may be on its way out, our continuing reliance on insecticides and all-too-eager embrace of genetically modified produce are clear and present danger signals which we can ignore only at our peril.
The story is set in a region which is home to several languages, including Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu, the last spoken chiefly in the Kasaragod district in Kerala. All these languages make an appearance in the novel, and a character speaks a mixture of Tulu and Malayalam. The translator, J. Devika, meets this challenge by deploying a fractured English with frequently truncated words. Whole sentences from the leader's speech in Tulu are deliberately left untranslated, conveying Neelakantan's inability to understand the language. Overall the translation is a labour of both love and skill, and a fitting tribute to a novel of beauty and power.
