This novel gets its beguiling title from the saintly Muktabai’s abhang:
The ant flies into the sky,
She swallows the sun.
Another miracle!
A barren woman begets a son.
The story is about three girls growing up in the early 20th century in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri. Surekha, at 15, is “getting too old” and so her marriage is arranged to the mighty Vilas Rao of Vaishali who is only a few years younger than her father. She is to be his second wife. The two other sisters, spirited Malati and cautious Kamala, get a chance to “fly into the sky”.
They are ‘allowed’ to be educated and decide the course of their destinies against a social backdrop where Maharishi Karve, Gandhi, Annie Besant, and Mohan Malaviya, amongst others, are waging an active movement for equal participation by women in public life.
The story begins well — admirably well. The recreation of those times — with women like Ayee (mother of the protagonists), who believed they were legitimate ‘ardhanginis’ of their husbands, a person like Maa Saheb who is isolated because of her ‘divine madness’, and a 15-year old bride’s cruel nuptial submission — has been crafted tenderly by this debutant novelist.
The two sisters who go to a boarding school and then to Elphinstone College in the big city of Bombay, where they choose their life partners, the unhurried stretching of their growing romance and their desire to participate in the freedom struggle — all move smoothly, till the writer suddenly loses patience! The other characters get sidelined and the life of Malati and her lover, Guru, occupies the centrestage. We are told, almost as if it did not matter, that somewhere along the line, Malati’s brother had got married. He was that important male child in conceiving whom Ayee had lost her life. The plot meanders. The narrator forgetfully becomes a historian. Contemporary vocabulary like PDA and B-team find their place in a novel that is largely about pre-Independence India.
Hidden messages?
What’s remarkable are the charmingly transcreated Marathi poems. The use of Marathi words, along with their translations, has been handled cleverly to showcase ‘Indian English’ fiction.
At the end of it all, one wonders about the message: Malati and Kamala are encouraged to ‘fly into the sky and attempt to swallow the sun’. But Ayee, in her desire to deliver that miraculous male child despite her very fragile health, was she too an ant flying into the sky? Baba — that quiet and strong patriarchal head of the family, who fights relentlessly against dacoits only to be killed by them — was he too an ant that had dared to fly? Veena, a talented actress, who chooses to become a sadhvi — another ant? Ultimately, are Malati’s goals significantly different from that of her mother’s?
An anecdote famous in English literary circles is about how Ezra Pound trashed extensive portions of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ to give it its final shape that shook the poetic landscape of the time. This very readable novel holds the potential of three books. The editor, however, missed an Ezra Pound moment.
The reviewer is a Sahitya Akademi translation award winner.
Swallowing the Sun
Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri
Aleph
₹899
Published - September 27, 2024 09:15 am IST
