Punarapi by Kavya Kadame Nagarakatte
Pallava Prakashana, Rs. 130
I f I were to answer this question: “What is the novel Punarapi all about?” It is a novel that explores a lesbian relationship – would perhaps be my answer. To a rather simple question, the answer remains incomplete. Punarapi examines human relationships, central to which is a Lesbian relationship -- certainly a more accurate answer.
Kavya Kadame Nagarakatte, recognised as an upcoming poet and writer in the Kannada literary world, takes a bold step with her first novel. After the first gay collection “Mohanaswamy” by Vasudhendra causing ripples both in the original Kannada and English, Kavya’s Punarapi follows, with two women as its central characters. The novel -- written in lovely, eloquent prose -- brings diverse streams of stories onto one canvas – collapsing them into the inevitable inter-connectability of human life situations. Kavya’s mature outlook to life endows her pen with a lightness of being: that which makes it possible for her to look at love and loss with pain, and equanimity as well.
Kavya deals with two chief concerns of our times – the problem of old age, and love between individuals of same sex group. She intertwines them and in the process, opens up pasts, interrogates memory and its impact in the present, the cold brutality of rural life as against the indifference and anonymity of urban life etc. Is everything that is preserved in the fabric of memory real, and that which becomes part of erasures, untruth? Kavya seems to pose this question both at the level of individual and society, personal and social memory. Kavya hints at it persistently throughout the novel: she achieves it in what could perhaps be called a Murakami-like effect towards the end of the novel – Lokesh’s dream of a cat sitting on his chest which he looks for in reality.
It is true that the writer’s view of the lesbian world is that of an “outsider”: her views therefore may not be as authentic as that of the insider. The raging passions or the seething politics of such relationships maybe absent. The language that Kavya employs may also not be that which is spoken in this world. So, both in its interior and exterior, Kavya may remain an outsider. But the remarkable achievement of this novel, and thereof Kavya’s, is its philosophical generosity. The empathy for the ‘other’ is what we must as a society acquire, the novel seems to say. Putting it in such a framework, the writer bestows upon the relationship a normalcy, what we associate with a heterosexual relationship. The manner in which she quietly slips in this relationship amidst other ‘usual’ ways of life is telling.
Asma and Anusha come from different backgrounds, and find that they are attracted to each other. They discover their sexuality with surprise, and while they realize that they need each other to survive, the fear of ostracisation by family and society looms large. There are tender, caring moments between them, coming from deep affection and love. Not merely lust as in the case of most queer writings. Their desire, longing, separation, ups and downs, loneliness, fear is captured with remarkable sensitivity.
Good politics, the novel seems to say, can no longer be lived in the abstract. One can clearly see Kavya privileging right action over everything else. For instance, the organisation “maneyoota” which serves food to lonely, old people comes to a sudden halt. Asma and Anusha who have developed deep emotional bonds to whose homes they carry food, keep the act going, using their own resources.
Punarapi echoes the feelings of writer Manil Suri who in his essay in the Granta says that in a country as diverse as ours, compared to other cultures, “negotiation with these issues will be less contentious”. The novel reminds us that any attempt to homogenise this society will be met with strong internal resistance, and cohabitation of the same sex may not remain an unfulfilled dream.
A piece of literature can be political, it can be social or historical. It can be any of these without overtly being it. If we can once again remind ourselves of the power of literature, Punarapi is not a personal act of courage alone, it is political.
Therefore Punarapi can be truth, it can be aspirational -- which is how the novel ends too. The great Shivaram Karanth had said: “Activism is not fighting for someone; it is fighting with someone.” Punarapi is an act of solidarity.
