Rimli Sengupta’s debut novel is marked by a struggle between the putative historian’s methodological proclivities and the private individual’s quest for family history and personal identity. What emerges in the bloody aftermath is a disorienting hybrid of fact and fiction, a genre-bending work that wears its internal conflict as a trophy and a badge.
The story is as old as the hills: star-crossed childhood sweethearts Ramesh (‘Shishu’) and Noni are parted by his participation in the armed freedom movement in Bengal and her marriage at 16. He witnesses fourscore years of devastating political turmoil, suffers horrific physical torture in Alipore Central Jail and the Andamans Cellular Jail, and undergoes paralysing ideological crises. Throughout it all, he retains his sanity by filling a notebook with poems for his childhood muse.
Troubling plot
Noni, meanwhile, has survived appalling conditions as a refugee in Calcutta after Partition and produced a now-affluent and thriving family over 50 strong. The one-sided record of this unconventional love survives in the form of Shishu’s poetry journal and is narrated by Noni’s granddaughter.
The trouble with this plot, constructed in the best realist tradition, is that it is all true. Sengupta offers an account “from below”, using the shadows cast by family heirlooms (notebook, mirror, photograph) as material archive to write an alternative history of India’s freedom movement, focusing on East Bengali (‘Bangal’) and Dalit participation.
As novelist, she writes richly imagined fictional scenes of meetings, partings, and journeys. As memoirist, however, the intrusion of the autobiographical “I” comes as a shock.
Towards the end of the book, she holds a debate with “ghost Shishu” about the impossibility of “X-raying the central, heritable fracture of our people”. Strangely, however, Noni does not receive the compliment of imaginary conversations with her granddaughter but remains an enigmatic, albeit catalytic, figure in the narrative.
The response of this historiographer, granddaughter, and self-styled “willing refugee from engineering academia” to the “full slap of history” that “lands only in hindsight” is to hold the written text hostage to its genres, keeping the reader deliberately off-balance, unable to discriminate between truths metaphorical and literal.
“If you quit trusting me,” she says in the beginning, “I’ll understand.” We cannot help being profoundly grateful for her understanding.
A Lost People’s Archive
Rimli Sengupta
Aleph
₹699
The reviewer is Assistant Professor, English, at IIT-Guwahati.
