Jasoda: a novel
Author - Kiran Nagarkar
Publisher - Fourth Estate, Rs 599
A pregnant woman squeezes her legs to kill her girl child, family time translates to the ‘head of the family’ torturing the female members into submission — Jasoda: A Novel portrays a societal nightmare, writes SHEENAM BATRA
Jasoda: A Novel is a heart-wrenchingly visceral and trenchant narrative of the desperateness of human survival in a climatically and culturally rotten Paar in Rajasthan. Paar is suffering from a decade-long drought and seamless patriarchal malpractices. Nagarkar entwines and enmeshes the two to produce a nuanced and accentuated situation which sheds light on the gruesome, ruthless and dehumanized imperatives of poverty underlined by the vicissitudes of sex, patriarchy and power. Paar is labelled as ‘mirage’ country where it is difficult to draw the line between reality and illusion, the two often merge into each other. Veracious to its name, Paar is both realistic in the sense that innumerous tyrannies its individuals, specifically women are coerced to tolerate and participate in and it is illusive as the notoriously unimaginable, ghastly tyrannies and routes the individuals are forced to fabricate for survival and for some who dream of becoming influential and powerful. The novel begins with a prologue where Jasoda performs her labor in front of her little son, Himmat. The moment the baby girl’s head emerges from her torn vagina, Jasoda squeezes her legs to kill her daughter. Jasoda does not quiver, sentimentalize or ruminate over her deed. She performs it promptly, unashamedly and cold-heartedly which signifies her lack of awareness of her sin. Her lack of regret and sensitivity is further highlighted as she kills her baby girl in front of her little son casually which further hints at the normalcy, triviality and recurrence of such heinous acts.This elucidates her cultural mindset where women are acculturated to remorselessly perform female infanticide which is not considered as crime in this society and become the agents of executing patriarchy in the public sphere. Jasoda’s decision to kill her baby girl is problematic because it can also be seen as an ambivalent act to submit the girl child to the cruelties of the patriarchal cosmos and the only way through which love and protection can be shown is through the act of the death of female child.
The repercussions of drought are dubiously humiliating and demeaning. Childhood is ephemeral, redundant and easily discarded. A nearly six-year-old Himmat has to accompany his mother to the peripheries of their town to bring water. The question of survival is too pressing to indulge in any leisure and luxury. Rather, it propels the individuals towards all forms of inequities and denigration which compromises their self-dignity. Transactions in all forms of exploitation-financial and sexual-occur during the drought. It makes some characters in the novel suicidal and leaves other with no alternative but to leave the town. Drought challenges the durability and faith of the so-called sacrosanct institution of marriage and shows its fragility by highlighting its mercantile ideology on which it has been premised. Jasoda’s husband, Sangram Singh neglects his duties towards his family and discards them. The author shows that “home” is an alien, distant and irrelevant notion considering the urgency of survival. “Home” often collapses in the tussle for survival. Nagarkar draws the attention of the readers to the hopelessness which comes with the question of survival and makes them nomadic. The author weaves a painful, pathetic and caustic picture of poverty and patriarchy through the rampantly graphic representation of brutalities and violence which makes them routinized, quotidian, casual and unquestioned. Further, the author makes use of excessively plain, unembellished linguistic rhetoric which is extremely resourceful in conveying to the reader the bland yet truthful account of life of the people living in Paar which is devoid of any hope. The plainness of the language is symptomatic of reality, urgencies and cheerlessness of life where the persistent anxiety is about survival. Through this strategy, the author reflexively draws the attention of the reader to the grandiloquent rhetoric of progressive ideologies and political promises which have been ineffectual and unable to impinge either on people’s consciousness or in the public sphere.
After many struggles, Jasoda, her mother-in-law and her three sons reach Mumbai. Here, Jasoda sees the sea for the first time and is allured by it. She chooses to provide a shelter for her broken family near the sea as a place with ample water which has been their problem in Paar. But Mumbai is not different from Paar. Both places are equally exploitative in their own ways. The houses here are dilapidated, stifling and full of stench. Jasoda’s landlord sexually abuses and rapes her in front of her children and her mother-in-law when she is not able to completely pay her rent. Poverty forces Jasoda to become increasingly cruel and callous to her own sons. She makes them stand on traffic signals to beg for money. Her son, Himmat refuses to beg and he is left impoverished by his own mother till he chooses to become a rag picker. His life is threatened by thugs and pathologies which bring him nearly close to death. The author departs from the stereotypical image of Indian mother and befuddles the boundaries of her love with her brutality so that it becomes categorically impossible to define Jasoda either as loving or a murderer. Though, she attunes herself to Mumbai and starts making money, Jasoda has not discarded the cultural baggage of the malpractices which she witnessed and participated in Paar. Another baby girl is born to Jasoda in Mumbai and she tries to kill her but is forbidden by her son, Himmat. The author draws parallel between Paar and Mumbai to critique the pretensions of modernity of the latter and expose the substratum of India which is essentially patriarchal and sexually obsessed. By etching out similitude between the two diversely apart geographical places, Nagarkar highlights that the modernity of a place is not intrinsic to it; places are innately dull but they are often shaped and become vitalized through human imagination.Jasoda has merely undergone a physical journey but not a mental journey.
Eventually, after having accumulated sufficient money, nostalgic and adamant Jasoda decides to shift back to Paar and irrationally sentimentalizes over her husband. Nostalgia is a problematic emotion as it defies any change, challenges the present and indulges in the glorification of past irrespective of its hierarchies and politics. Nostalgia is not simply a baseless emotion but a valuable critical ideology to critique the modernity of the present and its discontents which is aptly relevant in Jasoda’s dissatisfaction with Mumbai. Her decision to return back to Paar obviously proves to be deceptive. Sangram Singh has allocated to himself the attorney of power for Paar through his vile deceptions. He is furious to see Jasoda in his palace and refuses to recognize her. Through a series of failures and debts, Sangram Singh comes back to his family only to torture them through his patriarchal and sexist manoeuvres, specifically his daughter, Jahnvi. But through the textual strategy of artificial reconciliation, the otherwise bleak ending predicted for the novel ends with a silvery lining. The climactic turn offered by the author might seem synthetic but it tentatively fabricates a possibility of change, hope and sustains the spirit of rebellion. It deters from making poverty fatalistic and deterministic and offers the possibility through hard work to shine.
The reviewer is an Assistant Professor and research scholar in the Department of English, DU
