Indian stories, especially the myths, never seem to go out of fashion. It can be argued that mythological epics and their gods continue to cohabit with our people through rites, rituals, culture and religious practices and are not relegated to obscure ancient or archaic studies. They continue to reverberate in various forms, their assumed presence, ubiquitous.
In the past two decades (a resurgence in Hindu politics could be a factor) the gods have been recalled in tales and analyses in India and in studies abroad. Be it fiction or non- fiction, travelogues, social documentaries, or for the busy market of young adult fiction and children’s fiction, the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have been retold by contemporary authors. The world of comic books and animation, too, has been struck by the magical universe of these epics and has emerged in newer avatars for a young audience not too familiar with the ancient tomes.
Reinventing ancient myths or our epics is both fascinating and intriguing. And a contemporary retelling of the epic or placing the mythological characters in contemporary setting throws up equally interesting voices and meanings to an ancient lore in a modern retelling. Alice Albinia’s first novel Leela’s Book seeks resonances of the ancient text in her novel on Delhi’s privileged.
Ms Albinia’s first work of non-fiction, Empires of the Indus, was an acclaimed travelogue following the course of a mighty river and the social lives of those communities and people on its banks. She is a journalist and writer who has lived and worked in Delhi and that perhaps explains the setting of her next book. Leela’s Book is a work of fiction where the lives of the present are not wholly devoid of the Hindu mythological characters. It starts out as a Delhi-6 novel, with Ms Albinia marking all the signposts of the city and its people. The privileged live in the best addresses in the city, rites of marriage and continuity are observed, families are both powerful and exuberant at a wedding, with deep unsettling secrets of sexual and filial misconduct. The servant class and the poor battle rape and neglect and, in cases, take the rap for their masters under coercion or casual negligence and wealth and power are abused. There is a monkey menace that pops up in the city of towers and power; the Babri Masjid crumbles; Muslim identity, even among the so-called cosmopolitan class, comes in for a hard look; wily politicians play their games; a token White woman comes visiting and the city’s tapestry of humanscape is presented in detail with an insider’s touch. The book can be savoured for its women characters. Like the abused but resilient heroines of the Mahabharata, Ms Albinia’s women stand proud amid the masculine arena of ancient Indraprastha or Delhi, showing grace and grit and battle spirit. Thus, the elegant and deep Lalita moves back to Delhi after two decades of living in New York, to reopen past secrets of her family. Lalita is aloof and distant, yet under the cloud of gloom over her dead sister. She arrives in Delhi in the midst of preparations for a family wedding. Vyasa, her brother-in-law and a Sanskrit scholar, is busy with arrangements for his son’s wedding to a Hindu nationalist. A hedonist niece arrives from London to compound matters.
What turns the novel from being yet another Indian family spectacle or an English novel on manners of the Indian upper crust of Delhi is a touch of the whimsy and the symbolic. Presiding over the family drama of the well-heeled unfolding is Ganesh, the mythological elephant-god, believed to have written the epic even as it was narrated by the author, Vyasa. The reader can draw parallels and references to the Mahabharata, veiled or otherwise, while reading the story. Ganga can be compared to Leela who holds back secrets from her husband; a character like Bharti muses aloud about the possibility of having five husbands; and Shiv Prasad dictates his memoir to a scribe.
Ms Albinia brings in Ganesh, the mythological deity who set the Mahabharata into verse as an omnipotent viewer. Ms Albinia toys with the probabilities of the many versions of the ancient story in its oral retellings. Ganesh’s aim, as he says in the novel, is to set the wrongs of the scribe Vyasa in his narration of the Mahabharata, for who can say anything about the definite authorship of multiple oral retellings of an epic? Thus, Leela watches the family of nieces and nephews play out their lives and relationships, with the elders of the family coming together for what they think is arranging the lives of the younger generation. However, it is not the rich and powerful, but the omnipresent Ganesh, the divine remover of obstacles, who is the One at work, his divine designs saving Leela from her devious brother-in-law.
Ms Albinia’s fiction is playful and deep, threading contemporary social and religious aspects to a mythological one. Like the mythological works that beg reinterpretation and retelling, Leela’s Book remains a story of people and places that take different courses owing to circumstances and conditions and, most importantly, the unseen guidance of a mystical hand.
LEELA’S BOOK
Alice Albinia
Random House
422 pages; Rs 499
