June 16, 2002

David Davidar’s debut novel is in the tradition of the Roman fleuve or a saga novel, a long account that chronicles the history of several generations of a family while presenting an overall view of society during a particular era. Davidar writes about three generations of a well-to-do Christian Andavar family as he cuts a bold and ambitious swath across Indian politics, history and religion. The eye of the stormy narrative is the small, fictional village of Chevathar in southern India.

Skillfully setting the tone for the book in the very first chapter with the rape of an Andavar girl, Davidar etches out the character of Solomon Dorai, the Andavar thaliavar or headman of the village, “that most fair-minded of men” whose authority is soon to be threatened as caste animosity erupts in the 1890s. But breadth and ambition alone do not make for sagas as we discover early in the book.

The blue mango with a “monstrous flaw” works as a metaphor for the fault-like historic forces that lie deep within the red earth of Chevathar and create divisions between communities and families. The Dorais are uprooted and by the end of the first section almost the entire cast of characters jostling for the reader’s attention disappears abruptly into the annals of history, to be replaced by a new cast in the following sections.

We meet Daniel and Aaron exiled from their ancestral village in the second section. Aaron, an expert at silambu attam or stick-fighting, drifts into the life of a revolutionary. Arrested on charges for an assassination attempt of an English officer, he dies of tuberculosis in a prison cell. Daniel chooses to steer clear of his father’s and brother’s social and political calling.

Taunted as a young man by Solomon for refusing to fight, “you should have been born a girl,” he charts a different course for his life. He studies medicine, and returns to his village as a successful doctor and businessman after he amasses a fortune with the soaring sales of “Dr Dora’s Moonwhite Thylam”, a skin- whitening wonder cream, to nurture the rare and wild blue mangoes in Chevathar.

Daniel’s passion culminates with an unrealistic “great mango yatra” where he “had to hurry west, for the fruiting season of the Alphonso” and then dash east “to acquaint themselves with the finer points of the Malda”, and crisscross the length and breadth of the country, even charting a course to Rangoon and Lahore, tasting mangoes. All this time, “The skirts of the Great War brushed past India” and Daniel too. Gandhi’s satyagraha, Subhash Chandra Bose’s revolution take a backseat to Daniel’s mango festival.

Curiously, history functions merely as a backdrop for the characters, and a device for the author to divulge information. None of the characters is imbued with a political consciousness that ensues in an enlightened discourse. Simplistic explanations for complex issues and decisions mar the narrative. Aaron’s brush with politics is accidental and Kannan (Daniel’s son), a manager and “the first Indian creeper the company had hired” for a tea plantation, does not know his mind till the very end. “Now that he had decided, he wasn’t sure what he should do. Join the freedom struggle or help with Doraipuram? Probably the latter.”

The dislocation of fathers, and the journeying back of sons seeking their old ties to the earth make for a significant theme in a saga. “This is the land of my family. We have made its hard red earth our own with our failures and our triumphs, our blood and our laughter. I’m glad I’m here, it is the place of my heart,” declares Kannan in the last section. But where Davidar’s sweep of narrative gives an insider’s view of India’s layered history at a time when its fractured society ridden with caste wars is trying to come to terms with change; with revolutionaries and freedom fighters taking on the imperialist forces, it’s the surfeit of information that shackles the book.

In his earnest attention to detail and his urge to share every vestige of information stored in his mind’s chip, Davidar’s prose gets mired in verbiage and the lengthy disquisitions about every aspect of life prove taxing to the reader. The sprawling narrative is like a river that moves erratically, linear for most part, but clogged with detail.

The circumlocutions come with the forays into topics from culture, religion, caste wars, to flora, fauna even simple day-to-day living. A recipe becomes “thick seer fish cuts, fresh and glistening, a gleaming mound of rice that had been washed and drained, onions, green chilies, garlic, ginger, coriander, red chilies, turmeric, curd, mint leaves, cinnamon, cardamom, clove, nutmeg, aniseed, cumin seed, cake seed and mace (all to be ground to make the masala which gave the dish its unique taste), a pinch of saffron, ghee, thick and fragrant”.

The book falters, too, as the prose increasingly turns into jargon. “As his battle with the British reached its climax, the Mahatma unleashed yet another of his unstoppable thunderbolts, the mantra ‘Quit India’. As millions of mouths whispered, roared, warbled, chanted, carolled, bellowed, lisped, drawled, wheezed, trilled and stammered it out, it grew into a relentless force.”

Journalistic parlance such as “Charity’s mind had gone into overdrive, she would need to have back-up plans if for some reason the dessert didn’t pass muster”; or passages where it seems the author does not seem to care any more about the language confound. Equally confusing are the lapses of time as characters disappear, especially the mothers, daughters and wives, like Charity, Rachel or Helen.

The recurring, and conflicting metaphor for the mango does not stitch the narrative together convincingly. “From the outside, the mango looks perfectly healthy. But when it is cut open, dark tunnels and headless maggots greet the eye. Every family has within it its maggots,” wrote Daniel in a letter prior to his death. In life, the Chevathar Neelam, or blue mango’s reputation became his life’s mission. He declared the “need to proclaim its glories far and wide”.

Despite Davidar’s impeccable research and insight into south India, there is little insight into the human pysche. Informed commentary on stereotypical incidents abounds, such as gold pawned for a girl’s wedding festivities, snobbish Englishwomen at tea plantations, a curry priest and a spleen-venting collector versus a genuine Indophile sub-collector.

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it,” said C.S. Lewis. Davidar adds to our information immensely, but ironically at the expense of literature.

The house of blue mangoes
By David Davidar
Viking, Penguin Books, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India
Website: www.penguinbooksindia.com 
ISBN 06-70049-18-2
421pp. Indian Rs395

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