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| Kathmandu, Sunday May 12, 2002 Baishakh 29, 2059. |
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India
in its Complexity
By Manjushree Thapa
Forest Interludes: A
Collection of Journals and Fiction is the kind of book that one picks up with trepidation.
To begin with, it is a translation. (It was originally written in Bengali). Then, its
author is an Indian Administrative Service officer: one imagines that it is full of the
tales that self-satisfied bureaucrats like to bore others with. Plus, the book’s
contents include non-fiction journal essays, stories and a novella: it seems, from the
outset, to be slapped together.
Happily, all of these
fears are unfounded. From the first essay onward, Anita Agnihotri offers readers a finely
textured portrait of the lives of the tribal women whom she has worked with in her years
in government. She humanizes everyone involved in the development of rural India—a
great gift for those who tend to reduce rural development to facts and statistics. Each
piece in the book, whether fiction or non-fiction, is informative, insightful, and
exquisitely written.
Forest Interludes
starts off with six journal essays, all focusing on Maharastra and Orissa’s tribal
women who are struggling, with mixed results, against age-old discrimination, as well as
against the government and market forces. The first essay is a portrait of an Orissa
tribal, Sumoni, who with the help of NGO-organized leadership training is able to
challenge government officers promoting coffee plantations in the area. "Can coffee
be cooked like rice for food?" cries this woman, who would have hidden behind a
pillar five years ago. "Can you make a gruel of coffee and have it like our mandia
gruel?…No, we don’t want coffee plantations." Like all the other women in
this book, Sumoni lives in a complicated world of local panchayats, NGOs, moneylenders,
traders, agents, cooperatives, World Bank sponsored projects and women’s
organizations. She and the women of her village wrangle their interests from all of these
disparate forces. Agnihotri cheers them on, even though she works for the enemy, so to
speak: she clearly wishes that these women might defeat the administration that she, often
unhappily, serves.
The author’s
expose of the government gives the book’s essays much vitality. Agnihotri is as
honest about her good intentions as about her ineffectualness. In another essay, she
describes the women of a village that sees none of the benefits of the irrigation project
that tunnels through the area. She meets these women in the fields, their hands bleached
and ulcerated from planting paddy, and follows them through their arduous day, which ends
with them working at night in the tunnel. She describes their hard lives with great care
and utter sympathy; and yet she admits that she too lets them down, by forgetting about a
meeting she had arranged with them the next day.
By not holding herself
up as a model of virtue, Agnihotri avoids turning her essays into morality tales. The four
stories in the book also humanize the characters, be they "good guys" or
"bad guys". Agnihotri’s tribal women are sharp-minded and aware. Her
government officials are more often than not conflicted about their work, and though they
make many wrong decisions, they are understandable and real, very much like any of us,
lacking the patience to be bothered with the suffering around us. Agnihotri refuses to be
reductive in portraying any of her characters. As a result, her stories depict the many
points of light and darkness in tribal India today. For its incisive subject matter alone,
the book deserves to be widely read.
In addition, Forest
Interlude sparkles with fine writing. This is a real bonus for those who find ethically
challenging literature to often be dull, didactic, or simply dreadfully written. The final
novella, "Mahuldiha Days," is a culmination of all of the author’s
strengths: the descriptions are rich, the characters are strong and individuated, and the
plots, timing, and sentences are all finely crafted. The first-person protagonist is much
like Agnihotri, a government official who works in tribal areas, spending long periods
away from her family, trying her best to prevent or redress the brutalization of tribal
women. Weaving in between the past and the present, the story traces the antagonist’s
turbulent years through divorce and single motherhood, remarriage, estrangement from her
husband and their emotional breakthroughs, as well as her struggle with the moral
compromises she is pressed to make at work. Agnihotri’s protagonist is unlike any
woman character in Indian writing in English: she is far more mulitfaceted, and far more
real, than a Rushdie or even Roy woman.
"Mahuldiha
Days" may simply be one of the best writings on contemporary India to be found today.
It helps that the essays and stories preceding it prepare readers for this longer, more
layered narrative, which is so uncompromising in its fullness that it almost reads as a
dream. Editor Kalpana Bardhan’s decision to marry non-fiction and fiction in this
book is bold, and spot on. In addition, her translations are so natural that they read
just as well as original writing. Without ever resorting to cliches, caricature, or cheap
satire, Agnihotri achieves, in Forest Interludes, what one wishes Indian writers in
English would strive for: a portrait of India in its complexity.
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