The forgotten author of Rungli-rungliot
This summer my visit to the northeast was punctuated with a discovery. I was bookless and feeling a simmering restlessness on that account. People wont to travelling with a book in hand would understand this compulsion, how books and places, when brought together with a design, can create alchemy. However, good for me, once over there I landed in the house of a bibliophile friend. By the end of the evening, I had a book in hand and a renewed interest in Rumer Godden. We were just few miles from the lyrical Rungli-rungliot, a tea estate close to Darjeeling, after which Godden’s book is named. This question nagged me: With an expansive oeuvre on India, viz Black Narcissus, Breakfast With Nikolides etc, and The River having been made into an exquisite film by Jean Renoir (who is said to have inspired Satyajit Ray), why is it that Godden remains relatively lesser known?
Godden, who died a veteran writer in 1998 in her native England, with over 70 titles to her credit, that include novels and children’s writings, spent her formative years at Narayanganj (Now Bangladesh), where her father worked for a shipping company. She was sent to England for education but as a young woman kept returning and intermittently lived in Kashmir and Calcutta. A tortuous marriage followed and her stay in Kashmir turned out to be the stuff of Gothic literature, when an insidious attempt was made to poison her. It was while in Calcutta that she began to earn a living by giving ball-room dance lessons. In the interim she moved to Darjeeling, with her daughters and their Swiss governess Giovanna.
Rungli-rungloit abounds with vivid detail of the peculiar landscape refracted through the mesh of her consciousness. It has a marked stamp of the romantic idealisation of nature, wet days filled with endless rain, dew dripping from the ferns in the silent expanse, the sight of the eternal snows of Kanchenjunga. Though in themselves her experiences sound seemingly prosaic, connected with bringing up children and running a household, they are nevertheless mediated by the voice of a struggling writer, trying to commit to a routine. While the WWII rages on, there is the voice of a woman trying to come to terms with a bad marriage. A mother overwhelmed by the challenge of parenting, doubting her abilities. In the midst of all this, there are unguarded moments of deep understanding that suddenly descend on her, illuminating core ideas of freedom, bondage, poetry, a writerly life and marriage.
One expects this heightened consciousness to touch her understanding of race but it clearly doesn’t extend to that. The tea estates of Darjeeling were themselves built on the economic compulsions of 19th century British trade. The tea plantations have enclosed a mythos of dak bunglows, Nepali/tribal helpers and a white master. Miles of jungles give way to manicured tea estates. The vitriol of the Teesta river, the fierceness of the jungle mercilessly reined in by the ruthless order of the tea gardens. This violence is palpable even today. We are witness to herds of elephants sometimes materialising on metalled roads, bewildered by their lost habitat.
Some will not see beyond the lyricism of the language and landscape, some not beyond the racial content and some not beyond the women’s question. But a lone woman, a writer, in the midst of a struggle in a sparse location finding her voice at a definite point of time in world history is why this author should be read.
By the end of the trip, the academic in me had this research area in hand teeming with questions. Just like Godden’s own narrative.
RUMER GODDEN’S BOOK HAS A MARKED STAMP OF ROMANTIC IDEALISATION OF NATURE