Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - HT Navi Mumbai Live
The novel as a matryoshka doll
Uttaran Das Gupta
TI try not to think about this too often because, though I may be a peer to Butalia and Menon in this field now, it’s only because of their effort to establish oral history as an urgent source in understanding Partition that I can do this work at all. I know I will continue to learn and draw from their methodologies and writings. he narrative structure of Janice Pariat’s third novel, Everything the Light Touches, is like a matryoshka doll. Usually made of wood, these Russian-origin dolls are hollow figurines that separate in the middle to reveal a smaller figure inside, which in turn has another figure inside it, and so on. In Pariat’s book, stories part in the middle to reveal another story. And like the matryoshka dolls that usually follow a theme — folk tales or Soviet leaders — the stories in Pariat’s novel follow the themes of botany and travel.
Shai, an Indian woman in her early 30s, takes a flight from
New Delhi to her home town Shillong. Evelyn, a botanist from Cambridge, undertakes a sea voyage from England to India in 1911 in search of a secret plant. These are the two fictional narratives in the novel.
There are two factual ones as well. German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1787 tour of Italy, at the end of which he would write his first scientific work, Metamorphosis of Plants (1790). And Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s famous expedition to Lapland in 1732, which would result in the book Flora Lapponica (1737).
Narrative structure has been a preoccupation of Pariat’s earlier prose works as well. In The NineChambered Heart (2017), a woman’s life is narrated by different people who have known her, revealing a kaleidoscopic identity. Everything the Light Touches also has multiple narrators. While Shai tells her own story, Evelyn and Goethe’s stories are narrated by an omniscient third person, who is aware not only of their movements and actions but also of their thoughts.
Linnaeus’s story is a series of poems, some in free verse, others in meter, conforming in some ways to August Strindberg’s declaration: “Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist.”
On the surface of it, these protagonists and their journeys have little to do with each other, separated as they are by time and distance. Each part of the novel could actually be read separately as a self-contained novella in itself. But, like The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, in Pariat’s book too, the disparate narratives are welded together through an emotional and imaginative force.
For one, Shai, Evelyn and Goethe are all compelled to travel by a sense of being stultified in the places
Everything the Light Touches Janice Pariat 491pp,~799 HarperCollins where they live. On the first page, Shai declares: “I’m travelling out of Delhi, this mad, magnificent city at the edge of a desert, to go back to where I came from — the wettest place on earth.”
Mawsynram is about 60 km from Shillong. But it is not in Shillong or Mawsynram that Shai experiences what she is looking for. It is somewhere more obscure, in a Khasi village.
Evelyn is sent off by her family to Calcutta as part of the “fishing fleet” — young women looking for husbands — but she has a purpose that she can barely confess to herself.
And Goethe takes off for Rome almost stealthily, weary of administrative duties in the princely state of Weimar. Travel is a necessity of sorts, even an existential one — at both the physical and the metaphysical levels. In fact, the metaphysical questions of the novel unite its disparate narrative strands too.
The primary philosophical question it asks is this: Can we think of the relationship between humans and natural phenomena, especially flora, beyond the objective rationality of Enlightenment philosophy? Do the ancient rituals of the Khasi communities or the rustic wisdom of Evelyn’s grandmother provide an alternative to the taxonomical desires of Linnaeus, who declared: “Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit (God created, Linnaeus organised)”?
The answer, at least for Pariat, can be found in Goethean science that advocated a more subjective and personal approach, especially to botany.
This was an approach that Goethe’s contemporaries, the Romantic poets, loved, even as they revolted against the preceding Age of Reason. It is also likely to appeal to a contemporary reader, in a time when the relationship between humans and nature has turned irrevocably belligerent and aggravated through global warming.
IN SPACE AND TIME
By historicising what is arguably the most pressing contemporary concern, Pariat’s novel becomes one of ideas. To this reader, a certain section seemed like a well-placed tribute to Amitav Ghosh, whose non-fiction work The Great Derangement (2016), in many ways, prompted Indian writers to wade into climate-change fiction. Of course, this is only speculation on my part. But a reader will have no need to speculate about the necessity of reading the book under review as soon as they start on the first page.
Uttaran Das Gupta teaches journalism at OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat. His novel, Ritual, was published in 2020