An Accident of Rebirth
Marked by a longing for sex and spirituality, this novel’s great flaw is its politics
Saikat Majumdar’s new novel, The Scent of God, is a “twice-born fiction”. The term comes from the critic Meenakshi Mukherjee’s title of her study of Indian-English fiction. But, unlike Mukherjee’s metaphorical phrase referring to the rebirth of the western novel form in colonial India, Majumdar’s novel talks about a privileged rebirth into spiritual consciousness of the three upper castes. It tells the story of Anirvan’s rebirth and how he becomes a yogi. The protagonist must bridge not just the distance between his secular education at a boarding school, run by a Hindu protestant monastic order in West Bengal, and the modern, secular world outside, but also between his juvenile homosexual longings and the “maturity” of heterosexuality. Reversing the expected rebirth of Anirvan into maturity and secularity, the novel celebrates the protagonist’s homecoming to renunciation and homosexuality. The twist is that it is renunciation (Anirvan and his lover Kajol join the monastic order as lovers in the end) that enables homosexual union. Through this, the novel suggests that a religious self need not renounce itself to achieve modern consciousness. Anirvan’s attraction to Left politics is abandoned as the nostalgia for monastic orderliness and homosexual love exposes its propagandistic manipulativeness.
The spectre haunting the novel is of religious otherness. How can the religious self simply live by the beliefs of its faith when there exist other faiths? This is portrayed through the Muslim-dominated village that surrounds Anirvan’s school. The Muslims, as seen from the boys’ perspective, are poor, uneducated, unpatriotic, beef-eaters. The religious seeker (the yogi) turns to activism partially to change this perspective and help bring others into political consciousness. But this solution is not to be. While the novel exposes Left politics in Bengal for being unable to see people as persons, its own inability to see religious others (including those, such as adivasis and prostitutes, who appear in the novel) as possessing a self-meriting rebirth, makes it a plea for the world-view of the twice-born.
The novel’s true resolution to these problems is in its use of language: Orientalist tropes of an incense-ridden spirituality rendered in a syntax of erotic touch. The ability to transcend biological birth into spiritual rebirth requires the world-view of a group which can choose to return to ascetic life and then rejecting the hollow promises of the modern world. It is this twice-born world-view that the novel adopts and celebrates.