DIAL N FOR NATURE
Vivaan Shah’s latest is an homage to the Victorian whodunit as well as a critique of ‘development’
In
detective or adventure stories from the Victorian era, there is usually a clearcut demarcation of narrative function from page one—there is the relatively strait-laced, conventional narrator, and then there is the ‘explorer’, a maverick of science and exploration. Some say this archetypal character is derived from the medieval Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte, specifically the stock character ‘Dottore’ (‘the doctor’). Think of John Watson and his first meeting with Sherlock Holmes, for example. In Vivaan Shah’s third novel, The Forsaken Wilderness, this style of character-pairing is employed—but with a twist, in that we’re never quite sure of the narrator-protagonist’s motivations or the precise trajectory of his past. Shah’s strait-laced but still crafty narrator is a civil engineer working for an unnamed ‘infrastructure development’ enterprise whose name he “cannot utter for fear of banishment”. The ‘Dottore’ he meets is Professor Charan Prakash Chaturvedi, mountaineer, environmental studies scholar, and part-time botanic healer, who heads the Himalayan Rock Climbing Adventure Institute of Mountaineering and Research. When the said institute falls into financial troubles, Professor Chaturvedi (on the advice of his swami, the hilariously named “Shree-Shree Guru Dev Atal-Anivaarya Natija”; ‘natija’ means ‘outcome’, literally) embarks on a dangerous, historically fatal pilgrimage up to Ranibaug, an elusive peak that has not seen human hands and feet for a long, long time. What our adventurers find up on Ranibaug changes their preconceived notions of science, religion and the interstices between the two. The Forsaken Wilderness is informed by the Jim Corbett-style adventure story as well as a bunch of genres dominant in the Victorian era: Gothic horror, the ‘closed room’ mystery, the science fiction thriller. And there’s much to enjoy about this performance—Shah is very good at mimicking the linguistic patterns of Victorian-era fiction (there are plenty of expressions like “the aforementioned misfortune”, “pursuant to”, and “aberrational fantasies of the most unreasonable kind”). He even manages to extract moments of parody during several high-stakes adventure scenes. But The Forsaken Wilderness is more than the sum of its genre-parts. Philosophically speaking, it is also a passionately argued lament against the narrative of ill-conceived and shoddily executed ‘development’. The nudge-wink joke about the ‘infrastructure development’ firm is the first of many pointed statements Shah makes in this context. It’s also clear that he has a great deal of nostalgia for the Allan Quatermain school of wideeyed adventure stories, where noble and kind-hearted explorers discovered untold secrets—crucially, without sacrificing their souls or their integrity. Take this passage, for example, where Shah is talking about an earlier generation of explorer-adventurers: “Our forebears had not half our means at their disposal when contemplating the earth and its mystery, yet they envisaged order, exercised a will upon their external world, contrived battlements, lead one kingdom to another… in favour of arranging dominion over the unconquerable infinite; shook their fists at the almighty when chance partook of their voyages and lead us to the flowering of another age when their accomplishments would hold fruit.” The Forsaken Wilderness is not only a solid, entertaining genre mashup, it’s also a heartfelt pushback against the current zeitgeist, which sees environmental concerns as exaggerated and out of touch; an era where “progress shall reign supreme and nature shall dance to the banshee shrieks of blaring lorry-horns”.
In The Forsaken Wilderness, Vivaan Shah manages to extract moments of parody from high-stakes scenes