How the wheels of oppression keep turning

With her latest novel, Rising Sons, Nambisan expands on the village-meets-modernity framework and elevates it to a wholly different level, crafting a compelling familial saga while at it. The fictional setting this time is Kesarugattu, a few hours away from Mysoor, and the era is the 1920s-40s. The patriarch is the uber-Brahminical Devaraya, living amidst a large number of lower-caste people, including the Ai tribes indigenous to the region. He works as a peon at a bank in Mysoor and uses his experience to open a “money house" in his village. Devaraya’s wife Gowru and their children—Nanju the conscientious elder son, his sickly younger brother Anna, and sisters Chinni and Bhavani—are the other key players.

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Through their lives and choices, especially Devaraya’s, Nambisan shows us how the “said and unsaid rules of religion and caste" (not to mention, gender) play out in Kesarugattu and, by extension, in pre-independence India. Devaraya himself is the exemplar of Brahminical hubris. He is strict about “caste hygiene". He frowns on his sister’s best friend for marrying a lower-caste Malayali and keeps an eye on what his children are eating. But, as we learn later, when he’s away in Mysoor, he is known to enjoy eating meat himself.

Nambisan orchestrates this revelation through the eyes of Nanju, fifteen and already chafing against his father’s restrictive ways. Devaraya has big plans for him and it’s this straightforward patrilinear chain of caste-supremacy that’s broken when the scales fall from Nanju’s eyes. Eventually, the son sees the father being excluded from British-only spaces, despite waiting on his British superiors, hand and foot. The white man excludes the brown man, who, in turn, excludes someone with even darker skin—round and round goes the wheel of oppression.

Like her fellow doctor-writers Abraham Verghese and Siddhartha Mukherjee, Nambisan writes especially powerfully about corporeal decline. While attending a sacred thread ceremony, the already-frail Anna is affected by a mighty thunderclap that initiates hearing loss in his left ear. Over the next few days, the reader is kept close to Anna’s thoughts as he tries to make sense of the change overcoming his body. This magisterial section is reminiscent of Nissim Ezekiel’s classic poem Night of the Scorpion, which also featured a sick child in the throes of delirium.

Anna’s hapless parents subject him to a battery of physicians, both actual doctors and local “healers". After trying a range of responses with diminishing returns, the doctors declare him healed, just like that. Their wallets no longer bleeding, the parents are relieved, while the patient continues to suffer in silence.

That this is an indictment of organised healthcare—not just the systems of the 1920s but also the systems of today—is made abundantly clear by Anna’s sister Chinni, who suffered hearing loss as a toddler and has learnt to “adjust" ever since. She tells her brother that the two of them should stick together and go through life “as a team", she to his right side always since her right ear and his left ear no longer work (“Right-left! Of course! Right-left").

Nambisan is telling us that in the face of bodily decay, societal structures as they exist today will inevitably let you down. At the end of the day, the disabled will have only each other to fall back upon.

A salient aspect of the village’s arrival at modernity is, of course, the residents’ induction into the ways of capital. Crucially, the intertwined magic of interest and compounding is introduced by Devaraya’s bank. The scene where Keshava, the pujari, finally approaches Devaraya, looking to deposit a portion of his wealth at the money house, is a masterclass in understated humour. The priest has a superiority complex as a Brahmin, he is “above" the grubby business of money-making and fiscal prudence, associated with dusty old financial ledgers. Now he must surrender to Devaraya, who, on his part, must try not to rub it in, lest he loses his hesitant customer.

Anybody reasonably well-versed in the social sciences can deliver a dry summary of the intersectional encounter between money, religion, caste dynamics and gender relations. But an experienced novelist like Nambisan, operating at the top of her game, does so while advancing character and plot, indulging in gentle comedy.

Thanks to the recent Netflix adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, one was reminded of how a single village or town can become a metonym for the dreams and challenges of a nation. Rising Sons does something similar with Kesarugattu, and unlike Marquez, Nambisan never resorts to deus ex machina narrative solutions.

‘Rising Sons’ will be on sale end January. Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.

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