Premise: 'The Three Princesses of Kashi' by Shashi Deshpande reviewed by Brinda S Narayan

The Three Princesses of Kashi by Shashi Deshpande

Reviewed by Brinda S Narayan

Fortunately for Indian readers, many of our myths are being reinterpreted and retold by accomplished and brilliant writers. Among the more well-known reworks, Chitra Banerjee Divakurni’s The Palace of Illusions casts Draupadi in a new light, while Samhita Arni’s Sita’s Ramayana reminds us that the epic wasn’t just about Rama’s virtuousness and his forfeiture of the throne.

Shashi Deshpande, who negotiates modernity and tradition with a characteristic flair, evokes a similar discomfiture with the male-centred narrative of the Mahabharatha. In a powerful retelling of the circumstances that fuelled the birth of the two progenitors of the feuding cousins – Pandu, the father of the famously-principled Pandavas, and Dhritarashtra, the blind, remorseful father of the arrogant Duryodhana and his ninety-nine brothers. Deshpande foreshadows the violent battle that was to ensue in the very savage treatment of the two abducted sisters – Ambika and Ambalika. Being the sophisticated writer that she is, she does not explicitly use the word “rape”; after all, women in that era, would not have had modern legal jargon to describe the assaults they had been subjected to. But she depicts in excruciating detail how the two births were seeded in a muffling of female agency, in the outright subjection of female voices and bodies to kingly imperatives. She also derides the conventional notions of “penance” – usually posited as a “male sage” who eschews physical and sexual desires, standing on one leg in a cold, mountainous region or cave.  How can such a “penance” compare with the “sacrifices” forced on women – the sexual assaults, followed by an unwanted pregnancy, a painful birth and then the wrenching away of their sons, who have to perform their warrior duties. At every stage, women have had to disregard their own desires to prop up insecure or ambitious men.

Deshpande often writes about people whose lives are buffeted by forces that are not of their own choosing. And who then have to don a pretence of normalcy or contentment while keeping darker currents at bay. While this can very well be the lot of any marginalised group in history, it has been the particular experience of women, who have had to contend with wide gaps between their “masked” public personas and their roiling subterranean selves. But equally, Deshpande is also aware of female power, of Shakti, and how this force, both in emotional and psychological terms, thrashes into male consciousness, by blessing and cursing male oppressors into feeling rashly triumphant but thereafter, abjectly repentant. Or at least subjected to a similar anguish. Or at least women can hope that justice is meted out. In light of the contemporary #MeToo movement, and with punishments awarded or withheld, this tale, narrated with sensitivity and élan, carries a heightened significance.

Read Shashi Deshpande's 'The Three Princesses of Kashi', in Out of Print 36, December 2019.

Reviewer Brinda S Narayan's story @ The Shanghai Tea House appeared in Out of Print June 2013.

#Premise features Narayan's review of Jayant Kaikini's 'The Threshold' translated from Kannada by Pratibha Umashankar-Nadiger.

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Premise: 'The Threshold' by Jayant Kaikini, translated from Kannada by Pratibha Umashankar-Nadiger, reviewed by Brinda S Narayan

The Threshold by Jayant Kaikini

Translated from Kannada by Pratibha Umashankar-Nadiger

Reviewed by Brinda S Narayan

George Seurat, the founder of Pointillism, was a ‘shy, reclusive’ man who died at the young age of 31. In his Pointillist works, Seurat daubed tiny dots of color, one dot at a time. The eye in turn optically mixes the colors to create a sort of ‘luminous yet harmonious intensity’.

In ‘The Threshold’, the Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini creates a painstakingly constructed short story that shimmers with the luminosity of a Pointillist painting. As the critic C N Ramachandran writes in the introduction to Dots and Lines^*, Kaikini belongs to the breed of Kannada writers that picks ‘precise and authentic details of daily life’, organising them to culminate in a particular type of experience. ‘The Threshold’ infuses the squalor and sordidness of Mumbai’s streets with a magical realist quality. It centres around Muchchi Mian’s modka dukaan, ‘a shop dealing in discarded body parts of dilapidated houses and old furniture’.

Into his broken-parts shop, an old wooden dressing table ushers in a ‘celestial being,’ ‘engrossed in her own reflection’. She flits in and out of his shop, sometimes evaporating behind curtains of dust, sometimes just leaving traces of her scent behind. Inside his shop, between a door-less fridge and over a rusty stove, Mian starts seeing glimmers of domestic bliss and romance, the illusory woman ‘anchoring Mian’s makeshift life’. Even when the municipal truck carries his stuff away, the fact that she heard him scream ‘was the only reality that mattered’.

Reading ‘The Threshold’ forces us to look more mindfully at the discarded lives that inhabit the city’s nooks and crannies, to pay attention to the poetic details that may elude the rushing commuter or scurrying pedestrian.

^*Dots and Lines by Jayant Kaikini, Indialog Publications, New Delhi, 2004, translated from the original Kannada Amritaballi Kashaaya, edited by Vishvanath Hulikal. 

Reviewer Brinda S Narayan's story @ The Shanghai Tea House appeared in Out of Print June 2013.

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