How can I review Two Anti-Novels when nothing in my experience has prepared me for this? These are not two novellas or their antithesis as the title promises. These are disruptions. They are brutal and brutally intimate negations of all that has gone before. This is a book that isn’t a book as we understand letters or reading; and has no right to be.
The brightest and best literary minds of the subcontinent tend to write within fairly prescribed limits of what a novel may be and can do. Over decades both readers and writers have grown comfortable with the notion that a format is watertight and creativity must of necessity play with content albeit within accepted parameters that define that art form.
But then, almost all writers today write to be published and preferably published with a handsome advance and neon-lit publicity. To Subimal Misra, writing is a life work—his politics and his lament. In making his pen speak for the voiceless in India, he leads this powerful litany to no god.
Make no mistake, this anti-novel is almost impossible to read while being so significant that it must compulsorily be read by every serious reader; in fact each of us in need of an alternate education. This is not literature as it is but as it ought to be. The text perplexes.
It is a constant flood of shorts, unconnected thoughts, snippets of information and sketches of unnoticed lives. There is no cast of characters. People appear without introduction and may fade out of that startling narrative altogether after that small incident is spoken of. The tales are of deaths, hundreds of gruesome avoidable deaths, abject poverty, child exploitation and just too many instances of rape.
“Bombs drop on the courtyard. Bombs drop on the bedroom. Bombs drop on the bed. Three bull-like zombies dragged his wife and laid her on the dining table.”Actually This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale tries to depict a common tale, of a tea garden worker aka a Naxalite beaten to death in police custody. However too much intrudes. Through a bewildering montage of rapidly fading snapshots, short anecdotal tales or news items, the author piles on the exact abundance of violent images that have contributed in desensitising us to the cruelty around us.
The structures of politics in our democracy and how they rely upon exploitation as also the economics of corruption is dissected and laid across the cold ice of our reason.Our idiocy and cultural mores around sex occupy a certain space in When Colour is a Warning Sign, though in reality this is a difficult set of writings that challenges all our notions of narrative and the normative.
Authorship breaks away as often from sense as from our need for cause and effect, that addiction to easy linkages. Like broken bits of mirrors and lenses, these cohere powerfully to construct thought microscopes, an alternative mode of observing reality.
“The complete list of sex offences is known to many. Polygamy is a tendency in man. Not all are mentioned in this text. For instance, the colour purple. Who on earth would openly give it company?”
A quick shout out to the wonderful translator V Ramaswamy for taut writing that reads as original, so unlike translations. The cover design by Anna Lena von Helldorff is breath-taking.