The Tattooed Fakir is a journey into a little known historic past of colonial Bengal. Biman Nath takes a hitherto unfamiliar snippet of the region’s past and weaves an intriguing tale of fate, destiny and revenge. Set between 1781 and 1816, Bengal is the seat of ambitious East India Company officers, exploitative indigo planters and martial fakirs and ‘sannyasis’. The backdrop of the plot is its most winning quality. Asif, a poor, heavily indebted farmer, finds himself cruelly robbed of his wife, Roshanara when the village zamindar takes a fancy to her and gets her kidnapped. But fate instead takes Roshanara to the British ‘burra sahib’ of the ‘neel kuthi’ (indigo house), Ronald Maclean. Maclean decides to keep Roshnara as his mistress, blissfully unaware that she is a famous fakir’s daughter. Roshanara gives birth to a mixed baby, Roshan and abandons him. The baby finds love and solace from the French manager’s sister, Anne. Helpless and deeply in love, Asif joins the fakir rebellion, that is attacking the East India Company’s endeavours, in a bid to one day rescue his Roshanara. But fate has an altogether different plans for Asif as he ends up taking his wife’s mixed baby to the fakir group.
Nath, a scientist, clinically plunges into the plot; he has no time for superfluous detailing. It helps keep the narrative crisp and focussed. The number of battle scenes between the fakirs, sannyasis and the sepoys of the East India Company cry out for more thrill, suspense and adrenaline-pumping action of the battle field which is sorely missed, especially in the climax. Nath succeeds in unravelling the inner strife within the central characters. Maclean’s hatred for the rich British class who mock him for his Scottish ways; Anne’s failed romance with a local and her own dislike for the inequitable French society provide worthy support to the protagonist’s own personal conflict with power and identity.
As Nath himself concurs, his second novel after Nothing is Blue shows what ordinary people can achieve when faced by extraordinary circumstances. The novel is as much a story about fate and revenge as it is about different kinds of loves; the heart-wrenching love between Asif and Roshanara, the confused longing of Maclean, a sahib’s, for a native peasant woman, a native father’s relationship with his wife’s mixed baby and a French woman’s affinity for the local people and music. It is also a quest for identity — one of the poignant underlying sub-plots of the novel. Roshan, who was named John by Maclean, struggles to understand his mixed lineage. The most memorable and perhaps also the most painful moment in the novel is when a young Roshan tattoos his face to make the other fakirs stop calling him a ‘white djinn’. It is an evocative indication of the emerging mixed race that would later come to be known as the ‘Anglo-Indian’. While Roshan as the tattooed fakir-boy soldier easily becomes the protagonist, there is yet another character who dominates the reader’s mind long after the book is shut. Asif, who changes from an illiterate farmer to an experienced revenge-seeking fakir, is as much the protagonist as Roshan. The novel is also a story of inscrutable loss.