Sultana Daku existed and there is much documentation to substantiate that historical truth, but even before Sujit Saraf came out with his novel — The Confession of Sultana Daku — he was already a literary figure. The nautanki theatrical tradition made sure that his sordid tales of banditry were rendered memorable folklore. So the point is quite simply this — Sultana Daku is not an invention, and despite a colourful palette, Saraf squanders many an opportunity and does little with the served set piece. He is simply not inventive enough.
The book starts off with promise. The night before Sultana is to make his way to the gallows, he smokes up some charas, and sits down to dictate a letter for his son, where he details his escapades, conquests, loves and losses. His interlocutor is a certain Samuel Pearce, a British officer who once believed that he knew his India. Since the night of dictation is the 7th of July 1924, one can perceive some colonial tension. The quasi-epistolary form of the novel is broken by Pearce’s own journal entries that largely perform the function of being corrective footnotes, and correction, you soon realise, is essential because Sultana’s narrated autobiography is one exaggerated fable of machismo and bravado. Since the letter is long and the journal entries few in number, you sometimes feel like a priest locked in a box listening to a confession that is juicy at first, but then threatens to never end.
Sultana does have an unconventional childhood. His grandfather teaches him how to lodge a bullet in his mouth, one of the many tricks of the thieving trade. At 13, he crawls though a drain “wearing the king’s crown but covered in his shit”. Though the image of King George’s diamond-studded coronet on the head of an adolescent Indian dacoit seems blatantly subversive, literary rebellion draws to a halt as Sultana embroils himself in the politics of his gang and wreaks havoc in unfortunate villages.
In Saraf’s hands, Sultana becomes nothing more than your everyday bandit, incapable of escaping the subjective limits of his criminal profession. Even when
he burns down all of Mianpuri, imagining himself to be a messenger of Kali, Sultana does not inspire wonder. Though Saraf’s prose here and elsewhere is precise, his excessive attention to detail leaves you listless, and the gore fails to invoke the horror it deserves.
The introduction of Sultana’s nemesis, police superintendent Freddy Young, brings with it a sense of engaging conflict that the other battles lack. The nautanki performer Phulkanwar cross-dresses her way to some delight, but soon resigns herself to being a pawn in an otherwise predictable Othellean turn of events. Jim Corbett makes a cameo appearance as Carpet Sahib, only to make you wonder if you should exchange the novel in your hand for a re-reading of Man-eaters of Kumaon.
On many occasions, Sultana feeds his delusions of grandeur with comparisons of himself to Gandhi, Jesus and Ram, but it is Pearce’s early analogy of the drongo that stands out in the end. The drongo’s “strategy for survival”, writes Pearce, “rests wholly on its ability to mimic larger birds. It is a cheat, a fraud, a sort of criminal bird. It is in fact like a bhantu tribal, whose very blood is suffused with crime.”
Not only does the bhantu dacoit Sultana agree, there are enough instances where it is explicitly said that Sultana’s penchant for thoughtless bloodletting is essentially a result of his bhantu blood. It is this inadvertent espousal of caste determinism that makes the book’s politics irreversibly problematic. Towards the end, Sultana concedes that it is perhaps conditioning and not blood that forms one’s character, but this charitable conceit is too little to redeem him or the novel. Also, it comes far too late, and appears a mere bone thrown to appease those over-interpreting liberal types.
It is surprising that Saraf, whose first novel, The Peacock Throne, was such a marvellous polyphony of disparate voices, has created a work that is this flawed. The idea of nautanki seems to carry with itself the potential of unbridled madness and unknown surprise. This novelistic confession sadly has neither. If you have read the blurb, you’ve read the book.