There is a section in Crowfall, Shanta Gokhale’s own translation of her Marathi novel Tya Varshi (That Year), in which a classical vocalist puts an aspiring singer through her paces. Sharada plays each of the seven notes and then announces, “You are using a false voice... a top voice. It comes from the throat, not from the chest cavity and stomach. You’ll have to work hard to find your true voice.”
Crowfall, at one level, is the story of a group of friends who find their individual “true” voices over a year. Anima casts off the shroud of grief and guilt she has worn for 12 years since the hate-murder of her husband. Ashesh, her brother, ends the domination of browns and greys on his canvases and opens up to black and colour. Feroze, another artist friend, finds path-breaking inspiration in the Mahabharata. Haridas, the commitment-phobic bachelor, discovers he has loyalties after all. And Sharada, the vocalist, dares to step outside the strict traditions of classical music after witnessing a massacre of crows (the incident that gives the novel its intriguing title).
These principal characters are bolstered by a fascinating cast of minor players: Sharada’s aggrieved guruji; Anima and Ashesh’s missing, presumed dead, father; their lonely, passive-aggressive mother Sindhutai and her self-appointed benefactor, Dr. Bhaskar; and the Warli artist Girji. Their secret insecurities, unarticulated unhappiness, well-meaning benevolence, non-verbalised forebodings ebb and flow around the narrative, influencing the actions and destinies in an echo of the massive Warli painting that Girji creates for Haridas.
The tumult in personal lives and artistic pursuits meshes seamlessly with what seems to be the author’s chief concern: The insidious changes in middle-class Marathi/Mumbai society over the cusp of the millennium. The most grotesque is undoubtedly saffronisation, which claims Anima’s husband, engulfs Sindhutai’s home in Surgaon, distorts the nature of art and, in other, less headline-creating ways, challenges the tolerant fabric of the city and its hinterlands. A parallel theme is the play of money in art, embodied in the monstrous relationship between a powerful patron and a budding painter, and in the career of a bright young journalist who is instructed to balance her critique of an art show with descriptions of who wore what.
In lesser hands, these subject-lines could have run the risk of being caricaturised or demonised. Not so with Gokhale: She believes in showing, not telling, allowing readers to enter her protagonists’ headspace, involving them in their growth and allowing them to formulate their own stands while leaving no room for doubt about where her sympathies lie. It is an unequivocal, unapologetic, yet non-judgemental style that treats the reader with at least as much respect as her subject matter.
Bringing additional heft to Gokhale’s serious concerns are her deep understanding of classical music and the contemporary art world, as well as an instinct for middle-class Mumbai, so often overlooked in literature that celebrates the city’s many extremes.
Intense and captivating, Crowfall is also a passionate argument for more translations of the best Indian language literature into English. I hope that the publishers are listening.