Gurnaik Johal’s novel Saraswati is as much a story about rivers as it is about people whose lives they dictate. It is divided into seven chapters, each named after a river of north-western India: Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum, Indus, Saraswati. Each chapter begins with an epigraph, and the one that heads Jhelum is the shortest. Just three words, and its slightly longer translation: Crescat e fluviis, ‘Strength from the rivers’, the motto of British Punjab.
It is a motto singularly apt for the book itself, a sprawling story of a family that begins in Punjab, spreads out across the world, and then circles back to Punjab. The story begins on a river, is tied up inextricably with rivers, and ends at the river for which it is named: the Saraswati.
In between the beginning and the end are tales that, river-like, rise and fall, go here and there. They are tied to the earth and are always, eventually, about strength, of whatever kind.
Saraswati begins with British-born Satnam returning to his ancestral village in Punjab with his parents following his grandmother’s death. As part of her legacy, Satnam’s Bibi has left a farm, as well as seven hand-embroidered phulkaris, which Satnam finds intriguing. Even as his parents wind up their work in Punjab and return to the UK, Satnam stays on. The well on the farm begins to fill up with water, and when scholars and scientists investigate, they conclude that this is the long-submerged Saraswati, coming to life again. The river rises, and with it rises a frenzy of Hindu nationalism, invoking the sacred river for public approval.
From Satnam, the tale moves back more than a century, to 1878. During a famine, a young woman named Sejal accompanies her sister, a bride, across the river to the sister’s new home. The old boatman has been replaced by a young man named Jugaad, and the chemistry between Sejal and Jugaad is instant. Their love story is the foundation of the novel: Sejal and Jugaad marry, much against the wishes of her family, and they name their children after the rivers of their land.
It is the descendants of these people whose stories form the intertwining threads of the main narrative. There is Satnam, of course. And Mauritius-born Katrina, trekking to Mount Kailash in an attempt to fulfill a desire of her late husband. There is Gyan, a musician and underground saboteur of timber operations in Canada. Nathu, a Kenyan archaeologist and scholar who finds himself at the center of the hectic activity surrounding the evidence to prove the importance of the Saraswati. Harsimran, a Bollywood stunt double who ends up in a Saraswati-inspired game show. And, finally, teenage Mussafir, across the border in Pakistan, who sneaks into India just so that he can finally meet his idol.
Each of these stories, melded together by an unnamed female journalist (also a descendant of Sejal and Jugaad), is like the phulkaris Johal describes so lovingly: vivid, colourful, so highly detailed that their characters come alive. Running through each of them, like the gold thread Sejal works into each phulkari, connecting one piece of cloth with the other, are common themes. Love and loss, for instance. Acceptance, learning to cope. Resilience. The destruction of the environment and the politicking around it. Bigotry, an inflated sense of pride in a hoary past one does not really know. A mad race for fame, for power and wealth, for followers on social media.
At nearly 400 pages long, Saraswati isn’t a short novel. But Johal’s style of writing is so fluid and readable, his characters so nuanced and real, that it never seems a slog. It is a story that shines a harsh light on our tumultuous, harrowing times—and, in its way, manages to inspire how to survive them.
