Sthree Dharma

[Bharatvarsh2]

Kavalu: Book Review

Thursday, 12. August 2010 - 4:37 PM



An important truth about SL Bhyrappa’s works is that they haven’t had the fortune of being reviewed by the best of critics. The huge tome of “criticism” that currently exists is just thinly-disguised abuse. Which is sad because given the huge amount of popularity and wide readership that his works enjoy, one would expect a fair amount of quality literary criticism. This phenomenon hasn’t spared his latest, Kavalu (Cleft), already in its 8th reprint in about 50 days.



As is their wont, the “criticism” that continues to emanate from professional Bhyrappa-baiters is centered mostly around the following themes:



It is an attack on the concept of feminism/gender equality.

Only the bindi/mangalsutra-wearing women aka traditional Indian women are “real” women and it therefore reaffirms SL Bhyrappa as a writer who upholds regressive values.

Its lays extreme and unnecessary focus on extra marital relationships.

There was really no need to write such a novel.

We don’t need to attach any weightage to these baiters because…well, because we know the script. However, it’s not untrue that Kavalu has disappointed even his most ardent fans and admirers who feel let down for many different reasons as we shall see.



Kavalu is first and foremost a novel, a literary work that needs to be analyzed as such. Things like theme, issues, feminism etcetra are merely incidental because it transcends issues and remains utterly faithful to the author’s oft-repeated dictum about his views on literature: a quest for truth, a strumming of the strings of the most fundamental impulses of human nature, and a conscious divorce from isms. This is one of the reasons why his works haven’t enjoyed quality criticism. An age of formulaic and agenda-based literature yields a similar harvest of literary criticism and critics. And plain laziness and lack of imagination to appreciate quality literature, a fact that Bernard Shaw condemned about 100 years ago:



THE rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. [Sequel to Pygmalion, 1916]



Although it’s arguable, Kavalu has no central “theme.” It explores a range of human impulses by placing its chief protagonists in specific situations set in a specific spacio-temporal and cultural context. These contexts assume special importance to understand the essence of Kavalu. The behaviour, attitudes, and responses to specific situations of the six principal characters of the novel make sense only in the contemporary cultural context of India.



Kavalu is a treatise of sorts on the decayed Indian family values that we see today everywhere. Although traditional Indian values still exist in tiny, fragmented pockets, they’ve been largely obliterated in urban India in which the novel’s characters are placed. This decay as the novel shows, is just another facet of the overall decline of values in the society. The novel’s focus is a deep examination of the age-old and still-widely-held idea of marriage-as-an-institution. When you read it, you can’t help but question this idea: is marriage really an institution anymore or is it simply a contract that you can end at will. Or, as we are witnessing, a contract that you can end at a whim. Or the fact that we’ve come to this pass in India where it was a sacred, dharmic institution. And the next inevitable question that accompanies this: why have we come to this pass?



What began about 30 years ago as a movement (honourable, genuine and justified in many cases) for gender equality has today metamorphosed into an untamed monster armed with the power of law. The culprit here, again, is a blind and crude import of Western feminist ideas. A few months ago, I wrote this about the brand of “feminism” that has spread it octopus-like tentacles across our cities:



…our intellectually-vacuous thinkers imported the worst of Western feminism into India and superimposed it on to the Indian society. Western feminism arose out of a genuine need in those societies—for example, women were denied voting rights till the 1960s, about 50 years ere now. Also, oppression of women in those societies was also one of the outcomes of the industrial revolution, which in its early days, spawned a ruthless form of exploitative capitalism. However, India was a victim of the industrial revolution. Indian women suffered no such oppression. Besides, the status of Indian women as worship-worthy was still secure, and was handed down over a few thousand years. Indian women had such models as Gargi, Maitreyi, Arundhati, and Draupadi to look up to while their Western sisters had none. A poor Joan of Arc or a Hypatia who were put to death. Today, a Mata Amritanandamayi is worshipped by men and women with equal devotion. When I last heard, she didn’t go about preaching Mallika Sarabhai-brand of female equality



The two chief female protagonists of Kavalu, Mangala and Ila in their own ways, stand as excellent examples of this development. Mangala represents a classic example of what happens when spurious feminism is mixed with naked manipulation. She seduces Jayakumar without seducing him and marries him through legal coercion. “Legal coercion” is the precise term to describe her act of unleashing a pack of ultra-fiery feminists headed by a Supreme Court-status feminist lawyer. Post-marriage, she demands her “legal right” to get sex from him and sets out to systemmatically wreck his life. Mangala’s character development is a must-study for every serious student of literature. Equipped basically with a very sick mind fed on a heady diet of academic indoctrination of misplaced feminism and garnished with third-rate feminist literature, she sees sexual connotations in a father’s affection for his mentally-challenged teenage daughter. Ila, her professor in college provides the said academic indoctrination. Mangala’s defining character trait is a severe intolerance of other people’s happiness. She is willing to accept any indignity if that provides her an avenue to manipulate her way up the food chain of materialism. She lets herself be used by a powerful businesswoman as an object of sexual pleasure. Her consent to sleep with Jayakumar, her boss, before she legally coerced to marry, stems from the same impulse. Her legal coercion doesn’t end there. She quotes the law when he refuses to have sex with her post-marriage and tops her previous record by putting him behind bars because he hit her. Yet, the extreme provocation from her side escapes her: “I’ve read Freud. I know your “love” for your daughter: you love the thrill of feeling a fourteen year old girl’s ripe, young breasts against you” followed by taunts about his manhood.



Mangala’s repeated invocation of the law to get away with patently manipulative and evil impulses simply shows, among others, these:



The nature of the law that enables, encourages, sustains, and even rewards these impulses.

The obvious heedlessness of the makers of such laws.

The defeat of the original intent and purpose of the law–i.e. to protect a wife against the atrocities of the husband and his family.

The boomerang effect of the law. In the name of protecting the wife, the law victimizes other female members of the family–the mother in law and sister in law.

The law in question happens to be the dreaded Section 498 of the Indian Penal Code. As to what it does, I’ll simply point you to this. This raises an even more vital question: to what extent should a free, civil society allow the law to interfere in the private lives of individuals? More fundamentally, what exactly is the function, nay, justification for laws to even exist? This seemingly absurd question arises in the mind when the author opens the gates to deeper inquiry on many things we’ve come to accept as normal. The old lawyer who counsels Jayakumar says, “Justice and law are entirely different things. Law doesn’t guarantee justice. Even the judges are powerless here–they cannot rule what is not in the law. The current practice is to squeeze as much (money) as you can.”



The picture that emerges is both disturbing and dangerous: we’ve mindlessly created a system that empowers Mangalas whose tendencies have been given ideological justification by the likes of Ila and provided with fangs by the law. While Mangala has absolutely no redeeming qualities, Ila, her lecturer in college, is a committed feminist in every sense. Her feminist convictions are solidified during her years as a postgrad student in England. When she returns, she seeks to impose those ideas in a society that’s entirely a different universe. Ila symbolizes the adage about every problem looking like a nail to a person armed with a hammer. An English lecturer, she manages to “detect” injustice to women in every work of literature–past and present. She preaches free sex to her students in a society much to the delight of her male students who’re only happy if their female classmates buy into the idea. Mangala buys in and has sex with Prabhakar, has an abortion, and then he vanishes before emerging again after she marries Jayakumar, and resumes where he had left off. Ila refuses to join her husband, Vinay Chandra when he’s transferred to Delhi because she thinks it lowers her dignity as a woman who has a mind of her own, career aspirations, etcetra. She embarks on an affair with a powerful minister, which ends disastrously for her. Ila’s character is exemplary for her conviction and fealty to her feminist ideas. She preaches what she practices but both her preaching and practice are distant from the reality of her cultural context. She never realizes this fact despite her own daughter’s disavowal of everything she stands for. Ila’s conviction that feminism is about truly liberating a woman from all bonds she sees as imposed by a male-dominated society doesn’t resonate with Sujaya. When the eighteen year old Sujaya questions her liaisons with the minister, Ila says her daughter has no claim over her personal life. In turn, she says Sujaya is allowed the same freedom and privacy on the condition that she must have protected sex. Sujaya’s conclusive reply is a slap on the face of Ila’s convictions: “I’m leaving you to go and live in the hostel precisely because I don’t want your kind of freedom.” Ila fails to not just fathom her daughter’s reaction but really, fails to understand her daughter as a person. And it is easy to see why: people who blindly albeit sincerely ahdere to an ideology are blinkered by the very ideology and live their lives in denial and seek to blame other people and factors rather than introspect. Ila blames her husband for “weaning” her daughter away from her by poisoning her mind against the mother.



If this sounds like a wholly one-sided view of gender equality and feminism, it isn’t. Perhaps no other contemporary author has managed to create memorable and lasting female characters as SL Bhyrappa has done: Nanjamma (Grihabhanga), Satyabhama (Daatu), Chandrika (Saartha), Thayavva (Tabbaliyu Neenaade Magane), Savithri (Saakshi), Ramkumari (Mandra), and Lakshmi (Aavarana) are not mere characters; they stand out as entire value systems. In Kavalu we find Vaijayanthi, Jayakumar’s deceased (first) wife and towers over him by the sheer force of her immense personal strength. She helps him build his business, makes his home and provides support to him in every way–from taking over administrative tasks at work to supervising the construction of their house to doing the interiors to instilling values in the daughter. Jayakumar recollects her personality, “a pleasant face that radiated love and warmth and gave the comfort and security that every man needs from his woman” and “not like Mangala who is forever battle-ready.” Which raises an important issue: how can we rescue the Indian family system as we know it from the clutches of the entire discourse on feminism/gender equality, which is based on rights? Any discourse based on rights carries with it a seed of conflict. And so it is with the clamour of feminists that has resulted today in largescale wreckage of families across the country. In the last 12 years, an estimated 170000 men have killed themselves unable to bear the harassment meted out by their wives armed with the dreaded IPC Section 498. And eligible bachelors now fear marriage. A discourse based only on rights is a product of ego, a concept alien to Indian ethos, which is based on duty. Indian values emphasized the need to shed ego because the sages who laid down our system of values realized that contentment and ego are antithetical. Those who talk about the Constitution-guaranteed fundamental rights of a citizen never talk about the same Constitution, which also lays down fundamental duties. Leading a duty-bound life implies sacrificing large portions of the ego. A law enacted on the basis of a rights discourse therefore ends up feeding the ego. The consequence, to repeat, is the industrial-scale societal destruction that continues to occur. Like most things in life, love and trust and respect in a marriage need to be earned, and to earn something, one needs to sacrifice something. When these things are demanded as a right, things fall apart. While Vijayanthi exemplifies the former ideals, Mangala epitomises the latter vices of character. Which make us question another widely-held assumption: that education/literacy inculcates decency and values. The characters of Jayakumar’s mother and Dyavakka, his loyal female servant show this quite powerfully. Dyvakka knows her place in the household and sticks with Jayakumar through his journey from prosperity to misery. She becomes more than a mother to Jayakumar’s daughter when Jayakumar is jailed for a few months. Jayakumar’s mother is another powerful character who emerges very late in the novel. A gutsy woman, she speaks on the strength of the values she’s found through living a hard life. Her moment of glory is when she visits her older son and daughter-in-law, responsible for sending her to jail on a fabricated charge: “You won’t understand this. He’s my son and he needs me now.” This is the other side of a rights discourse, which knows only punishment, but ignores the possibility of the moral courage it takes to forgive.



The male protagonists in Kavalu are pretty much weak and have no real depth of character. Jayakumar is a naive but hardworking and decent person who lacks courage to counter his exploitation in his own home and is powerless to stop his downfall. He gives in to his sexual impulses in a weak moment and spends the rest of his life regretting it. He finds sexual pleasure with call girls and when he’s jailed, he fails to brazen it out like others arrested with him do. In many ways, he’s a symbol of the New Emasculated Urban Indian Male while Vinay Chandra is the smart and sophisticated urban Indian male who doesn’t hesitate to manipulate to get what he wants though he’s not crooked by nature. He is deeply attached to his daughter and sets aside time to ensure that he’s always there for her. He doesn’t openly show the fact that he’s unhappy with Ila but uses his transfer to Delhi as a convenient opportunity to separate from her. He makes it sound like it’s her decision to stay separate. Vinay Chandra’s firm conviction in strong family values and his rustic background keeps him attached to his family back in the village. He wills his share of land to his poor brother and bears the hospitalization costs of his sister-in-law. His conviction makes him perpetuate these values across generations. He forges a warm bond between Sujaya and Satish, his brother’s son. Over time, the cousins become fiercely protective of each other and become mutual support systems. The other male protagonist Nachiketa, Jayakumar’s elder sister’s son, endures the travails of his own follies. As an impulsive young man, he migrates to the US, and first lives-in with a White woman who walks out of the live-in arrangement. He then falls for an older woman, divorced with two children. She traps him in a marriage and finally grants him “freedom” after stripping him of everything he has. In the end, Nachiketa returns to India in a quest to rebuild his life.



The male characters are symbolic of what’s happening to urban Indian men. They are no longer the “men of the house.” The first sign of assertiveness earns them the “brute” label, which now invites the wrath of Section 498 among other, similar laws. Their commitment to parents earns them the “mama’s boy” label while their acceptance of the wife’s whims gets them the “henpecked” tag. Whatever way you look at it, the urban Indian male’s life is a lifelong journey on the proverbial razor’s edge.



Despite this near-total breakdown of family life, Kavalu provides hope. Each of the men in the novel rebuild their shattered lives in their own way with the emotional support of the family and relatives. Jayakumar finds an avenue to heal his past by thinking about a consulting assignment and by tending more to his daughter. His mother and sister and Nachiketa stand by him while Nachiketa tries to redeem himself by marrying Puttakka, Jayakumar’s mentally-challenged daughter. Though a far-from-ideal marriage by conventional norms, he realizes that she possesses all the qualities that makes a marriage work: unqualified love and care and acceptance. However, the best sign of hope is that which emanates from our children. The highpoint of Kavalu is the email that Sujaya writes to Satish sharing her thoughts and concerns and fears about relationships and ends it with a touching request: “will you find such a groom for me?” In many ways, that email captures the essence of the entire work.



SL Bhyrappa’s talent for concealing dhwani, or suggestion, is brilliant as ever. The names of Ila and Mangala resonate with a range of possibilities. Ila, meaning “Earth” is significant because in the Indian context, Earth is regarded as Mother, sacred and worship-worthy because she gives life, supports, sustains, tolerates, endures, and forgives. In the novel, Ila’s personality is defined by a steadfast devotion to self-interest in the garb of individuality and freedom. Mangala, which means “auspicious” carries a similar undertone of suggestion: she unleashes a relentless torrent of misery from the moment she steps into Jayakumar’s life and home. Equally, SL Bhyrappa’s unparalleled mastery over the technique of unraveling the tale largely by delving into the minds of the characters remains intact in Kavalu. He’s one of the finest practitioners of maintaining aesthetic distance: characters tell the story, the author merely records them. The episode of minister’s wife–a crude, raw, and ferocious woman–who abuses Ila is one of the best illustrations of said aesthetic distance.



Kavalu is not one of SL Bhyrappa’s major works and rightly so. A novel that depicts a society populated by pusillanimous people cannot be profound. The India of today cannot produce towering personalities–any such personalities that still exist belong to an earlier era. At best, the today’s India can produce good and decent people: the office-going, festival-celebrating, law-fearing, pilgrimage-going and family-photo variety. Despite these limitations, Kavalu emerges as a work that will force you to ask tough and disturbing questions. Part of the reason why even SL Bhyrappa’s loyal readers and fans have felt “let down” by Kavalu is because it peeks into the reality of their own lives. This reality doesn’t necessarily need to be negative: ask people to introspect honestly and expect the obvious reactions of denial and defensiveness. Kavalu does this unlike all his other works, which deal with largely impersonal themes. It doesn’t have the epic sweep of Thantu, Parva, or Daatu or the unfathomable depth of feeling of Mandra or the intricate churning of fundamental philosophies of life in Sakshi. It is in many ways a canvas on which the author has simply drawn an outline: the reader needs to create the picture according to his/her own mental makeup, character, imagination, erudition, and experience. Whether an everlasting work of art emerges or a Hussainesque aberration ensues depends on the reader.



http://www.sandeepweb.com/2010/08/12/kav...ok-review/

Someone in the comments posted this link:

Of course, the men who take the tests already question their paternity, and for about 30 percent of them, their hunch is right. Yet as troubled as many of them might be by that news, they are even more stunned to discover that many judges find it irrelevant. State statutes and case law vary widely, but most judges conclude that these men must continue to raise their children — or at least pay support — no matter what their DNA says.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazi...anted=1&hp

There was a story in that article about a guy who was cuckolded and only found out about it during his divorce. His ex-wife married the biological father, and now the cuckolded guy pays CS to that family for its own biological child. Imagine the concept of of “justice” behind that — a man fucks your wife, gets her pregnant, and then gets her to divorce you and marry him while YOU pay him and his new wife to raise their own biological child. That's feminist "justice" for you.