Book Title: Tara: The Sati Series V
Author(s): By Koral Dasgupta.
Publisher : New Delhi: Pan Macmillan, 2024.
Pages and Price: Pp. 314. Rs 399.
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata continue to inspire writers even today, so rich is their narrative scope, so nuanced is their philosophical matrix. Koral Dasgupta is one writer who has been trying to rewrite episodes from the two epics from a contemporary perspective in English. Tara is the final book of the five-volume Sati series, which seeks to foreground the stories of the panchakanya, five women characters from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, from a feminist perspective.
The Sati series is important to take note of, for it evidences the renewed attention that our ancient literature and mythology command today. It demonstrates the perceived need to rewrite the texts in a more fair, just and egalitarian manner, giving a voice to the women characters who have been largely left relegated to the margins so far.
The series is a rich addition to the corpus of revisionist works that try in the modern period to recast the ancient texts in a feminist light. Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Bangla), Yashodhara Mishra (Odia), Sarah Joseph (Malayalam) and Sundara Ramaswamy (Tamil) are just a few of the writers who have done the same in their respective bhashas. But Koral Dasgupta’s series, spanning all of five volumes, is perhaps the most sustained effort in this direction so far.
Before this, Koral has focused on Ahalya, Kunti, Draupadi and Mandodari, and this time the focus shifts to Tara, wife of Bali, the monkey king. Most readers may remember that Bali and Sugreeva are twin brothers in the Ramayana who lead the vanara sena, or the army of monkeys. The monkeys, along with the bears, squirrels and many other creatures, help Rama fight the war of Lanka, defeat Ravana, rescue Sita and bring her back to Ayodhya.
In the war, Bali and Sugreeva are pitted against each other, and Rama, who has allied with Sugreeva, kills Bali through questionable means. In this book, Koral takes up this narrative and reinscribes it with a modern tenor, focusing on it from the perspective of Tara, BaIi’s wife.
The ancient texts often focus on the narrative primarily from the point of view of the male characters; this means that the perspectives of the female characters like Draupadi, Kunti, Mandodari, Ahalya and Tara remain unenciated; it is these women that revisionist writers like Dev Sen, Mishra, Joseph, Ramaswamy and Dasgupta give a voice to.
As in the other Ramayana volumes, here too, Koral depends primarily on Valmiki’s ur-narrative, but only up to a certain extent. She takes creative liberties and weaves in new complications and twists in the plots, thereby highlighting new philosophical concerns in her rewritings. One is struck by the finesse with which the author depicts Bali and Sugreeva, casting one as a foil to the other, and indeed by the inner strength, integrity and independence she accords to Tara, the first-person narrator of this novel.
Writing at this historic stage of human history, when ecology and the environment have assumed such great importance, gives Koral the opportunity of dealing with the animal world in a particularly nuanced way. The relationship of the animal world inhabited by Tara and her ilk with the natural world and the human world is explored with finesse.
Thus, Bali’s and Sugreeva’s positions on development and planning for the future with reference to their relation with nature are starkly different, and they represent oppositional discourses on ‘development’ today. Again, the relationship between Sugreeva, Bali, Ruma and Tara is complicated by the writer, and is depicted sensitively.
The rationalising of the apparently ‘unethical’ way in which Rama kills Bali to keep his promise to Sugreeva, too, is thought-provoking, and this debate provides the scope for the writer to display her skills at probing the psychological makeup of both Bali and Sugreeva.
The narrative is psychologically probing and brings out, among other things, the way the characters respond to how power is exercised in Kishkindha, the monkey kingdom. Another age-old debate that Koral’s novel foregrounds is the conflict between personal desire and the greater, common good, a conflict explored so sensitively while portraying the relationships between Bali, Sugreeva, Tara and Ruma.
Read More : From The Frontline
Koral’s style is remarkably fresh and innovative. Instead of offering a straight narrative, Tara throws a challenge in front of the reader. The narrative shuffles between past and present, life and death, this world and the world after and even resembles in many parts, the stream-of-consciousness narrative style.
The narrative, thus, takes readers on a roller coaster of a journey, pushing her in different directions before returning her to the main narrative after a plethora of digressions. In retrospect, one wonders if this is done deliberately by the author. What other narrative style, after all, could be more appropriate for the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which themselves are texts replete with gargantuan levels of digressions.
Like the previous four books in this series, Tara sports a framed Hemen Mazumdar painting on its cover, giving it a classic and vintage look. The pictures of the women on the covers of the five books highlight right in the beginning the importance of female subjectivity in this series—the focus right from the cover itself is on women—on the women characters who seem to have been shortchanged by the writers/ composers of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
The Sati series is important to take note of, for it evidences the renewed attention that our ancient literature and mythology command today. It demonstrates the perceived need to rewrite the texts in a more fair, just and egalitarian manner, giving a voice to the women characters who have been largely left relegated to the margins so far.
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