Publisher: Ratna Books, New Delhi (2023)
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PART 1 of 4
The Sahitya Academy, Sangitha Nataka and Padma Shri Award winner for Tamil Literature, Indira Parthasarathy (aka Dr. R.Parthasarathy) translated into English his own earlier Tamil novel this book with the endearing title “Forever Yours, Krishna”, first published in 2006 and now reprinted in 2023.
The translation is a delight to read since it lets one easily imagine what excellence the Tamil original must have had on offer. I finished reading it, put it down and paused to ask myself how I might describe the book if asked to do it in one word. The word “potpourri” popped up immediately in my mind.
The dictionary meaning of potpourri is:
“an unusual or interesting mixture of things”.
This novel is quite a medley of mythological retellings. It would be difficult to follow its storyline for any foreigner or a reader unfamiliar with the great Indian epics on which it is wholly based. A reader who is ignorant of the ancient Hindu classics will find this novel rather disorientating — it teems with just too many events and characters all extracted straight from the epics but without the usual contextual build-up to them found in the original. This novel faithfully pursues the storyline of the original Sanskrit epics and simply assumes the reader already knows everything about the background of its depictions.
For those readers, however, who are already well acquainted with the Hindu “itihaasas” and “puraanas”, this novel is indeed a potpourri in the very best sense of the word i.e.
“a mixture of dried petals and leaves from various flowers and plants that is used to give a room a pleasant smell”;
This novel of Indira Parthasarathy is indeed an extraordinary mixture of many stories taken from the purana and itihaasa genre of India, all culled from the Hindu scriptures such as the Harivamsham, Srimad Bhagavatham, Vishnu Purana and the Mahabharatha. They are indeed what one might call the dried petals and leaves from various flowers and plants of ancient Indian literary traditions. Indira Parthasarathy has collected and stitched them all together skilfully in a literary floral bouquet, as it were. And it fills the reader’s mind with a sweet and pleasant storybook scent that just continues to linger long even after the last page has been turned.
The novel in translation is so languid in prose that it reminded me of R.K.Narayan’s simple but arresting style. It retells the enchanting biography of Krishna from start to finish with dramatic but unpretentious verve and gripping excitement. The storyline might be simple in structure but a few of its themes are not. They are disturbingly complex and ambivalent in moral implication.
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The themes of “Forever Yours, Krishna” must be enjoyed at different levels of aesthetic appreciation: as (a) literary contrivance, (b) socio-cultural political allegory (c) commentary on the morals of sexualityand (d) the conundrum of relativism Vs. absolutism.
(a) Literary Contrivance:
Retelling of Hindu mythology is an old and revered tradition in India. According to A.K.Ramanujam, there are at least 300 versions of the Ramayana extant today in various parts of our vast country. There are perhaps an equal number of native and regional recensions too of the innumerable stories and sub-textual fables of the Mahabharatha. Most of the translations into English however of the two great itihaasas are usually pretty straightforward and linear in structure and construction. The most popularly read English language renditions of the Ramayana and Mahabharatha for a long time have been Rajaji’s (C.Rajagopalachari, the great freedom fighter) who during periods of long incarceration in many British jails, took time out to faithfully write his recension of both the epics.
Indira Parthasarathy’s biography of Krishna is unusual in the sense that it veers away from the traditional pattern of recensions. It adheres in almost all parts very faithfully to the original mythology, its storylines, themes and dramatis personae but it resorts to a rather different literary contrivance to tell the story of Krishna in contemporary idiom and style. Let him explain his recension in his own words:
“In the Sri Bhagavatham, Suka hears the story from Vyasa and narrates it to Parikshith, who is destined to die within a week. In this novel, the dying Krishna himself narrates his story to Jara, the hunter, who, in turn, chooses Narada, the eternal cosmic traveller, to tell us in his own way what he has heard from Krishna.”
Jara, as we know from the Mahabharatha and Bhagavatham is the forest hunter who accidentally but mortally wounds Krishna in the last days of the latter’s avatar on earth. Krishna in those last, dying moments narrates to Jara his life-story. He tells Jara:
“I want you to narrate my story, defining the significance and essence of my role during this lifetime of mine, so that generations that come thousands of years later will be able to understand me and relate to me in another time and space”.
After Jara leaves Krishna behind to shed his mortal coils, he is accosted by Sage Narada who is curious to know what transpired between him and Krishna. And Jara then says this to the rishi:
“Krishna narrated his story to me and asked me to tell it to others. I feel that his story needs to be told in a language which can always be understood and that you are the right person to do it because you are the eternal cosmic traveller. You are in a position to spread the story of Krishna, I shall tell it to you word for word, and you can compose it in your own language and narrate it to others. This is my humble request, My Lord”.
Sage Narada it is who thus eventually becomes the narrator – he who “spreads the story of Krishna” in this novel, tasked by Jara to broadcast to the world, and to posterity, a second-person account of the story while Indira Parthasarathy — he will be referred to as “IP” in the rest of this review — assumes the persona of Narada and retells it again as a third-person account.
This literary contrivance serves the novelist very well. Placing himself in the position of a third-person raconteur, he is twice-removed from the original narrator’s account of Krishna’s story. That gives him a lot of literary latitude if not liberty to tell the story in his “own language and narrate it” in any which way he wishes“so that generations that come thousands of years later will be able to understand me and relate to me (Krishna) in another time and space”.
The literary latitude that IP takes, in fact, he admits quite openly: “Don’t try to cross-check what I am saying with the Srimad Bhagavatham, the Mahabharatha, the Harivamsham or the Vishnupurana. As I told you, it was an exclusive story revealed personally by Krishna to Jara. When you narrate this to others, you are free to say that Narada told you the story, based on what Jara had heard from Krishna. However, your narration would be based on your vision and perception of Krishna.”
IP thus deftly identifies himself with a “cosmic traveller” – the immortal biographer of Krishna, Narada… and hence the rather suggestive title the novel is given: “Forever Yours, Krishna”.
Inside the heart of every novelist, writer or any creative artist for that matter, lingers a deep yearning for immortality. It is secretly nurtured hope that his or her book or work might turn out to outlive him for a thousand years or more, and remain in the hearts of generations to come that would continue cherishing it dearly.
The story of Krishna in the Bhagavatham, Harivamsham, Mahabharatha and Vishnu Purana is indeed an immortal one, authored by the sage of immortal fame too viz., Veda Vyasa. But when a novelist of the present times sets out to refashion the Krishna story and retell it in his own image and in a recension that is his very own, it becomes — in a brilliantly executed subliminal sort of way – a literary contrivance by which a scintilla of Veda Vyasa’s own immortality is sought to be appropriated.
(to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi