LITERARY REVIEW
By Himansu S. Mohapatra
When one hears that a former professor of English from Berhampur University has come out with a new English novel, rather quaintly named The Prince in Disguise, one is a bit weary to start with. One wonders if the author has found a new way to pay an old debt that he owes to English literature. Or could it be a case of ‘writing back to the centre’? The Varsity Reading Group ARIEL decided to find out. The group read The Prince in Disguise in its last discussion session held March 21, as mentioned by Orissa Post in its report dated March 19. The result, as this review also confirms, is fascinating.
Author Dharanidhar Sahu actually seems to fit neither of the available stereotypes of colonial mimic man or postcolonial avenger. But neither does he seem to conform to the generally-accepted description of the Indian writer in English who typically writes on themes such as immigration, nostalgia for home and mixed identities which appeal to the upwardly mobile section of the metro-dwelling Indian middle class. For one thing, his is a simple, moving and allegorical tale about people in a seaside town, something that has been declared undoable especially if one wrote in English from any of India’s numerous semi-urban and provincial locations. What is more, he has been creative and refreshingly original in his use of English – in the load-bearing sections of the novel at least – without being annoyingly self-conscious or fashionably experimental.
The prince of the story is no Hamlet, although he speaks to his Horatio – again no modern-day courtier, but a simple college librarian – using words that Hamlet had spoken before his death. But here is the twist that Sahu provides. Hamlet had asked Horatio to ‘absent thee from felicity’ only so that it will permit the telling of his own story, the story of Hamlet. In Sahu’s story, Lambodar or Lambu — as he is fondly called by Rajen, his Horatio — calls for the same ‘absenting from felicity’ for everyone as the very condition of sensitisation to human suffering.
According to Lambu, this is the true princely ideal and the discourse of the real world with its inevitable lack must be made to conform to it no matter how much Rajen might crib and complain. The words in the story are Shakespeare’s, but they are a vehicle of a philosophy that is distinctly of the East. It is in this way – which is the time-honoured way of R.K. Narayan – that Sahu writes an Indian novel in English. But, of course, this is only one of the ways.
The other way is the melding of English with a small-town setting and ambience. This charmingly allegorical story of a running wager between idealism and practicality, as symbolised by Lambu and Rajen in the main but also reaching down all the way to the cast of characters, is set in Gopalpur-on-Sea. ‘Much alike a floating nut I drifted into this seaside town,’ the novel opens thus in Rajen’s casual-seeming narration and stays focused unremittingly on this small locale for the rest of the 349 pages. But there is a pattern in the way it keeps things in or out.
There is a university just three kilometres from Gopalpur-on-Sea, a place where Sahu gave lectures on English literature for over two decades. This does not figure in the novel. Nor does the military base in Gopalpur get a mention either.
The distracting presence of the high and mighty thus excluded, Sahu is able to show us his simple folks and set their lives and loves amidst flowers, sands and the sea breeze. A line about a maid making a living with her little son conveys this flavour unmistakably: “Widowed at forty, she learnt poling her own punt upstream carrying her son in tow.” The author has clearly also explored his metaphoric possibilities in English.
Far from being a quaint throwback to a past, The Prince in Disguise is a compelling story about the ethical ways of life in the present. It can give Indian writing in English a much-needed shot in the arm.
The writer is a Professor of English at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar
