Literary Pilgrimages: Reading Manohar Shyam Joshi’s Kasap and its Aftermath
This is a short account of my failed literary pilgrimage to Gananath near Almora and the subsequent reflections to which it gave rise.
Some stories are like those versions of reality that cannot muster enough conditions in their favour to pass from potentiality into the real world. Isn’t fiction then failure par excellence — failure that fails to even be? That is, to be substantial enough for its failings to get noticed as a form of failure.
Fiction delves into the plausible more often than it rehearses the merely probable. It creates structures that lend plausibility to unlikely or even bizarre occurrences and houses them. Insofar as it does so, it also raises before us alternatives to what is, to the seemingly undeniable solidity of social constructs, of modes of reasoning, and of the beliefs and practices of our own milieu. But what makes this housing possible? Often, it is achieved by scratching off the rust of the overly familiar, the functional, and the now-become-domesticated, which coats what once was radically new.
For most Kumaoni folk, Gananath was once synonymous with succour for those academically languishing men of our fathers’ and forefathers’ generation who, after having diligently tried year after year to clear their matriculation examination, were now ripened enough in their suffering to warrant divine intervention to help them across the line; some kind of deus ex machina working in the real world.
I am told the peculiar location of the government intermediate college was such that perched on higher ground it afforded a clear view of the sole path winding to the top. And so the invigilators had their work cut out for them: to be on vigil for any ill-intentioned inspection squads raring to thwart the students inside, now producing pages after pages in facsimiles of ‘model answers’ that were to be found in the hottest guide books in those times.
And thus the deity at Gananath blessed countless Kumaoni men to join in with others in the ranks of lower-middle class Kumaoni lives. The cultural and economic cream might have comprised of scholars, army men, A grade officers, but here all lives were lived as if just secure enough to reproduce in their labour and lives the mores of a moribund culture, constantly accompanied by the awareness of their own precariousness.
In many ways Kasap is nothing if not the improbable, the brilliant and chaotic, that breaks out in the placid world of Kumaoni lives. It is a populace which is not so different from the petty bourgeoisie of any other milieu that aspires but only from within the safe, acceptable bounds of propriety and proscription. And the novel chooses Gananath’s cultural significance and geographical layout — over and above the convenience it became synonyms with — to map its topography of change and timelessness, love and loss, identity and aspiration, continuity and departure.
But why did I feel drawn to this place? What motivations drove me to Gananath? Did I imagine it to be like literary pilgrimages inspired by the perfectly preserved city in Joyce’s representations of Dublin or the burst of sounds, and sights that is Rushdie’s Bombay? And would it be any different in fate from the doomed search for Narayan’s Malgudi?
Then again it is not a question of simply being a geographically defined space. A place extends well beyond its physical limits to become a home, a rendezvous, a dispute, and even hallowed or haunted grounds. So things can’t be so straightforward in literature that implicates places with memory, history, myth, and identity.
If we were to look a bit closely we will find that, in the novel, Gananath strengthens the bond of the failed romance in the novel with the myth of the eponymous deity. In one of versions of the myth, before being deified, Gangachand renounced his royal title to become a monk and left home. Later, he fell in love with the local chieftain’s wife and when the scandal broke out Ganganath and the pregnant Bhanumati were killed by her jealous husband as they tried to make their way back to his native kingdom of Doti. The myth also mixes together asceticism, love, and tragedy — some revealing intertextuality about the novel and the place.
Encouraged by this, we also find another kinship, one that the figure of Gananath gathers together; that between the lover, the monk, the madman, and the artist. By choosing Gananath as the site where our protagonists are thrown out of themselves as decisive leaps are made in the narrative’s course, Gananath represents the necessary fracturing that dreams undergo as and when they materialise. DD would’ve probably liked to have had it all. However, the life he chose in the end was that of the artist who (because he had to?) spurned love. And while everything may seem futile now –achievements, accolades, reputation — and despite the constant ache of yearning that might have accompanied him all his life, the imperative that our dreams impose is not unlike that of the ‘had to’ of the previous sentence: it can only be asserted haltingly because any degree of conviction is belied by our own choices.
Perhaps individual choice and the regret born from it is another link that needs to be added to the chain that extends from place to history, myth, and identity. Novels can also invite one to invest them with our own yearning. Maybe that is one reason why we like to visit real world places that are linked to the acts of the imagination found in art. More significantly in case of Kasap, the novel’s structure also appears to mime one’s love and longing for these hills. All things considered, in reading you move from experiencing nostalgia for a bygone time to, in the end, the evocation of its painful intensity because the present has become unbearable for the protagonist.
But questions still persist. What makes Kasap work? Why did I feel so powerfully drawn to the place found in the novel?
Fiction puts into words what is widely felt but cannot find proper expression, a proper feeling identifiable, resonant with a people. And to find a work that achieves this is like experiencing again that pleasant shock, that frisson of excitement attendant upon the moment in which you discover your own reflection in a mirror or a screen. And art or representation is often associated with metaphors of reflection and imagery. For a Kumaoni like me, one can casually suggest that it is to see ones cultural habits, phonic texture of the speech, linguist idiosyncrasies, so deftly traversed — as only literature can — that probably made me go out in search of a real world connection to it.
Beyond localised, context based and often disparaged nativist reasons, the other potential ones are of literary merit, valid even when the reader doesn’t get affected powerfully enough to move (to the) mountains after reading one novel. Kasap is a tale told with sophistication and finesse. The outsized narrative presence in the work glides with cinematic ease between close ups of individual psychologies and anthropological panoramas of a culture, done with an ironic distancing that is native to its lingering quality mixed in with a telescoping outwards to philosophical and artistic concerns. It doesn’t let emotional outbursts, righteous anger, and assertions of class and caste supremacy stand unchallenged and constantly throws shades of world weary knowledge in the voice of a sympathetic but at the same time plain-speaking friend.
Can this be reason enough to head over to the landmark that finds mention in the work? What was I after in my journey to the hills of Gananath? I found that the idea of literary pilgrimage that suggested itself to me early on helped shed some light on what I so powerfully felt and yet cannot exhaust it with reference to questions of literary merit and cultural pride/bias. Literary pilgrimages generally involve visiting the places associated with authors, like Amsterdam’s Ann Frank House. Or, like the Leopold Bloom tour of Dublin, they recreate in real life what is an episode from the work. And with the latter example we have also arrived at a point where reality comes to mimic fiction. But let us go back to the term itself. Literary pilgrimage in order to be termed so would need to share in some characteristics of a pilgrimage.
What is a pilgrimage? In the simplest of terms, the pilgrim goes out toward some source of aura, and that powerful source of religious, spiritual power itself suffices as the cause of the journey. It wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that it is the aura of meaningfulness that prompts one to undertake it. So the end precedes the first step of the journey. In other words, an image conceived, before it is iterated in the real world, causes an act with its conclusion already borne in the mind. In some aspects isn’t pilgrimage the reverse of nostalgia — one subjectively seeks the answers in the past and the other actively goes outward to meet a promised revelation in the horizon of the future and conceives it as something out-there, to be found, touched, and once again experienced? So pilgrimage may be an appropriate term to define the movement that would extend the workings of nostalgia once it breaks out of its psychological, inchoate state — no less powerful for that — — either way, out of desperation or intent.
The salience of a pilgrimage also consists in the journey that is involved. It is a moving out of one’s comfort zones, exposing oneself to the elements, a movement into and through unfamiliar territory where the destination is suspended in the here and the now of challenges faced along the path.
Perhaps now we can move into question of literary pilgrimage that presented itself to me ever since I decided to undertake that failed trek to Gananath. Kasap brought out something that can only be found in a literary work — a nostalgia that structures itself into an enduring work, but paradoxically, where the journey — the experience of reading –substantiates the activity undertaken because the ending does not leave us in complete possession of meaning. In fact, the movement of the novel draws the reader themselves to a path of nostalgia that begins with the representation of the world — brought alive in the fullness of colour, sound, and mannerism negotiated by a knowing voice, and a sharp eye. Finally, the novel’s conclusion unveils the image of nostalgia itself, for everything that was left behind and sacrificed; a life never lived that now stands before us more powerfully evoked because so painfully yearned after, even as one has achieved all that was to be found out there in the world, far away from these impoverished hills .
The novel offers a sense closer to what many of us feel when we head for the hills: hopelessness with a mix of nostalgia and yearning that lends it a kind of sweetness; the sense of good old days lost, mixed with a grudging recognition that economics is the great invisible hand that makes this world go round. So the ugly commercial buildings — off putting in their matter-of-factness, trading in material necessities like concrete, brick, mortar, and electronics– have to be ignored. They announce the bare facts of life as they welcome you.
As for the ending of the novel, what are we to make of it? Is DD pathologised in his restive state that never lets him settle? Or, is love a force that restores as us more fully to ourselves — solicitude that restores us to solitude — so we become ourselves more fully? The ending cannot be generalised as the yearning of those who move away. Rather, it shows the idiosyncrasies of DD developed to the very heights of their individuation — a yearning for change that paradoxically itself remains unaltered, forever caught in the intensity of an emotion that gives the novel its name — Kasap.
