Monday, March 24, 2003
Beyond All Heavens by Jayabrato Chatterjee
- Anjana BasuAnjana Basu taught English Literature, briefly, in Calcutta University. She writes poetry, stories, features in the local newspapers and in Cosmopolitan. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India. The BBC had broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In America she has been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review, and Recursive Angel, to name a few.
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Book Name:Beyond All Heavens
Author:Jayabrato Chatterjee
Publisher: Harper Collins India
Price: Rs. 295/
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AS ELABORATE AS THE TIME
Jayabrato Chatterjee is a writer who has the chameleon like ability to switch identities and styles with his period. He wrote, for instance, an essay on the life and times of Chowringhee and the Oberoi Grand, Calcutta which was very intimate in its nature and delightfully gossipy in its appeal, covering the history of a stretch of pavement and his associations with it with the eye of a born film maker. And he has now written a novel, his second novel, that covers an incredibly vast canvas, both in time and space and changed his style to do it, while still retaining that flavour of gossip.
It is the London of 1895-of Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and seductive West End actresses. Nikilesh Mitra is only nineteen when he steps into this dazzling world of excitement and glamour to study law, fresh from his vast house in Calcutta and his intermittent cause of commitment to the cause of independence from the Raj. Away from the initial rumblings of India’s freedom movement and his first love, he falls madly in love with Ruth Lavine, a ravishing actress of the music hall. Their affair becomes the grist for many Victorian gossip mills, but Nikhilesh has to return to his family in Calcutta and leave his love behind.
Half a century later, Maya, an English journalist, discovers a spiritual pamphlet on the Underground in London. It mesmerises her into coming to India – a land with which she shares a tenuous link. Violent riots blaze across the country as Maya arrives in Bombay in 1947 and promptly sets out to interview an eccentric Maharani. A series of events unfold as Maya confronts the mysteries of her past and unravels a family secret that has haunted her all her life.
So says the blurb on the back cover. However, Jayabrato Chatterjee’s book goes far beyond this description. Beyond all heavens, as the title goes. The story is about depths of grief and despair, and its burning counterpart, love and passion, told in a style that matches the time in its elaborate formality.
The story is also about the writer’s erudition -his knowledge of turn of the century London and Paris is precise and detailed. He quotes, for example from The Perfumed Garden of Sheikh Nefzaoui, recently translated by Sir Richard Burton. He also anchors Nikhilesh’s love story against the background of Oscar Wilde’s arrest for sodomy.
The texture of Beyond All Heavens in some senses recalls Bakimchandra Chatterjee’s RajMohan’s Wife, or perhaps, more aptly, Bakimchandra's Bengali novels with their intricately described palaces and their beautiful women in their gold mebroidered saris. The elaborate style is deftly matched to the elaborate era. A period when rooms were over decorated with velvet, gilt and plush, whether they were in England or England ruled India. When the excesses of the Russian Ballet and Bakst were beginning to make their presence felt along with that of the aesthetes who paraded down Piccadilly clutching a poppy or a lily. Indian traditions, some of them excesses of their kind, rub shoulders with western excess. Swami Nityananda sits on a tiger skin under a Baccarat chandelier, breaking his fast with grapes. The two civilisations co-exist edgily as the story moves from India to Europe and back again and the drama threatens to escape out of control and never does.
Apart from materialism the book has a deeply spiritual side. In fact the two halves are linked by spiritualism. Maya seeking to find a meaning for her existence, Swami Nityananda, a guru seeking the raison d’etre for sorrow. The eunuch Pooran Miyan filled with questions about his own identity. Perhaps it is because of the spiritualism that the gilt and ornateness of the story stand out so compellingly.
Now one looks ahead to another book from this multi faceted writer. An intimate novel of low doings and high life with a delightful insider’s edge. We’re waiting, Jayabrato.
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