| India in the late 1940s was undergoing great change. The period of British rule was ending, Gandhi was assassinated and, like many other nations, it experienced the increasing pressures of new industry competing with older cultural ideals. It is out of this dynamic period that Shree Ghatage has written her new novel Brahma’s Dream. Through the eyes of a young girl, Mohini, Ghatage has created a tightly-knit family drama that becomes a reflective portrait of the birth of modern India.
Mohini is born with a rare disorder, Cooley’s anemia, which restricts her physically but gives her a unique slant on the world, and a central position within her family. Her mother Kamala is devoted to her, but unable to have more children. Having to keep up with the pressure of taking care of Mohini, she finds her marriage to her husband Keshav continually strained.
Keshav is an engineer who loves his family, but finds himself becoming a stranger within it. There is also Vishnupant, Mohini’s grandfather, whose wisdom gives her a framework to construct and challenge her views. Her aunt Vasanti doesn’t have her own family, and needs Mohini’s love as much as she gives it. Surrounding them is Bombay in 1948 – dynamic and bustling and, like Mohini’s family, undergoing changes of its own.
Unlike many historical novels, Ghatage has the history adhere to her characters. Her prose is carefully polished; there’s nothing gratuitous in the details, and the reader finds the history seeping in around the edges. This decision didn’t have entirely stylistic foundations, as the Calgary-based author explains.
"My sister had Cooley’s anemia and I had wanted to explore it for a very long time," she says. "Mohini has Cooley’s anemia, but Mohini isn’t my sister and my sister isn’t Mohini. My sister was the inspiration; she was an extraordinary person with the same kind of courage and curiosity that Mohini has. When I started going into Mohini’s head, I began to think of how people like her who are ‘disadvantaged’… cope with life, and I realized that there’s an inner life that is happening all the time, and that is a spiritual life."
Ghatage provides a welcome addition to Indian history, filled with details and information that readers may not have encountered before. Most of what western audiences know about the independence movement comes from works such as the film Gandhi and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. However, there are new interpretations and revisionist views being written even now, of which Ghatage’s is one.
"Around 1980, or 1981 perhaps, I saw the movie Gandhi. I was living in North Wales at the time and for the first time in my life I had seen Gandhi theatricalized," says Ghatage. "I puzzled over that a bit; I knew he was very prominent in the independence movement but hadn’t realized that he was such a ‘saint.’ Around that time as well, I found out that two roads down from the neighbourhood I set this book in and that I grew up in, lived one of the persons who was charged with the assassination of Gandhi and later acquitted. Around the late ’70s, early ’80s, Caddell Road, which features in this book, was given the name of the charged-but-later-acquitted assassin, as he himself was a very prominent freedom fighter from the area. I also realized that the partition of India happened at the same time, and I realized that religion played an important part in that subcontinent, so I ended up going prehistoric, into all the history of India."
History has tended towards one image and version of Gandhi, furnished by the Attenborough film, and collections of his philosophy and homilies. But like any other historical figure, there is more than just one side that needs to be seen.
"It became very clear to me that when Gandhi was fighting his freedom movement it wasn’t along intellectual lines," says Ghatage. "It was more along obstructive lines that he had decided that passive resistance was the way to go. And if there was any violence that came out of it, it was almost ignored as long as there was passive resistance. For instance, I think that in 1921 the Prince of Wales came to Bombay and Gandhi had declared a passive resistance, a boycott really, so there was no welcome committee by the Indian people and it ended up in several deaths."
The most important thing in writing a historical novel, says Ghatage, is to avoid a polemic, and let the history be told by the characters, those who live and are shaped by the events around them.
"I’m not too fond of works where the landscape becomes more important than the people – political stuff where you’re trying to make a political statement – because I think (a statement) can be made beautifully through people," she says. "They are, after all, the ones who are creating the politics at the time." |
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