Commentaires client les plus utiles
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4.0étoiles sur 5
A most satisfying reading experience..., Nov. 25 2007
There is a musicality that permeates Ameen Merchant's exquisite debut novel. Right from the name, The Silent Raga, (the Tamil Mounaragam is more eloquent, but would be meaningless to Western readers), to the way its chapters are structured after the various stages of a raga's performance in recital, and the mellifluous prose they contain, and in the way certain sentences or words are repeated as a refrain, there is an inherent musicianship about the enterprise. Ameen Merchant has said he does not play any instrument, nor was he schooled in the Indian classical music tradition, but through a happy, albeit inexplicable osmosis, he strikes the right chord throughout his tale of a musical prodigy and her sister and the complicated familial past they must put to rest.
Two skeins of narrative unspool simultaneously, like melody and harmony. One narrative recounts the past, which relies on a capricious and unreliable memory for detail, while the other relates the present. Within the first few pages, one is hooked as the question, "How did they get here from there?" forms in the reader's mind.
"Here" is the protagonist's present: Janaki Asgar, the Brahmin Hindu second wife of a Muslim film star. She is famous now in her own right with a successful classical music academy whose students are on the verge of international renown. It took her ten years to reinvent herself. There are, naturally, the psychic scars of abruptly severed ties and the whiff of scandal. "Here", geographically is Bombay or today's Mumbai.
"There", is a small town in Southern India, not far from Madras or present-day Chennai. In the past "there", Janaki is a middle-class Brahmin girl with few prospects and no hope. An early adulthood is thrust on her when, plucked out of school upon her mother's untimely demise, she is dispatched to the kitchen to become the family cook and cleaning woman, plus replacement mother to the younger sister upon whom she dotes. As it is with millions of such girls in India, she must live a life of servitude, first in her father's home, then in her husband's, without murmur or question. But Janaki is different. With a survivor's canny instincts, she realizes early on that tradition can ensnare only if subscribed to. And she plays the veena--a stringed instrument akin to the sitar--divinely. A gypsy woman, to whom she gives alms, prophesies that the instrument will be her salvation.
This prediction and a shocking incident galvanize her into putting an escape plan into action, or so one thinks. It is best that no further details of the plot are revealed to guarantee untarnished pleasures of reading and discovery.
It is fascinating that Ameen Merchant populates his book predominantly with women. Men--the perpetrators, the oppressors, the aggressors, and yes, sometimes, saviors--remain shadowy figures. Apart from three sympathetic characters, one feels pity and a cold contempt for them and returns to the women, who are uniformly compelling.
A woman recognizes early that the world is ordered and run by the patriarchy. She then uses the unique weapons in her personal arsenal to negotiate her way to some semblance of fulfillment. There is an interesting lack of a sisterhood, for one woman will gladly offer up another for an increment in personal power, and alliances, if any, are constantly shifting. One cannot ask why the women do not rebel, or leave, or tell the oppressors to go to hell. Feminism, as it is known in the West, cannot be transplanted to South Asia and expected to flourish. The women themselves would not subscribe to it. What one can hope for are the quiet epiphanies that come to the Janakis of the world. Janaki uses her wits, and one knows at the outset that she has forged her own destiny. Perhaps change was imminent, for Mallika, the younger sister, gets to follow her desires for education and an empowering fulfilling job. But how did it happen? The author offers judiciously measured morsels of information and expertly draws out the tension in his tale, until it progresses to a satisfying, emotional crescendo.
Ameen Merchant has retained many of the Tamil words and locutions of everyday speech, often because they cannot be readily translated. This does not reduce the pleasure of the non-Indian reader, for the meanings are readily apparent from the gist of the sentences. His spot-on descriptions of the rhythms of small-town life and each task that comprises the quotidian routine transcend the humdrum and take them into the realm of the poetic. The remembrance of long-forgotten sights, colours, customs, tastes (yes, there are many tantalizing South Indian dishes mentioned), and textures is among the many pleasures of the book.
I was transported--a willing hostage--to tiny Sripuram, and its tinier agraharam Brahmin colony, where Janaki Venkatakrishnan was brave enough to dream, and braver still to carve out her own personal destiny. And when Janaki and Mallika finally meet again, it is as though a benediction has been pronounced. That, dear reader, is our cue to stand and applaud.
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5.0étoiles sur 5
Sensual and Intelligent, Nov. 22 2007
Two great qualities of this novel: one, the vitality of the characters, smart and passionate, and ensnared in a plot that is full of the play of fate and reality, feeling as familiar as one's own life, however removed that life may be from theirs. Two, the sheer physical allure of the places and scenes. The description is never overdone, but this seems to be a book which can't resist the sensuality of India itself.
There is something about books about India.... It is as if images and descriptions of the place are uniquely strong and vivid in the minds of readers in English. Sights, sounds, smells, the touch of India, arise from the prose in The Silent Raga: It could all be a kind of touristic indulgence--except that we are hearing a voice of intimate familiarity with India. And beyond that, the pretext and reason for the poetics: the musical scale which informs the whole book. That is inevitable because a major motivation/driver in the story is the making of Indian music.
A rhythmic current of narrative quickly sets in, a page-turning curiosity develops, because the characterization is both rich and strange. Yet not exotic: these people are so easy to identify with. I can't say how Merchant makes this happen, but he does. He involves us in the narrative, for suspense, mystery, complete catharsis--pity and terror. There is intelligent, incisive scrutiny of multi-generational family relationships, female-centred, somewhat reminiscent of Tamarind Mem. A reader soon identifies whole-heartedly with how these Indian women feel and react, even if the reader is not an Indian woman. The now-hackneyed remark is unavoidable: the author is not an Indian woman either.
The compulsion to move the story along is finely balanced with the judicious amount of lyrical imagery in the text. The haste of curiosity is at odds with the desire of the mind to linger, over the evocations of food, climate, the air, the voice of the place. For instance, one recurring series of descriptions of electric light sources. Bulbs and lamps keep appearing, in various conditions of age and frailty, and their particular characters, and the particular qualities of light they emit, seem to stand in some way for memory itself, whether memory of a time that is gone, or of ways of making and structuring things in human civilization that are flawed, or insufficient, or less esteemed. So many visions of electric illumination, whether sad or dim, or garish, or warm and generous, come to linger in the mind like actual memories of light observed.
If the raga is a mysterious craft to most English-speaking readers, The Silent Raga's emotional depths begin to suggest something of it as it moves along and we are touched and seduced by turns. It is like being drawn into the ecstasy of musical rhythms; no scholarly knowledge or ability is needed, other than knowing how to listen.
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de Shani Mootoo
de Padma Viswanathan
de Nikita Lalwani
de Muriel Barbery
de M.G. Vassanji
