The Peacock Throne [Paperback]

The title 'Peacock Throne' hints at cinematic royal melodrama, and what is printed on the cover of my paperback might make one expect a racy, fast-paced thriller. To be sure, there is no dearth of vile, greedy, scheming, devious and even murderous humanity, and castes, ethnicities and religions at regular intervals clash violently and disastrously, but on the whole this Asian vanity fair of middle and lower classes unfolds quite leisurely; and though there are several interlocking plot strands running through the book from the first to the last pages, there is no all-embracing arc of suspense.

Add to this a fair amount of episodic material, and it becomes obvious that for some readers the journey through 750 densely printed pages might become somewhat exhausting. I myself was never in serious danger of giving up and often quite spellbound by the analytical, amused and at times downright cruel detachment of the narrator's voice; but I still wonder if the book's moral and emotional impact might have benefitted from a slightly firmer focus on guileless tea stall owner Gopal Pandey, buffeted by fate and other powers beyond his grasp and eventually dragged into a ludicrous political campaign.

In what has seemingly become mandatory for Indian authors, we have a massive book; this one being a portrayal of a minuscule area. Rarely are we given a typical plot and always we in the West are given a glimpse of a way of life that is almost impossible to imagine. The people of the area are rich and poor, but almost to a one they spend their days looking for power and/or money.

The story is basically that of Gopal Pandey, a tea seller in one of the narrow lanes off the main street of Chandni Chowk. The book is broken into parts beginning in 1984 and ending in 1998. Each of the parts takes us ahead in time and events dealing with this area and its people and its politics.

Gopal is uneducated and totally naive. He is from a place that means he should not be where he is. But being where he is and who he is allows others to use him for their own purposes. And they do so - often. Each section reminds us of the old saying about things changing but staying the same.

Unlike the more frequent Indian family saga, this is more about the political and social family of those few square blocks. The ubiquitous corruption and dishonesty are the story's constant companions.

In the end, we wonder: Is naiveté perhaps a blessing? Is this the way things will stay? Will our vision be cleared? Or, should it stay clouded?

Saraf has written a book that we Westerners can appreciate; but we can't understand the feelings of the residents. If you're in the mood for a long journey with some insight into a very small microcosm of a fascinating place, then dig in.

"Looks deep into the soul of modern India" says one of the blurbs on the back of the book. If so, the picture of that soul does no credit to India. For all the sardonic and sometimes compassionate humour with which Saraf describes his immense cast of characters, this is an almost unrelieved picture of dog eat dog, of dishonesty and deceit practised and also expected by everybody, of greed and exploitation, of the mentality of rupee-counting shop-keepers, of venal policemen, of pimps and prostitutes, of corruption and of political skulduggery not stopping short of murders, of rent-a-crowds paid to join in demonstrations and riots, of ignorant youths being tricked into becoming `martyrs', and of the bigotry of communal or caste passions. There are so many victims: Sikhs suffer mob violence after the assassination of Indira Gandhi; children from Bangladesh find themselves parentless in the ant heap that is Old Delhi and have to scrounge for a living as best they can; small shopkeepers are helpless before demolition squads.

The lives of all these people are described in five sections against the political background of fourteen years of Indian history: from the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 - through the riots about the Mandal Commission in 1992 which had recommended positive discrimination in favour of disadvantaged sections of Indian society - then through the destruction by Hindus of the Babra Masjid Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, - then through the ruthless demolition, without any advanced warning, of hundreds of mainly Muslim shops in 1996 - lastly, to the election campaign of 1998, which produced a hung parliament in which the biggest party was the Hindu nationalist party (called in this book the IPP, but more usually referred to as the BJP), and whose local politicians play the major role in this novel.

All this comes across well enough, and the book is intricately plotted through its 750 pages - so intricately, indeed, that I often lost track of the threads. The book is far too long (almost entirely written in the historic present) and is not easy reading. Some of the episodes seem little more than padding, not essential to the story and therefore become increasingly wearisome. I kept going only because the climaxes, long though they are in coming, are very well done; but in between them the book often loses momentum. Then there are all those names to remember; all those Indian words that need to be looked up in the glossary at the end (and most of them are not there anyway); all those places in Old Delhi, not all of which are shown on the map in the front. Towards the end of the book anyone not already familiar with the complexities of Indian party politics may find them bewildering - but we certainly learn a lot about this and many other aspects of life in Old Delhi.

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