Book Review : Purna Swaraj: A Call for Complete Self-rule
Change plays out in Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room (Viking, 2021) across three-quarters of a century in India: from a great-grandmother’s cloistered life in 1929 to her great-grandson who returns in 1999 from England to his Punjabi ancestor’s farmhouse. A change that runs its course parallel to the change taking within India. As Tej Singh, a minor character in the novel, fights for the country’s freedom with the slogan of “Purna Swaraj … We will settle for nothing less. Complete self-rule,” the two main characters—Mehar, the great-grandmother; and S, her great-grandson—are wrestling too, over the decades, for the same sense of autonomy over their lives. As Sahota switches back and forth between them, Mehar and S—divided as they are by time and space—seem to continue in a muted dialogue: we are dissatisfied with the lives that we have, we have a vision of a future of self-rule.
In the earlier part of the century, Mehar, one of three daughters-in-law married to three brothers on the same day, is stifled by Mai, her imperious mother-in-law who barks commands in short military-style sentences suggest married life as life imprisonment with Mai as a warden.
“’Mehar!’ calls Mai. ‘Must we die of thirst?’”
“’You can go,’ says Mai, shrewd-eyed Mai.”
“Mehar, the fire needs kindling.”
The three new brides seem destined to share a life together in a room of their farmhouse. The “china room” secures the daughters-in-law in the same way it safeguards its bone china dinnerware—locked away from the unwanted gaze of strangers. The ties that bind are many, but it is a delicate balance.
“They do not speak, it is enough to try to keep their balance, and slowly the pool starts to darken, their clothes and skin too, indigo staining legs and hips and face, but they stay in harmony, up-down-up-down, minutes upon minutes, so that by the time the sun has disappeared and the moon is the whole light, they let go of one another’s hands and double over, gasping.”
Gasping. Because the chapters around Mehar read like flash fiction, each word impactful. Gasping. Like poetry that you feel, see, smell, taste as many parts of China Room infuse all of one’s senses taking the reader back nearly a century. Gasping.
By enabling one to feel Mehar’s life, Sahota disabuses any notion of a romantic village idyll. In between dealing with the power imbalance of familial interpersonal dynamics, there is the drudgery of work for Mehar and her sisters-in-law: “Picking cotton. Picking guavas. Collecting dung … Dyeing salwars. Ironing dhoti … Bathing before dawn. Eating last of all. In their room by dusk. Slats turned, window shut, moon out, veils off.”
A novel that privileges the perspective of the women, the three husbands are in the background—one is kind-hearted, one is steadfast, and one is a scoundrel. But regardless of the reader’s sympathy or empathy for the brothers, it is their wives who command one’s attention.
Sahota takes us behind Mehar’s veil, “The veil makes a red haze of everything, a sparkling opacity against which bodies move as dark shadows. It is pulled so far forward that it entirely conceals Mehar’s face, and she must cast her eyes down to see anything at all.”
Seventy years later, Mehar is no more, and her great-grandson, known by the initial S, (perhaps suggesting an element of autofiction) has turned to drugs, in part to escape the diminished lives of his immigrant shopkeeper parents in a British working-class town which, too, has been diminished by the lack of work in the mines. As a child, S was turned away from a birthday party to which he had been invited after the birthday boy’s underemployed miner father takes his despair out on him. S leaves, “embarrassed, stinking with shame.” When his father asked if he had fun at the party, S lies, “Great. I should have saved you some cake.”
Later, struggling with addiction, S is sent to Punjab. While Sahota writes sensitively about the stages of withdrawal from heroin, the dream sequence of Mehar’s narrative is broken. The chapters become longer; the language more contemporary. S makes his way to the “china room” where Mehar spent a loveless life. He falls for a young doctor, Radhika, who appears magically to heal him. Radhika’s expository backstory tells the reader that she’s a modern woman: educated and liberated, so unlike the illiterate Mehar whose hopeful, shining bid for freedom was crushed like the cigarettes that Radhika unabashedly smokes.
A lesser teller of fables would have had us believe that Independent India has changed, which of course it has; and that all lived happily ever after, which—of course—they don’t.
But with Sahota, change is imbued with continuity. Just as the nosy neighbors in Mehar’s village took delight in the tragedy of a confused teenage bride loving a man who was her husband’s brother, their descendants whispered rumors about S and Radhika. “A scandal, that was all these people wanted, some easy story that they could loop around a person’s neck, and lynch them with.”
One can’t help recall Gandhi’s call when he said that for the country to be truly free, Swaraj must begin with personal self-rule, self-control, self-regulation and self-determination.
In addition to his Change Management consulting, Dr. Rajesh C. Oza has written Globalization, Diaspora, and Work Transformation, Satyalogue / Truthtalk: A Gandhian Guide to (Post)Modern-Day Dilemmas, and P.S., Papa’s Stories. He can be reached at satyalogue.com or amazon.com/author/rajoza.
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