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A River of Wisdom
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11806 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
3,334 Words |
| Author
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Uma Parameswaran
Uma Parameswaran teaches English at the University of
Winnipeg
and is author of A Study of Representative Indo-English
Novelists (1976), The Perforated Sheet: Essays on Salman
Rushdie's Art (1988), Trishanku (poems, 1989), and a play,
Rootless but Green Are the Boulevard Trees, (1987). |
Gita Mehta is reported to have told Philip Roth: "It doesn't matter if I don't ever have a single original thought again--my background, of India, is so very rich, so filled with material." India is indeed a treasure chest for storytellers, and Mehta knows that if authors dip their hands into the chest they will scoop up iridescent gems to which readers will be irresistibly attracted.
But A River Sutra is far more than a collection of remarkable tales. From each story, the reader derives some essential truth: that one can renounce the world for the greater glory of God but feel the need to hold on to the company of fellow mendicants; that parental love involves pain and sacrifice greater than any other kind of love; that the teacher-student relationship is the highest in that it parallels the bond between Creator and created; that music links the mortal, finite world to the divine eternal world; and that, as Hamlet tells Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
A River Sutra repeats these truths in many ways. A sutra literally means "thread"; as a literary form, it is aphoristic and often strings together parables that encapsulate concepts or experiences. The thread in Mehta's novel is a bureaucrat at retirement age who opts to take a government post at a small town on the banks of the Narmada River in central India. In this quiet retreat, the nameless narrator finds company in the all-male network of Mr. Chagla, his secretary; Tariq Mia, a Sufi mullah; and Dr. Mitra, a rational idealist.
From the number of stories told by his transient guests, the narrator selects six unconnected tales that form the beads on his string. They tell of a Jain monk's renunciation ceremony, a blind boy whose singing connected earth to heaven, an executive seduced and "possessed" by a tribal woman, a courtesan's daughter abducted by a bandit lover, a musician who teaches his daughter to be the perfect ragini (mood) to a raga (melody), and a mendicant who adopts a child from a brothel and makes her a river minstrel. Common to all the stories are relationships between two persons and a search for a higher experience, be it spiritual, sensual, or moral.
Sutras in literary history
The Western reader will readily recall that The Canterbury Tales and Decameron are sutras, or strings of stories, but may not know that the tradition has a longer history in India. Buddha and Buddhist texts favored aphoristic
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