Backward Village

Radhika Jhas first novel,Smell 1999,was described by the Village Voice as a marriage between Judith Krantz and postcolonial theory. Her second novel,Lanterns on their Horns,which comes a decade after the first,is less Judith Krantz and perhaps more Mulk Raj Anand. For,the novel is set not in metropolitan Paris,as Smell was,but in the heart of rural India. Not that old Nandgaon is a place that one might quite be able to place on the map: you might more easily be able to find it in a Shyam Benegal film,from his late,more mellow period,funded by the NFDC.

Nandgaon is in some ways like Sajjanpur,or like the Amar-Chitra-Katha village of Ashutosh Gowarikars Lagaan. Theres a control-freak headman to whom the village is more or less devoted; an idealistic M.A. History whose philosophy for the renewal of rural India is artificial insemination with European breeds; a set of district ladies led by the wife of the Deputy Commissioner who natter away vacuously.

And finally,the unlikely heroes of the story: Ramu,a village simpleton this role is made for Shreyas Talpade married to Laxmi,the college-educated daughter of a farmer who committed suicide because of debts. Add to this a devastating flood,an enormous temple and a miracle cow and you have before you this strange new novel about tradition confronting modernity in a blur of cliché,confusion and resentment.

The novel does have heart although parts of the narrative are uneven,and there is even a chapter written in the voice of an abandoned cow: On the third day they found water a tiny green pool,thick with algae and almost undrinkable. But the cow went in gratefully and lay in it,and the soft cool mud eased the sores on her back and belly. Old Two-legs squatted at the base of a tree and watched. Their eyes met and the knowledge that there was no herd to join cut through her like a knife. Old Two-legs was the first to look away.