Title: The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River
Author: Ravindhu Mahendra
Publisher: Sarasavi Publishers
It is better to be hated for what you are than To be loved for something you are not. -Andre Gide
‘The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River’ is Ravindhu Mahendra’s maiden novel in English. It is novel that invites close attention. I say so primarily on account of four reasons. Firstly, it boldly ventures into an experiential terrain that is not normally selected for fictional exploration by Sri Lankan writers. Second the author has a clear ability to generate narrative energy through collocation of diverse well-realized incidents connected to emotional entanglements and manipulations of time and memory. Third, the author has sought to employ a metaphorically dense and poetically charged language. This can be described as a poetic novel in the sense that the woks of Andre Gide, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison or Amit Chaudhuri can be termed poetic novels. Fourth, the author’s desire to clear new pathways of feeling towards the nerve-centres of being. Intricate emotional entanglements, both overt and subterranean, are at the core of the novel.
In a good poetic novel, the metaphorically rich language works at different levels of artistic apprehension and in different registers. The poetic language is no surface and external ornamentation; it has an epistemological value in the sense that it promotes a deeper inquiry into ways of understanding the world. In the case of The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River, the metaphorically driven language opens up another layer of meaning – the need to extend the margins of quotidian reality. This enlargement of the consciousness is part of the aim of the novelist. It is not, as is exemplified in the protagonist’s character, a disembodied consciousness; rather, it is a defiantly embodied consciousness.
Fictional attention
The narrative discourse of the novel The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River is constructed around the character of Sujatha. He is the centre of fictional attention. His arc of growth is marked by encounters with ambivalences – he is impulsive and thoughtful, sensual and spiritual, stubborn and flexible. His joy is linked to anguish and inner calm linked to inner turbulence. Sujatha is represented as a complex character who is battling antithetical forces, the central topos being that of the duality between body and spirit that guides everything. His homoerotic desire, which he both acknowledges and evades, courses through the novel giving it definition. Sujatha’s character emerges both as an extension of, and in opposition to, a number of forces. The memory of his deceased mother, the fraught relationship with the father, complex attachment to his cousin Hasantha, and the tender mutualities between him and his fellow monk the reverend Ananda are among them. This is a felicitous novel that takes us into the intricate inner workings of the human mind and heart. Part of the novelist’s agenda is to map the treacherous terrain of human emotions. Interestingly, the protagonist’s homoerotic desires and the narrator’s textual desires coincide in their respective quests for locus of authenticity.
The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River can be read through diverse optics. I have chosen the optic of the human body which, it seems to me is the dynamo of the novel, although, I concede, there other equally compelling perspectives that could be pressed into service. The body is generally regarded as a physiological entity, which is true so far as it goes. However, to restrict our understanding of the body solely to this facet of it id to deprive it of its diverse layers of meaning. The body is more than a biological object. It is also a linguistic product, a cultural construct, a site of conflicts of meaning. Ravindhu Mahendra, as an imaginative writer is fully cognizant of this fact.
The way he has semioticized the body, that is to say, the way in which he has converted it into an intricate signifying system deserves careful analysis. Superficially, a perfunctory reading might convince us that body and mind are in tension. This is obviously true. However, Mahendra is saying that at a deeper level of understanding they are mutually nurturing. The predicaments of Sujatha can be comprehended through this critical approach. In humanistic and social scientific inquiry, the body has always been regarded as being ancillary to the mind. However, in more recent times, thanks to the writing of thinkers such as Mary Douglas and Michelle Foucault the body has been placed at the centre of humanistic and social scientific inquiry. Ravindhu Mahendra, in his novel, implicitly endorses and validates this approach.
Our analysis of the human body need not be confined to western formulations. For example, the human body has played a central role as a symbolic construct in classical Indian philosophy, religion, and literature. According to the purusha hymn in the Rig Veda, the cosmos and everything in it arose from the body of the Brahman. In the Upanishads we come across vivid imagery describing the power of the human body. Similarly, in classical Indian poetry, notably in the writings of Kalidasa, nature was textualized in terms of the vibrancy of the body. Ravindhu Mahendra, in his novel, has made the body into an object of imaginative apprehension as well as an instrument guiding the narrative. Throughout the novel, the idea of consciousness repeatedly makes its presence felt. However, it is important to note that what Mahendra is proposing is an embodied consciousness. Here the consciousness is guided by somatic imperatives, the dictates of the body.
Elizabeth Grosz has written insightfully on the body. She says that the subject’s psychical interior needs to be understood as an introjection, a form of internalization of the meaning and significance of the human body. This admonition of Prof. Grosz is deeply germane to the experiential richness of Ravindhu Mahendra’s novel. In her book titled Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz asserts that her aim is to displace the centrality of mind, the psyche, interior, consciousness through a reconfiguration of the body. Indeed, this displacement, the according of a position of centrality to the body, is central to intentions of the author of The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River.
Prof. Peter Brooks in his valuable book Body Work: Objects of Desire in the Modern Narrative claims the following. ’I consider the body as an object and motive of narrative writing- as a primary concern with the life of the imagination.’ He says that his aim throughout is with the creation of fictions that address the body, that imbed it in narrative, and that as a consequence embody meanings. These observations are relevant to Mahendra’s efforts. The locution stories on the body and the body in story is pivotal to the life experience of Sujatha and the narrative experience of the omniscient narrator of the novel. I have dealt at length with the concept of the body and its centrality in Mahendra’s novel because it opens up, what I think is a very productive pathway of inquiry into this novel.
The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River is a felicitous poetic novel executed with conviction and assurance. The author has, as I pointed out earlier, adopted a metaphorically dense style. His newly-minted metaphors fly off the page startling us into answer awareness of human living and imaginative possibilities. This is a poetic novel both in the superficial sense that it contains poetic passages added onto the narrative to beautify it and that it is also a poetic novel in the deeper sense where the entire novel has been conceived and executed in poetic terms. The metaphorically driven poetic passages have a way of expanding our awareness of the quotidian world, pushing its margins, and alerting us to the vital reciprocities between nature and human beings. Certain tropes such as the thunderstorm, fires, moonlight recur throughout the narrative like a leitmotiv imbuing it with symbolic significance. The metaphors, therefore, carry an epistemological burden.
I wish to comment briefly on the structure of the novel as well. There is rhythmic movement to it; the narrative consists of memories selected and rearranged so as to emphasize various defining incidents from Sujatha’s past. Memory, which plays a crucial role, in the narrative, is social in origin and effect. The author would concur with Maurice Halbwachs’ viewpoint that the memory is collective rather than personal; the stitching of incidents projected my memory into a narrative flow has been done so as to enhance the rise and fall of emotions and the conflict of the protagonist’s self-denial and self-actualization.
The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River is not a confessional novel; confessional novels are normally written from the first person point of view. However, in this novel how the omniscient narrator presents the driving incidents of Sujatha’s life carries with it a certain shade of confessional striving. It is a confession at one remove, a mediated confession. The notion of confession calls attention to four important imperatives. First, it presupposes a mood of human guilt. Second, it is important to recognize that there is a larger moral order against which the guilt is defined. Third it recognizes the existence of authoritative figures or norms which underline the misdeeds, actual or imaginary, committed by the individual. Fourth, the existence and availability of diverse frame works for discussing the confession. Sujatha has not committed any crime. Still a certain guilt clouds his feelings. His confession-tinged ruminations carry instances of self-depreciation and self-justification in equal measure. The reader can bring in the idea of confession to his or her reading of the novel to make greater sense of the flow of narrative. This raises the question whether a first person viewpoint, rather than an omniscient one, would have been more impactful. But then I fully recognize the limitations of the first person point of view
As I stated earlier, one of the strengths of the novel is the author’s desire to create a vibrantly rich and metaphorically evocative language. However, if one is not restrained, this effort can degenerate into over-writing and over-metaphorizing. The aesthetic of excess almost always results in an undermining of its very effort. Even outstanding poetic novelists such as Toni Morison, as in her novel Paradise, have occasionally fallen victim to the impulse to poeticize excessively. We all need to remind ourselves that there is a fine balance that needs to be achieved between anaemic prose and over wrought prose. Hence, lyrical novels demand discipline and parsimony as much as vigorous imagination.
Emotional honesty
The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River is a novel that valorizes emotional truth. The protagonist’s quest for emotional honesty takes place on the terrain of the body which has become a sight of conflict and meaning. To attain emotional honesty is to validate authentic living. The eminent French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that the act of creation is an act of resistance. He was deploying term resistance largely in a metaphysical sense. There are other possible meanings of resistance. In Ravindhu Mahendra’s novel, the achievement of emotional liberation signifies a resistance offered by Sujatha. It is a measure of his self-realization. A one sentence summary of the novel would be, this tells the story of a young man who became a Buddhist monk and after a while decided to give up robes.
In between these two momentous events, the author has given figurality to a complex and intricate network of emotional entanglements. The novelist has ably foregrounded the agonies of dislocation and joys of relocation. At the dead centre of all these tensions and conflicts is a radiant tenderness which lends the novel a moral authority. I started out this article by asserting that The Saffron Robe by the Flowing River is an absorbingly meditative novel that merits the close attention of lovers of literature. It signals the welcome arrival of a new talent on the local literary landscape.
Reviewed by Professor Wimal Dissanayake
