Book: The Inheritors
Author: Aruna Chakravarti
Pages: 340
Read: Paperback edition pictured above
Read in: 4-5 hours
Plot Summary: "There's insanity in our family, It runs in our blood—the blood of the Vaidic Brahmins, one or two of us go mad in every generation."
From the ritual-bound household of an orthodox scholar in a small village in Bengal in 1897 to Germany and Mumbai at the turn of the new millennium, The Inheritors follows the shifting life patterns of a family through a melange of narratives, memories and characters.
The unrelenting puritanism of Nyayaratna Bishnupada Deb Sharma drives his daughter Radharani to insanity and throws into sharp relief his grandson Shibkali's feeble attempt to break free.
Giribala voices her resentment against her circumstances through a lifetime of silence, her destiny finding an echo in her daughter Alo, tragic victim of her husband's sexual perversions. And Pramatha's depraved radicalism is set against Shashishekhar's progressive outlook which symbolizes the most significant departure from the stifling constraints of his community.
Even as it inherits the deadwood of the past, each generation strives to liberate itself, setting the stage for the eternal conflict between tradition and change, between a legacy and its inheritors.
Aruna Chakravarti draws upon history and myth, religion and folklore, rituals and culinary practices to create a vivid portrait of a community of Vaidic Kulin Brahmins. The narrative, oscillating back and forth in time, weaves a vibrant tapestry of life—differing ideologies and sensibilities, suicides and desertions, marriages and infidelities, bigotry and liberalism—set in the larger context of a nation's inexorable march towards independence and a society caught on the cusp of conservatism and modernity.
Things I Liked:
1. This book is like a rich tapestry. There are colourful narrative threads from different centuries, male and female voices and stories of struggle and stories of breaking free. There are just so many stories about the plight of women (and men) within the framework of the rigid Bramhanical society and values that are shared in this book. You will find yourself connecting with one or more such stories.
2. There are three primary narrators in this book. We first see the stark before-and-after of Radharani's life. A beautiful, talented and much loved daughter of a highly regarded Kulin Brahmin man, she wanted for nothing as a child. In order to maintain family line purity, her father married her off to a scholarly but piss-poor brahmin man. Radharani accepted her fate with equanimity and did her best to adjust to her life with her new husband and unending poverty. Your heart will break into a million pieces on seeing what she was made to endure later in life. It will make you question and wonder why any religion dictated that their women ought to be treated worse than cattle.
The second narrator is Shibkali- Radha's son. He is privileged as a Kulin Brahmin man of a pure bloodline, but that privilege comes with a price. He spends his whole life in the mocking, accusatory silence of his wife- Giribala- and we see the journey of how his marriage and life became what it did.
The third narrator is Giribala's daughter-in-law, living in Delhi with her family and we get to see the probashi (migrant, non-resident Bengali) perspective in her life and stories.
3. This book is about a family and one of the best things about it is that it shows in a very nuanced manner how resentment, misunderstandings and misgivings grow and fester within families over time. For instance, Shibkali's daughter- Alo- resents her eldest brother- Shashishekhar- for moving to Delhi with his family. She thinks he is selfish to leave the rest of the family in Bengal to deal with their various issues and challenges, while he and his kids have a luxurious life in Delhi. However, when we see the life of the family in Delhi, we see their perspective and life and it is not nearly as luxurious as Alo seems to think it is. That's the beauty of perspective, isn't it?
4. This book is also about women's rights and freedoms, especially, how they have grown and evolved with time. How education has played a role in getting us this precious freedom and access to rights.
5. This book also highlights the perils of ill-thought-out arranged marriages. It is a very Bengali thing to get daughters of wealthy families married off to poor, promising, educated boys. There seems to be a Bengali obsession with the groom's talent and his potential to become a good earner. We've seen examples of this on both sides of our family, especially, our mother's side. The highly talented, educated but poor groom may never live up to his potential, which means that the beloved daughter of the wealthy family lives a life of struggle and penury and plunges subsequent generations into poverty as well.
6. This is an incredibly well-written, well researched and just overall a brilliant book! We're so glad we read it!
Rating: 5/5
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