Every year, in India – people welcome their beloved Goddess to her earthly abode during the nine days of Navratri. The legend of Ma Durga battling Mahishasur and emerging victorious is recited through stories, drama, artistic installations and songs.
For a lot of us, this is largely symbolic of finding our inner strength and destroying the demons – literally or metaphorically. We are awed by the Idol of Goddess Durga, fierce and sassy, standing over the slayed demon and claiming her victory. In the Song seekers, Saswati Sengupta seeks out all these legends in. Not just the ones which found their way to us through mainstream narratives of the good versus evil battles, but the stories in the songs which are forgotten, which are casted away and the ones which are conveniently interpreted. These songs that she seeks for us are not just of a Goddess seeking revenge against an evil balance-of-the-world disturbing demon. The songs are of the commonest of common women – fighting their own battles in the real world.
The book begins with a death in a Kailash Mansion of the Chattopadhays (metaphorically meaning the abode of the Lord Shiva) somewhere around the 1930s. Then, it abruptly turns to Uma entering the household as a newly wedded bride. Uma tries to make herself comfortable in the large house with the husband and her father in law, the only members that are a part of her daily life. Her mother in law is said to have died of an illness very long ago, but her husband’s vague memory of witnessing her falling down from the steps adds to the mystery. And then, she forges a relationship with one more person in the household. A woman, a widow with startling green eyes whose relation with the family is not mentioned.
All this would make one draw a comparison to a certain ‘Manderly’ house, but the ‘Song Seekers’ is no Rebbecca, it does not delve on mystery alone. Rather, the mysteries in the Kailash mansion are a mere subplot leading to the main focus of the novel which is delving into the long forgotten and suppressed histories of the women of Bengal.
And how does it do that?
It starts with Uma taking upon herself to read the ‘Chandimangal’ a book written as an ode to the Goddess Kali by the patriarch of Chattopadhay family Neelkanth -a man held in high-esteem. Chandimangal is indeed a significant part of medieval Bengali literature which eologizes Chandi or Abhaya, primarily a folk goddess, but subsequently identified with Puranic goddess Chandi/Kali.
Neelkantha’s son had revived Chandimangal at the peak of the independence movement in India and it quickly gained popularity among the elites of Bengal who were seeking inspiration for their struggle against the enslavement of their nation. The nation was recast as the Goddess, and the militant Goddess was recast as the domestic, sacrificial mother needing to be saved from the ‘imperialists’. And somewhere in between, the real stories of the women and the Goddesses were lost.
Uma was brought up to believe in the story of Parvati who revered her husband so much, that (as the famous mythological story goes), she had cast herself in fire in retaliation to his insult from her father. Chandimangal espouses and glorifies many such similar stories.
However, the women in Kailash Mansion, the domestic helps, – to whom Uma reads out to, are hardened by their experiences of living in a man’s world. They are not so easily impressed. They lament, innocently at first, how even a Goddess was not spared from a life of domesticity with Shiva. They question how a free spirited woman like Durga was irreversibly tied down to her house and invoked, conveniently, only when the Gods- the men- were unable to fight their own battles. As Uma’s reading progresses, the women also realize how the folklores of the Gods that the lower castes believed in were reconstructed and reclaimed to suit the requirements of the upper castes. The realization also is that it is only what is written down and publicized that has become the gospel truth, part of the religion, while what is being passed down orally from one generation to another within their community is relegated to the status of ‘folktales’ for entertainment.
The novel gradually takes the reader to an understanding of real history which is often re-written to suit the needs of a patriarchal and caste based society. The song seekers thus become the seekers of truth, while learning to read between the lines.
None of the women, barring Uma perhaps, really believe that what they suffer in the hands of the feudal, patriarchal and the caste system is ordained by the Gods, as works like Chandimangal tries to establish. And Uma, charged with the revelations that come from their lived experiences, starts looking out for facts. She deep dives into the histories of women – particularly those of the marginalized and subjugated castes and communities, only to realize that literatures like Chandimangal exists to whitewash, and then to create – a hegemony of brahmanical castes as the pure saviors of the world.
Because the novel goes back and forth in time, narrating the stories of over four generations of the Chattopadhayas, it is rich in the description of Bengal. Bengal’s tryst with the Portuguese, the Swadeshi movement that had swept across the nation, the partition of Bengal in the 1890s, Gandhi’s non violent call to protest, all became important pedestals in taking the story ahead. Coffee houses, the space for ideological banter of the Bengali youth, makes an appearance too, as the story moves from past to the present. Saswati Sengupta thus makes use of historical accounts to shape the stories of her characters, and we as readers are left to question and probe the history that we are presented with.
This book reminds you to unfold and dissect the many layers of the myths and legends that are passed down to us generation after generation. It calls you to reclaim forgotten history and amplify the voices that have been long silenced. It asks you to seek our songs.