A powerful woman-centric historical novel

The City of Palaces by Sujata Massey

Penguin. Pages: 471. Price: Rs. 499/-

Pom lives in poverty. She belongs to a peasant family of Johlpur – a nondescript village located in coastal Bengal of pre-Independence India. She is still a pre-pubescent when her family, along with the entire village is washed away by a huge cyclone storm. Thus orphaned, her struggle for survival begins. She encounters kind people and predators during her ordeal. She escapes the clutches of a child lifter and becomes a servant in a public school, where she is renamed Sarah. There, she meets Bidushi, her village landlord’s daughter. Since both are at the receiving end of bullying at the hands of fair-skinned boarders, they become friends. Sarah, like Eklavya of the Mahabharat, picks up English diction and literature while listening to the lessons taught in the classes. She is so good at it that soon Miss Richmond, a teacher there, begins to take her help in translating literary works from Bengali to English and vice versa. And, Bidushi too depends upon her to draft love letters to her fiancé, Pankaj, who is in England for higher studies. Sarah actually begins to enjoy this indirect romance with her friend’s fiancé, knowing well that it will remain unrequited. Despite the harridan Miss Rachael, life seems to have become tolerable. But soon tragedy strikes. Bidushi dies, and Sarah is falsely accused of stealing her pendant.

When she is thrown out of school, and Rachael usurps her savings, Abbas – the school’s buggy driver – helps her out with money, clothes and a railway ticket to Calcutta. But fate has something else in store for her. When the train reaches Midnapore, she mistakes it for Calcutta and alights. There she falls into the trap of a whorehouse run by Rose Barker. And, Sarah is renamed Pamela. One of the customers rapes her and she becomes pregnant. After giving birth to her Anglo-Indian daughter, she flees. Before leaving for Calcutta, she leaves the child at Abbas’s doorsteps. In Calcutta, she becomes librarian-cum-housekeeper in an Englishman’s house. His name is Simon Lewes. Here she gives herself an Indian name – Kamala Mukherjee, which endures.

Soon she is caught up in the vortex of spying, freedom movement related activities and a romantic triangle involving her, Simon and Pankaj (who re-enters her life as Subhash Chandra Bose’s acolyte). Her interaction with two men leaves her bemused, and yet enriches her life in a strange sort of way. She becomes more confident of herself. The novel climaxes with the communal riots although it ends with the country’s independence.

Massey has written a powerful novel that has all the ingredients for becoming a classic, and probably a template for woman-centric historical novels. With simple strokes she manages to conjure up strong and vivid images – be it the whorehouse, the boarding school or the riots. Every emotion, be it lust, love, hate or anger is deftly treated – not allowing the narrative to go out of control. Each character is well defined and convincing. 

Very few Indian historical novels of note have been written in English. Works of Amita Kanekar, Amitav Ghosh, Ashwin Sanghi, Anurag Kumar, William Dalrymple and Salman Rushdie readily come to mind. And it is rarer still for this genre to have a female protagonist. Probably, this one is the first woman-centric Indian historical novel in English.