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PARTISAN REVIEW
the Coromandel coast, where he takes a job with the East India Company
and tries to break down his wife's "Puritan failing of frugality." With an
irrepressible curiosity about the exotic world she finds herself in, Hannah
recapitulates her mother's scandalous history and eventually becomes the
lover of a Hindu rajah, with whom she finds the erotic bliss inconceivable
in Puritan America.
In the last third of the novel, Mukherjee powerfully recounts the
bloody battle waged by the rajah against the last great Mogul emperor,
Aurengzeb, in the course of which the intrepid Hannah saves her lover's
life and kills his enemy. Along the way the novelist fires some enraged
salvos at the English exploitation of her native country, the narrow–
minded contempt for Indian customs and culture, the greedy plunder
which reminds her of "Manhattan in the mid-eighties...." As the tale
comes full circle, Hannah returns with her child by the handsome rajah to
straitlaced Salem, where the little girl, in pointed allusion to Hawthorne
and
The Scarlet Letter,
is called Black Pearl.
Into her tightly constructed tapestry, Bharati Mukherjee has woven
dozens of characters, a huge trove of skillfully textured detail, and a deft
guide to the "tangled lines of India and New England." Armed with
formidable research, the novelist has attempted in
The Holder of the World
(the title refers to a legendary diamond owned by the Emperor
Aurengzeb) to span past and present, history and fable, reality and myth,
plain clothes and bejewelled folklore. All this, packed into two hundred
eighty-six pages, inevitably overwhelms us with its excess of detail on too
many levels. Mukherjee remarked in a recent interview that she didn't
want to write a big, conventional historical novel: "I want to bring the
world into the three-hundred-page novel without losing the complexity."
Unfortunately, in her zealous determination to crowd so much onto such
a small canvas, she sacrifices the clarity and coherence essential to com–
plexity. Though her originality and eloquence are impressive, the result–
ing confusion is too steep a price to pay.
In 1987, the Indian writer Vikram Seth - he is also an economist, a
playwright, travel writer, scholar of Chinese literature, and a poet - pub–
lished a short, delightful novel, entirely in verse, called
The Golden Gate.
Written while Seth was a graduate student at Stanford,
The Golden Gate
presented the lives, in the stately form of linked sonnets, of a group of
yuppie friends and lovers in San Francisco. Remarkably agile and up-to–
date in its mastery of California pop-idiom and American slang,
The
Golden Gate
charmed and bedazzled with its wit, vivacity, literary ingenu–
ity, warm-hearted satire. In contrast to that, no one could have predicted
that Vikram Seth's next book,
A Suitable Boy,
which took him more than
six years to research and write, would at 1,349 pages long be many times
