A FICTIONAL CANVAS OF HISTORIC PAST

The novel Swallowing the Sun’ by Laxmi Murdeshwar Puri explores pre-Independence India’s societal complexities through Madhav Rao’s struggle for women’s education, Malati’s sacrifices, Gandhian ideals, and deeply entrenched patriarchy. The book masterfully intertwines love, politics, and cultural tensions within a vivid historical narrative

- SANJEEV CHOPRA

The binaries between the mundane and the miracle, fiction and non-fiction, Durga and Artemis, the politics of Gandhi and Savarkar, commitment to pre-marital celibacy as well as explorations of love, entrenched patriarchy and the assertion of feminism, the real and the surreal, the abhangs of Tukaram and the mediations of John Donne dissolve with much natural ease in this wonderful debut novel, Swallowing The Sun (STS) by India's foremost diplomat Laxmi Murdeshwar Puri.

This is the story of the decades leading up to our Independence. It documents the struggle of Madhav Rao, a forward-looking Maratha farmer and Vaidya of Ratnagiri, to educate his two younger daughters, Malati and Kamala, in the village school where they are bullied by the boys – Bhika in particular. We then witness the marriage of their elder sister Surekha to Vilas Rao (Malak), twice her age but a minister in the princely kingdom of Vaishali. As one of the 562-odd princely states in the Indian dominion, it owed its allegiance and existence to the British Empire. Their mother dies in the quest for a male child, but Madhav Rao, their Baba, gets a male heir, Govind. The girls are shifted to Ahilyabai's Indore for their education in an orphanage where they learn English, Maths, Science and Hindi in addition to Marathi. They get the first hints of ‘body touch’ between and among their wardens and fellow students. Meanwhile, as Malati and Kamala go on to Elphinstone College, their father winds up their establishment at Ratnagiri and establishes a new settlement, Desaikheda, where he convinces the village elders of the need to educate girls and boys together in the same institution.

While at Elphinstone, the sisters meet with their class fellows: Guru, Ram, Chandra, Shyam and the Kaul twins – and there are a few good blushes as the young women and men explore love along with the philosophical texts and legal aphorism.