Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (HarperCollins 2022)
My first Divakaruni novel was The Mistress of Spices, which I read as a college student and I was hooked from then. I’ve read almost all her novels after that. With The Last Queen, Divakaruni stepped away from women in myths to engage with women in history and she continues in the same vein in Independence, although her main characters here are fictional.
Independence is about the heroine Priya, the youngest and most intellectually progressive of three sisters with her dream of becoming a doctor, and also revolves around Jamini, the lame second sister with a permanent yet hidden grievance and Deepa, the beautiful and confident eldest. The novel is written in five parts, chronologically arranged, from August 1946 to February 1948 and with the Epilogue set in 1954. The events within these dates are significant in both, India’s Independence movement and in the lives of the three sisters.
Although Priya is the designated heroine, who seeks her own independence as avidly as India, the reader is attuned to Deepa’s and Jamini’s stories as well, as entire chapters of the plot are devoted to how their personalities and actions are tangled together and how each sister impacts the lives of the other two.
Their father, Dr. Nabakumar Ganguly is a selfless, dedicated doctor, whose commitment to his patients, even in his self-funded Calcutta clinic, costs him his life on Direct Action Day, converting a rare outing into a nightmare for his family.
The main theme of the novel is the struggle for Independence, of both India and of Priya and her sisters. Equally interesting are its subsidiary themes of rural poverty, the education of women, Hindu-Muslim relations in India since pre-Independence, and the very feminist theme of how “When men go off to be heroes, do they even realise what it does to the women they leave behind?”
I found the almost equal depiction of the three very different sisters most interesting, as they grew and changed in character along with the progress of the plot. Their flaws contrasted with their strengths to evoke empathy, especially for the hypocritical, emotionally neglected, physically handicapped and repressed middle daughter, Jamini. I actually found that the heroine, Priya appears somewhat flat in contrast to this lesser yet more complex character.
Another appealing feature of the plot is that no matter how disparate the individual natures of the characters, the tumult brought about by their (at times maddening) idiosyncracies during their varying responses to external events is orchestrated into the plausible natural harmony of a very satisfying conclusion.
An especial feature of the novel is the inclusion of patriotic Rabindrasangeet and Nazrulgeeti sung by Nabakumar, or one of the sisters, or heard on the radio. I thus, looked up and listened to numerous old favourites that really set the mood for the ongoing narrative.
If you like historical novels, then do read this one, with its very realistic depiction of the rural and zamindari lifestyle and of Calcutta in pre-Independence India and the appealing stories of three sisters caught up in the events of their time.