For his second novel, author and astrophysicist Biman Nath trains an imaginary telescope away from the grand immensity of intergalactic space, and focuses it on a colourful, fiery slice of his nation’s past.
Writing it between his ‘day job’ at the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, Biman was anxious about one thing - that his novel should do something that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s ‘Anandamath’ did not. So in ‘The Tattooed Fakir’ the reader meets the fakir rather than the Hindu sanyasi, and the role that fantastic band of Muslim mystics played in the sanyasi-fakir rebellions of late-eighteenth century Bengal.
“Bengal was going through a transition at the time. The sanyasis and the fakirs were engaged in guerrilla warfare against the British. All this is recorded by the British district collectors of the time. But nobody has told the tale from the fakir’s point of view. ‘Anandamath’ talks about the sanyasi and not about the fakir. I wanted to talk about the fakir. They were more interesting in a way,’’ Biman said last weekend at the Kovalam Literary Festival where his novel was released.
‘The Tattooed Fakir’ is set at a point in time critical to the Bengali psyche and Indian nationalism. In the years following the great famine, British-ruled Bengal is increasingly restless. The first indigo plantations have come up. The region is firmly in the grip of the British, but the French too have footholds - in places like Chandranagore, for instance. Both the European powers are possessed by an ever-deepening lust for indigo. Across a whole world, the French Revolution has reached critical mass.
Biman’s protagonist is the grief-maddened farmer Asif who joins the fighting fakirs after the local zamindar kidnaps Roshanara, his beautiful wife. She falls into the hands of the indigo planter MacLean - Makhlin Sahib to the ‘natives’ - a Scot, who keeps her for himself.
At one level, revenge is the theme that stitches the tale together, but Biman also wanted his novel to be about indigo. “I wanted to write about the process and not just about the cruelty and oppression on the plantations,” says Biman. A sub-plot is crafted around industrial espionage, painting the thinly-veiled rivalry between the British and the French in the booming indigo trade. ‘The Tattooed Fakir’ is a far cry from galactic nuclei and ‘burping’ black-holes that otherwise keep Biman occupied for most of his waking hours, but the novel also lingers upon one subject relevant to the space age; rockets - both Tipu Sultan and the fakirs used rudimentary versions to thwart the British.
Where ‘The Tattooed Fakir’ disappoints as a historical novel is in the author’s reluctance to dwell heavily on his main themes - whether it is the fakirs or the indigo trade. The novel fights shy of the fine, narrative passages that help put the historical novel in perspective. Also, the purists are likely to complain that the English spoken by his 18th century characters appear too contemporary for comfort. But Biman’s novel excels, on the other hand, in its racy readability and the deft handling of the softer emotions.
Biman’s first novel ‘Nothing is Blue’ was critically acclaimed. He wrote his second novel centuries removed from the actual historical events his novel portrays, but there are elements in it that recall the simmering tensions in the rural regions of 21st century India. “In retrospect, I realise there are things that I did not realise at the time of writing. Phrases like, fakirs will now on be regarded as ‘enemies of the government’ used by (Governor General) Warren Hastings’s in his circular to the district collectors.”
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