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November 14, 2006
Review of The Hills of Angheri
Kavery Nambisan – The Hills of Angheri (Penguin: India, 2005)
By the author of The Mango Coloured Fish, and The Scent of Pepper, this latest of Nambisan’s novels recognisably contains her distinctive style and writing voice. Nambisan is one of the small number of authors writing about Indians who do not showcase the Indianness of her characters, but almost as an afterthought, a backdrop. Quite refreshingly different from the majority of diasporic South Asian women’s writings, but then Nambisan is a home author, and there is a wealth of local detail underlying the entire novel, understated, but pleasingly present.
This novel is about Nalli, a village girl who aspires to be a doctor, and has a dream of building a hospital in her village and working with her childhood sweetheart, Jai, who also left the village and became a doctor. Nambisan sketches out Nalli’s village life, her extended family, and goes on to detail Nalli’s medial training, her internship, her going to England to train as a surgeon, then returning to India to work. Her childhood dream remains unfulfilled for a number of reasons, and Nalli’s life trundles on, filled with very human satisfactions (few) and dissatisfactions (many).
The curious thing about this novel is that although very readable, although fluently written, it is a novel which meanders, goes nowhere, makes no point. Events are related, but frequently go unconnected to the storyline. Many personalities are sketched, but hardly affect the plot. Nalli, our protagonist, is quite clearly portrayed, and a most believable character, but ultimately, a very flawed, often petty, rather small-hearted and small-minded individual. In fact, in the many medical details Nambisan includes of cases, surgeries, hospitals, she seems to select the failures to write of. Woven into the storyline are little mentions of corruptions, exploitations of the poor and ignorant and vulnerable, the cynicism and lackings of doctors and the entire medical system in India. Not only this, but Nambisan also seems to focus on Nalli’s many incompetencies as a doctor and surgeon, describing her blunders, mistakes, negligences, and hardly mentioning her achievements and victories except in passing. We hear of how patients berate Nalli, have little confidence in her, how she lacks confidence in her own skills, and where she does gain a little confidence, it is merely the pride before the fall.
It is hard to know why Nambisan spends most of the novel undermining her protagonist, which while realistic enough a portrayal, is hardly one to endear either character or novel to the reader. Nalli not only comes across as only a semi-skilled doctor, she is also a rather negligent daughter/relative, manages no real relationship with any man, has several friendships but drifts from them eventually, and has neither talent, courage, humour, insight, nor any outstanding qualities which would have enabled her to rise above the ordinary and mundane. Perhaps Nambisan is making the cynical point that doctors, the much revered and elite group in Indian society, are some of them Nalli-like characters, doctors by opportunity and circumstance, but unremarkable for all their elevated social status.
The novel is not dispiriting, not at all, but it is definitely not a good news story either. It is not an Austenian type of novel where the character grows from strength to strength, learning about herself and rising above her own weaknesses; Nalli just gets by, not really seeming to have much to be proud of, and grows very little, learns very little, and changes very little. Reasonably well written, though less well edited, a story fluently told but too loosely structured, it is in fact very difficult to know what to make of Nambisan’s latest piece, difficult to place this novel in terms of genre and type. It is a novel I am glad to have read, but am not certain if I would want to read it again because I am left not knowing what the author wanted to convey to the reader, if anything at all.
Posted by Lisa Lau at 05:00 AM | Comments (0)