Book Review by Somdatta Mandal
Title: Moonlight Saga
Author: Arupa Patangia Kalita
Translated from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Tea garden literature in various Indian languages forms a definite sub-genre of literary history and the present 340 pages book under review gives us a wide canvas of the rise of tea plantations in colonial Assam and the human cost that sustains them. The historical background of this novel is well-known.
Since tea gardens are extensively labour oriented, the common problem facing them is shortage of workers and this is where the arkathias or middlemen keep on recruiting Adivasi and tribal families from central India by promise them a rosy picture of Assam desh — a land of milk and honey where they can live with dignity, earn money and bring an end to their impoverishment. But reality turns out to be the exact opposite. These bonded labourers or ‘coolies’ as they are termed, are then packed onto overcrowded steamers and sent upriver, where hunger, disease and death shadow every step of their journey.
Among them is Durgi, a young woman whose resilience endures even in despair. She carries with her a small bundle of marigold seeds, a fragile memory of the land of red earth she has left behind. At her side is her husband, Dosaru, the rebellious archer, bound to her by love and the shared hope of building a life of their own. However, what awaits them at Atharighat Tea Estate, located just below the Bhutan border, is no promised land. Labourers are stripped, disinfected, confined to barracks, and driven into relentless work, while sickness, fear, and muted defiance simmer beneath the ordered rows of tea bushes.
The novel opens with Jonathan, a British tea planter and manager of the plantation, who has spent decades building the plantation from a small nursery into a large and profitable estate, arranging the supply of more Adivasi labourers to work on the plantation. His authority is near-absolute, as is his feeling of superiority. The plantation company grants him freedom to rule over workers’ lives as he sees fit, a role he takes seriously. He has to manage their arrival, ensure they do not bring malaria or cholera with them, train them to avoid snake bites and tiger attacks, and keep them productive, while also worrying about his own health in a harsh climate with limited medical care. Soon, after Jonathan’s departure, the atmosphere of the garden changes with the arrival of a comparatively young new burra-sahib called Fraser. He tries his best to uplift the living condition of the coolies and enhance the productivity of the tea estate.
Throughout the novel Kalita beautifully narrates the tensions and pressures of plantation life. As many as 60 out of every 100 new coolies die before they can even begin work. The strict discipline that they have to undergo while living in the barracks is described in the minutest details. Durgi, a talented singer and dancer, brings moments of joy to the workers through her singing at festivals and religious celebrations. Moonlight becomes a recurring image and a significant metaphor throughout the novel. The songs sung by the coolies emphasise their cultural significance and adds to the authenticity of the narrative.
After her husband’s death, Durgi’s life takes a complicated turn over the years—an intimate affair with Fraser, the white manager of the tea garden, results in the birth of three mixed race children. She becomes known as Durgi-mem and though Fraser pays utmost attention to her well-being, allotting her a separate cottage and farmland, things change dramatically when he leaves permanently and goes back to England.
Among the three children, the youngest one died of cholera. Fraser returned to England with his daughter who resembled his mother in appearance making false promises of her return. The only child left behind was the eldest. The boy is caught in the horns of a dilemma when he refuses to go far away and live in a hostel like many other mixed-race children. The unequal relationship between the white officials and their coolie concubines exposes another unspoken truth about plantation life. There are generations of similar children, many of whom, abandoned by their white ancestors, still live in Assam’s tea gardens today.
One interesting fact about this novel is the beautiful blend of fact and fiction. In the ‘acknowledgement’ section Kalita tells us how she was handed a slim volume written by a gentleman called Usman Gani narrating the life story of Durgi Bhumij and a few documents about her and requested her to write a novel on her life. Coincidentally, during that period she was researching on tea garden life and its people as one of the subjects for her new novel. So, though Durgi was a real-life character, and the people around her had deep roots in Assam, ultimately it was Kalita’s credit to turn it into an excellent work of fiction which became very popular and managed to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award too. The excellent translation of this Assamese novel into English done by Ranjita Biswas now brings the novel to a wider readership.
What is interesting in this story is how the novelist depicts life in a tea garden with minutest details while placing the story in a period when the independence movement from British rule along with Gandhi’s ideals of satyagraha was changing the social ambience in this region as well. The exploitation of plantation labour comes under increasing scrutiny, and workers begin to demand better conditions. Meanwhile Durgi also grows in prominence among the workers and becomes known to the new manager Fraser. Soon, these two worlds, once rigidly separated, begin to collide and ends with the killing of Durgi. So, while Kalita has woven the story around Durgi, at the same time she has meticulously portrayed other prominent people of Assam, the rebellion against colonial rule at a time when tea plantations flourished in Assam after the East India Company lost ground in China post the Opium War. This elevates the novel into a chronicle of the times too.
The epilogue serves as an interesting finale to the narrative when the first-person narrator tries to trace the whereabouts of Durgi’s daughter. After a lot of effort and attempts to tie loose information together, she manages to locate a ‘white girl’ at Rangachali Tea Garden, her last shelter and her fifth generation. This brings the story to end on a somewhat positive note, and the narrator promises to come back again with some gifts for the children there.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is former professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems
Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles