Review of Ajita by K. Sridhar

The Hindu

21 hours ago

There have always been rules in literature. Take poetry, for instance. A sonnet has 14 lines and a rhyme scheme. A haiku is 17 syllables arranged in three lines. But, Oulipo — meaning workshop of potential literature, from the French — takes this up a notch, using elaborate literary constraints for any form of writing, whether a detective novel or a poem.
The formal experimentation in If on a winter's night a traveller by Italo Calvino is exhilarating as one is a reader reading a book about a reader reading a book. Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style is a single story told 39 times, each in a different style. The intention of the Oulipo is not only formal but to liberate the story through such limits. And the magic of reading these texts is near-mathematically wondrous, like decoding a cryptic crossword as one is doing it.
So, it is a rare and fresh surprise to encounter the novel Ajita by K. Sridhar, set firmly in what we might call an Indian past and present, that tells us that it takes its formal cues from the Oulipo movement. Set out in 26 sections, the novel is told from the perspective of two characters from different periods of time — the eponymous Ajita from the 5th century BCE, and Moksh from the 20th century.
Each chapter is written without a letter of the alphabet, and expands the universe of our characters little by little. It is a fictional history that is ambitious in its scope, asking questions about ritual and tradition, ethics and morality, life and death, and politics and practice. The larger historical questions emerge from the inner lives of the characters and in dialogue with the people they encounter. Ajita is a Carvaka philosopher from the time of the Buddha and Mahavira, and Moksh is an academic steeped in Marxist tradition in a politically churning Mumbai of the 1980s and 90s.
The novel as a character
We watch the characters grow up and their questions are grand in scope: what makes humans different from ants? How does the individual cope with grief? We meet not only the fathers, mothers, teachers and lovers of our characters, but a wide cast of Vedic philosophers, Ajivikas, the Buddha, Dalit panthers, Mahayana Buddhists and trade union activists. While the novel succeeds in its experimentation and broad historical scope, the characters can tend to feel two dimensional and perfunctory. It barely passes the Bechdel test, with women characters existing merely to advance the plot or progress of the protagonists. But one could keep aside such critical concerns to applaud the freshness of this novel and its attempt to speak to a sweep of ideas and meet its formal restrictions with assurance and rigour.
The novel grows more inventive as it gathers momentum, offering intertextual surprises and metafictional confidence, surreptitiously drawing the reader's attention to its form. It becomes a character in itself, interested in the ways in which Indian society has sought to order itself against orthodoxy and tradition.
As it draws to a close, the novel recalls Doris Lessing's 'inner space fiction' of The Golden Notebook (1962), capturing both social reality and the psychic journey of individuals. It offers Indian fiction a refreshing new direction and conversation.
The Mysuru-based writer and editor covers books, queerness, and mental health.
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