Uniquely Common

The Govardhan of the title is taken from the one and a half century old Hindi play Andher Nagri Chaupat Raja by Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850-1885). In Bharatendu’s savagely satirical play, Govardhan is an ordinary man on the street chosen for punishment by hanging — not because he committed any crime, but for the simple reason that the noose fits his neck. In Anand’s novel, as Bharatendu wrestles with the question of the writer’s responsibility, he almost feels the noose tightening around his own neck — and is compelled to free Govardhan “from the tip of his pen”, though not from the death sentence that hangs above his head.

Emerging from his prison cell to go in search of his destiny, Govardhan travels across history, geography, legend and literature. He walks behind the famous traveler Ibn Battuta as his slave, and is then set free to find his own way in the world. Walking along with the rest of the population when a whimsical king decides to change his capital, he reflects on whether “perhaps free people, like slaves, had no voices”. He wanders through a village of blinded animals, and another where the people cut off their thumbs and throw them into the river. He is accompanied by a blind cat; he carries the message of the revolution in a packet of round chapattis; he loses his village, home, wife, child, lover, even his ears and then his fingers. He moves on.

Even after justice, knowledge and dharma have failed to provide any answers for his situation, Govardhan walks on, across a Kafkaesque terrain of violence and pain. His fellow slave Ali Dost, freed at the same moment as Govardhan, goes on to become a king’s henchman, carrying out Humayun’s orders to blind his brother Kamran. In this landscape where history and literature are called to speak for themselves, we meet a host of characters: Kotwal Moinuddin and Mirza Ghalib, Choupat Raja and Company Bahadur, Chitragupta and Yama, Umrao Jan and Tyagaraja, Galileo and Ramachander Mathur, Kalidasa and Amir Khusrau — and finally, Kabir, standing at the crossroads with a flaming torch in his hand — a solitary figure, with no one prepared to follow his call.

And yet the novel ends on a note of hope. In the final chapter, Govardhan is completely worn out and sits on a roadside culvert to rest his legs. But there is still humanity left in him. Noticing a tiny plant growing in a crevice of the crumbling plaster, he touches the leaves gently with the palm of his fingerless hand. Seeing a column of ants moving tirelessly on the ground beneath, he lifts his feet off the ground to let them pass. And then, choosing to ignore the film song blaring from a nearby loudspeaker, and the village reception from where the sound is coming, Govardhan asks the ants whether he can join them on their journey. Although they warn him that he might have to walk across roads that he has already traversed, he replies that it does not matter, and begins to walk with them.

The back quote by Mahasweta Devi sums up the significance of this deeply thoughtful work. Calling the novel the most memorable literary event of her experience, she remarks on the plight of Govardhan, “that common man who seeks justice from history, from time and society, and is punished. Govardhan is everyman… his story is everyman’s story.”