Book review 'The Sialkot Saga': Fiction peeps into the well of history

Chennai: Imagine having to preserve and protect, down the ages, a compendium of ‘powerful knowledge’ that a team of nine researchers in the court of King Ashoka (250 BCE), had systematised through 18 steps — a ‘Rasayana’ formula, that the great emperor wanted “not to fall into wrong hands” and used only for the ‘good of mankind’.

Ashoka was even believed to be even more concerned that this profound piece of metallurgical chemistry does not degenerate into mere ‘alchemy’, the science and art of converting base metals into ‘gold’ to fill greedy coffers of monarchs, worse if they happen to be “your enemies”.

That ‘secret knowledge’ wrapped in an ‘oil skin parcel’ is to be passed on, across generations, from the ‘keeper of the secret’ at any point in time to his/her ‘chosen successor’ by a set of criteria laid down by Ashoka himself to his dedicated band of researchers – merit, honesty and loyalty being among them and not necessarily your blood relative-. There is already a critique of dynastic politics there!

The ‘oil skin parcel’ has to be averted at any cost from reaching wrong hands or ‘your enemy’ more so in times of war by its author/possessor; and one of the keepers of that tradition in a long line of quiet successors throws them into a well, called in the novel, Puran Bhagat well, in a place that was to be later part of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Punjab.

And the way to the well’s location are inscribed in ‘Gurmukhi script’ in two ‘copper kadas’ that Sikhs wear around their wrists. The two main protagonists of this racy and insightful work of voluminous fiction by Ashwin Sanghi – Arvind and Arbaaz — each happen to be wearing this ‘copper kada’, with each ‘Kada’ having a name, ‘Daljit’ and ‘Manjit’ engraved on it.

Only the wife of that brave Sikh man knows exactly where that well of knowledge was located. Telescope these existential facts — you can see them as ‘facts’ or ‘fiction’- onto the larger canvas of history of the Indian subcontinent, particularly from 1947, the year of Independence and also the most horrid days of bloodletting in communal riots in the wake of the Partition when Britain handed over power to India, the narrative moves on since the ‘last train of death’ to the Indian side of Punjab had left Sialkot in Pakistan. This also explains the novel’s title, ‘The Sialkot Saga’.

The two orphaned children of partition, tossed by the turmoil of the historical forces, get adopted by two families in two different cultural settings; the boy who grows to be Arvind is gratefully accepted by a childless Marwari businessman couple with roots in Kolkata, while the other kid Arbaaz finds himself into the protective arms of a Muslim family in undivided Bombay post-partition.

As the plot thickens, with unfolding of events in the political theatre in post-Independent India, right from Nehru to Narendra Modi in the backdrop, Arvind and Arbaaz evolve as very powerful individuals in their own right, unmatched business arch-rivals, trying to have a hand in every possible pie from mining to IPL franchises.

The rest of it is contemporary history, as they would say. But for Ashwin Sanghi, the story has a deeper motif, to try and discover the essence of ‘Bharatiya’ or ‘Bharat’ that is not so explicitly stated, but shown by his characters.

From intense nostalgic yearning of a ‘golden past’ bequeathed by Ashoka’s own supposed knowledge of a ‘periodic table’ of basic elements, in a turn of phrase so to say, to strands of a Harry Potter’s passion for an elemental know-all substance, to a typically Indian emotive crush that Bollywood films portray in grand style, with even underworld dons pressing the cause of ‘Dharma’, Ashwin Sanghi’s novel makes for an engaging roll-all of right versus wrong amid shades of grey. As the poser in Kamal Haasan’s Naayagan, was he good or bad, has no simple answers.

Interestingly, the deeper cultural underpinnings the author obliquely hints at with his musings in the words of some of his characters goes well with the ascent of anti-Congressism now in the country, notwithstanding the political pitfalls of a new, assertive facile discourse of sociological dogmas floating all around.

Still, in a T.S. Eliot sense, a larger humanitarian cause would be served as long as wisdom and the search for truth are not identified with knowledge and information.