Govardhan’s Travels
anand
Penguin India, Rs 350

Anand is the pen-name of eminent Malayalam writer P. Sachidanandan. Born in 1936 in Irinjalakuda in Kerala, the son of a primary schoolteacher, Anand trained and worked as an engineer. In his writing career, as an autodidact, he developed his own literary style, one that would take him on a decades-long personal journey through history, legend, politics and philosophy. His first novel, Aalkoottam (The Crowd), was published in 1970; Govardhante Yatrakal (Govardhan's Travels), which comes to us in this excellent translation by Gita Krishnankutty was published in Malayalam by DC Books in 2000.

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.

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