[Originally posted in Nepali Sansar]
Seto Dharti, one of the most important books in modern literature, turns 10 this year. The book follows the story of a child widow as she goes through many hardships in her life. Tara was born on the date of the 1934 earthquake. This was one of the worst earthquakes in the country’s history. Gandhi claimed it was providential retribution for India’s failure to eradicate untouchability.
The first major event that happens in the book is Tara’s wedding. Getting married at seven was a norm rather than an exception during the time. And so a child, unaware of what marriage means, gets married.
So, with this bit of trickery from her parents, Tara unknowingly starts her married life. Her marriage brings the colour red to her life. In our culture, red is symbolic for married women. It is also integral to any form of celebration and worship. Following her marriage, Tara follows the monotonous labour of rural life.
Two years after her marriage, Tara becomes a widow and thus impure. The ideas of purity and impurity are central to our culture. Even people and their actions are pure/impure and auspicious/inauspicious. Untouchability bars people from kitchens, and any religious and cultural places. Menstruation and childbirth make women impure and untouchable. On top of this, widowhood makes a woman permanently impure and inauspicious. Not being allowed to be married in the future, and excluded from almost all festivals and ceremonies, widowhood does literally takes all colours out of her life.
Returning home after widowhood gives Tara a semblance of hope – she can live like a son, her mother says. But tragedy again befalls her as her mother’s death, followed by her father’s second marriage to a child. Tara plays the role of the primary caretaker for her younger brothers. But at a point, she does not feel comfortable in her father’s house anymore. And at 33 years old, she leaves for Devghat.
Devghat is a place people go to devote their lives to spiritual pursuits. The concept of Sannyas is old and means purification of everything in Sanskrit. To quote Bhagavad Gita, “He is known as a permanent Sannyasin who does not hate, does not desire, is without dualities.” Hence, Tara’s action fulfils the need for purification and the renouncement of desires. But Tara’s feelings portray anything but this. At the beginning of the journey, all she desires is for her brother to come calling for her, to stop her from going. And throughout the journey, she has other desires. She continues hoping and fantasizing about an alternative to where she is going. She fantasizes about marrying a fellow traveller and becoming a wife. As she travels, she yearns to take a different life path than the one she is travelling towards.
Throughout her young adulthood, we see Tara pondering about her desire for love, sex, and relationships. Human desire is said to be the fundamental motivation of all human action. Even in Rig Veda, desire is said to be the first seed of minds. But despite this, personal desire is something that needs to be repressed or sacrificed in our culture. Tara suffers through almost all the social evils that our country’s women of that time had to suffer. It might have been a melodramatic sob story about misery, had it not been realistic for a woman to go through during that time.
Along with Tara’s story, the novel follows the lives of two other women. Their story arcs seem to be to tell us how Tara’s lives would have been in different cases. Yamuna, Tara’s married friend, embodies the life that Tara might have lived had her husband not died. And the plot of her fellow child widow, Pabitra, embodies the life that Tara might have made for herself. Pabitra is who Tara could have been – had she not shackled herself to the expectations of society. This would have been her if she had given into all her desires and pleasures.
We may see Pabitra at the surface level as someone who extracted herself from the shackles of patriarchy. But would we have felt that way if we had followed her journey as closely as we followed Tara’s? All three women go through their share of trials and tribulations. And end up in the same place in their old age. This showcases the inevitable rigidity that society had provided to these women.
The novel always draws a parallel between Tara’s colourless and harsh life and her colourful fantasies and desires. Through our modern lens, her desires do not seem outrageous or even unreasonable at any point. But it seems impossible for any of them to come true for Tara.
To sum up, it’s been a decade but the book still holds up and I would recommend it to everyone.
