The Swaraj Spy – Review

Book Review

Title: The Swaraj Spy

Author: Vijay Balan

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2022

Hundreds of thousands of people sacrificed their lives during the struggle for the country’s independence. Each one of them must have had a moving story to narrate. Most of them vanished from history, however, without telling their stories to anyone. Vijay Balan tells the story of one such person in this debut novel of his.

The Swaraj Spy is the story of a real person, Kumaran Nair from Calicut (today’s Kozhikode) in Kerala. The plot spans the period from 1931 when Kumar (as the protagonist is called usually) gets chucked from the Malabar Special Police (MSP) to 1943 when his life reaches a tragic denouement.

Bhagat Singh had just been executed. There were protests all over the country. It was one such protest gathering that Jemadar Kumaran Nair was asked to disperse by Commandant H Keane. “No! I can’t do this,” Kumar tells himself. “I wasn’t trained to break the skulls of unarmed women!” As a result, he loses his job. Since his seven-year-long service at MSP had been remarkably good, he is not court-martialled as he should have been. Kumar reaches his home in Kerala unexpectedly and his mother “sensed something was seriously wrong.”

Kumar starts a business with the help of a relative. The Great Depression takes a heavy toll on that business and Kumar leaves for Singapore where another relative will help him find a job. Eventually he joins the Royal Air Force as a civilian clerk. In a short while, he becomes an espionage-trainee of the Indian Swaraj Institute.

The second half of the novel narrates Kumar’s harrowing experiences as a spy. Hence the title of the novel. In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, we are told that “Beyond the play on the Indian Swaraj Institute and India’s freedom struggle, another perspective drove me to choose this title…. (T)he story is about Kumar’s personal transformation, and his discovery of a different kind of self-rule.”

Without that explanatory note, the title could be quite misleading. The entire first half of the novel has nothing to do with espionage. Hence a reader who buys the book assuming that it is a spy novel will be disappointed. Even in the second half, espionage has little role to play. It is about a betrayal by a double agent and the agonies that follow.

The author wove the plot from his family narratives as well as his study of Kumaran Nair’s trial transcripts. Kumaran Nair is the author’s granduncle. One problem with this is that the novel turns out to be quite hagiographical. Kumar appears too good to be true, a hero without a flaw. The author’s note at the end of the book describes Kumar as “a charismatic man buffeted by the winds of cataclysmic global events." The global events, particularly the World War II, determine Kumar’s fate rather than his own personal choices. He becomes a puppet dangling on the strings pulled by forces beyond his control or choices. This does affect the cathartic effect the novel seeks to have on the reader.

The novel ends up as more of a biography than a work of art though quite much of the plot is conjured up by the imagination of the writer. The author has not kept the required aesthetic detachment from his subject. Moreover, there is little drama except in the last part. Not one memorable scene or character in the first half. Nonetheless, the novel keeps the reader engaged to the end because of its stark realism. As Shashi Tharoor tells us in the blurb, "The Swaraj Spy is an engrossing story that delves into a place and time that writers and historians have unjustly overlooked for a long time.” It is worth reading this book precisely for that reason: to see some events and people that didn’t become part of the normal history of India’s freedom struggle.

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