Skip to main content

Call of the Forest




Book Review


Title: Dattapaharam: Call of the Forest

Author: V J James

Translated from Malayalam by: Ministhy S

Publisher: Penguin, 2023

Pages: 164

The forest is an enchanting place for many people including me. The chief reason why this book drew my attention is that the forest plays a vital role in it. We live in the forest through this novel. We move in the forest, climb its rocks, bathe in its streams, and sleep in its caves. The smells and sounds of the forest envelop us.

The hero of the novel, Freddie Robert, vanishes right in the beginning. He is somewhere there in the deep forest living with all the wild animals because the call of the forest is far sweeter to him than the allures of human civilisation. His friends begin a journey into the forest to find him. The novel is about that journey.

The novel is about forest, rather. About the need to merge into nature. The human world is replete with hypocrisy and deceit. The animals are far better. They turn out to be kinder too in the novel. Only, you should know how to deal with them. Rather, you should reach their level of existence – a high level of ‘transparency’. Freddie Robert is seen by a team of researchers as completely naked man. Freddie’s nakedness is a mark of his transparency. Nothing, not even clothes, now separates him from nature.

Before Freddie’s disappearance, he tells one of his friends: “Only the forest has a pure present time. The one who can live like a wild animal, after understanding himself, is fortunate. Without worrying about what is behind him, and without concerning himself with what is yet to come, he can exist purely in the present.”  

Is such bliss of living purely in the present possible? Maybe, in the forest it is. But what motivates one to seek such bliss? In the novel, mysticism is not what motivates Freddie to abandon human civilisation. It is not spirituality of any kind either. There’s not even any convincing metaphysical reason suggested. Towards the end of the novel, a very ordinary human motive comes to the surface. I don’t want to discuss it because it will be a huge spoiler in case you wish to read this novel.

Freddie was a gang leader at college. His gang was called the Pandavas. Freddie was Yudhishtira, but one without any sense of dharma. There is a Panchali (Draupadi) too but playing a completely different role. Freddie has to learn his dharma from the forest, the place where “there are fewer wicked animals … when compared to the mainland.” The human world today is led by “charismatic masters who are frauds” and “devils who read the scriptures seated on commercialized spiritual pedestals.”

How do we redeem ourselves in such a world? Can the forest be of help? This novel suggests it can.

I didn’t find the suggestion very convincing. The plot and its movement toward denouement will keep you hooked to the pages. But the characters turn out to be rather unconvincing. Superficial. Towards the end, it is impossible to believe what they are saying and doing. Not because the forest has deluded them; they are deluding themselves because their creator (the author) has a lesson to teach the readers.

Eminent writers like Bernard Shaw have written with the clear purpose of teaching certain lessons to the readers. But their didacticism didn’t detract from the literary eminence of their writing. James stops short of belonging to that category of writers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Circus called Politics

Illustration by ChatGPT I have/had many students whose parents are teachers in schools run or aided by the government. These teachers don’t send their own children to their own schools where education is free. They send their children to private schools like the one where I’ve been working. They pay huge fees to teach their children in schools where teachers are paid half of or less than their salaries. This is one of the many ironies about the Kerala society. An article in yesterday’s The Hindu [ A deeper meaning of declining school enrolment ] takes an insightful look at some of the glaring social issues in Kerala’s educational system. One such issue is the rapidly declining student enrolment in government and aided schools in the state. The private schools in the state, on the other hand, are getting more students. People don’t want to send their children to the schools run by the government systems. The chief reason is that the medium of instruction is Malayalam. The second ...
6 comments
Read more