The Fruits of Inheritance

David Davidar’s House of Blue Mangoes was published in 2001 and received excellent reviews. The cynic in me wondered whether reviewers were ever likely to criticize a debut novel from an author who also happened to be the CEO of Penguin India.

More than 20 years later, I finally read the novel, which follows three generations of the Dorai family in Tamil Nadu over several decades. They are Tamil Christians, a subgroup about which not much has been written, and their religious beliefs and practices are also explored in detail, along with the life story of their English priest.

The patriarch of the first section is Solomon Dorai, and his section starts in 1899, giving the reader an excellent glimpse of the style of the novel.

The morning routine continued to unfurl at a leisurely pace. A servant girl was stripping a few glossy green leaves from the karuvapillai bush that grew next to a row of drumstick trees, their long green fruit swaying in the breeze like gypsy earrings. A rooster strutted along at the head of a small group of chickens, pausing every few moments to strop the earth and peer in its foolish squint-eyed way at any food it might have uncovered.

Davidar has a keen eye for detail, as you see, and the extended descriptions are to be savoured. At the same time, when chapter after chapter contains dense descriptions of landscape, history of India and England, the practices of the priests, the background of the English Collector, siddha and Western medicine, marriage ceremonies, the occasional digression into Hindu religious stories, and an extended disquisition about mangoes …. it slows down the forward momentum of the novel.

The second section follows Solomon’s son Daniel, who becomes a doctor, and eventually becomes rich on the basis of a skin-whitening cream that he develops (“make your skin shine like the Pongal moon”). He decides to return to the family village (for reasons that were rather unconvincing to me — “it’s where we belong”, although Daniel grew up in his mother’s family household after his father’s death) and buys land and builds houses so that his extended family can move there as well, to the new township called Doraipuram.

Daniel’s son Kannan goes off to the tea estates of the Nilgiris, and estate life is beautifully described, with its English overlords and clubs and hierarchy and drinking, and at the base of it all, loneliness.

The history of the region, and especially the caste issues (that remain entrenched among the Tamil Christians as well), are extensively explored. Near the end of the novel, there is a sudden digression into a tiger hunt, which likely had some metaphorical aspect that was lost on me.

Many pages are spent on each main character, and a vast host of minor characters who come and go. But it is a book heavy on description: even their feelings are described rather than felt by the reader. The caste battles, the father-son disputes, the rebellions and compromises — are all described with a faint remoteness.

The book is solidly male-oriented (despite the woman pictured on the front and back cover). The three generations are represented by Solomon, his son Daniel, and his grandson Kannan. There are wives and daughters too, but they serve largely as background: their astonishing household organizational skills are admired, their relentless hard work is also commented on, but they have little individual personality. Solomon’s wife Charity is ‘a beautiful woman’, but more words are spent on the renown of her fish biryani.

The descriptions of the mass-scale cooking (for there are often dozens of people staying with them) are delightful for any food-oriented reader.

a great feast at Easter — avial, two kinds of poriyal, pachidi, raw mango kootu, mutton curry and rice, curd rice and payasam.[..] The biryani was cooked to perfection, each mouthful of rice spiced with nutmeg, clove and cashew-nut, and full of tender meat.

My mouth is watering! At the same time, the lush descriptions do seem to reduce the women characters to their housekeeping skills. Occasionally a woman’s concerns (‘you’ve forgotten about me!’ cries a young daughter to her mother) appear, but they seem largely irrelevant. There are some stereotypes too — at one point, a whole chapter is devoted to the prevalence of gossip among the women, and the clever way in which Charity dealt with it by finding the older women other tasks to occupy themselves. The only non-Tamilian family member is Helen, an Anglo-Indian who marries Kannan: her uneasiness with both Indians and the English are well described, but in the end she is reduced to a standard gold-digger trope.

The Dorai family, to a man, are ‘not interested in politics’. This means that they stay apart from the great Independence movement in India during their times, and in fact, would have preferred the British to stay.

Not very interested in politics to begin with, the demands of the clinic, his family and his growing business had further eroded the attention he paid to the political events of the day. But he supposed he did approve of the British in a distant sort of way. They had brought stability and discipline to the country.

This is interesting; many South Indians stayed out of India’s tumultous independence struggle, but they do not often appear in books. The events of India’s struggle for independence are not ignored here, but are described generally at a distance, as when one character’s friend feels that all Indians should participate, and encourages the Dorais to be involved. Despite the pointedly negative descriptions of many of the English colonial rulers, the only Dorai who is a freedom fighter is Aaron, son of Solomon — he is a rambunctious, angry man, and it is never quite clear if his dedication to the movement comes from rebelling against his family, from his own kneejerk uncooperativeness, or a real dedication to freedom from colonialism for Indians.

Solidly researched (as best I can tell — I’m no expert on Tamilian history) with a bibliography at the end, and smoothly written, this novel has the feel of an extended personal exploration into Tamil Christian community hitory, mixed in with a family history based on stories from the elders. One chapter where young Kannan inadvertently starts the car and hits a tree has the feel of a much-retold tale. Likewise, athletic young Aaron’s well-jumping exploit is described in detail, and then referred to again and again, but it seemed like a tale that would fascinate relatives rather than outsiders.

Sometimes the book is unquestioning: for example, when sales of Daniel Dorai’s face-whitening cream dropped because it has ‘run its course’. But why? Surely fair skin did not stop being desired by Indian women in the 1940s and 1950s?

The novel is well crafted, as I said, but there is the occasional glitch. Chapter 48 starts with:

Indian vs Indian. We’re brilliant at it. Differences of caste, community, language and religion have split our society for thousands of years.

Who is this ‘we’? Is this meant to be one of the characters speaking, or is it a sudden statement by the author? Two paragraphs later, the writing shifts back into the third-person description of Daniel visiting someone’s house, and the ‘we’ are never heard from again.

An epic saga without emotional depth, the book is more successful as a history than as a novel.

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