Irreverent histories: review of Nilanjan P. Choudhury’s Song of the Golden Sparrow

A few pages into Nilanjan P. Choudhury’s Song of the Golden Sparrow comes this argument between a young boy who is a garage mechanic and a Santhal girl, about the value of school education. According to the girl, “All this reading-writing is useless… my father says the jungle is our teacher, the best teacher there is.” The boy retorts, “Because your father doesn’t know of anything outside the jungle. But there is a big world out there and I want to see it.”

A little later, Satyajit Ray makes an appearance. As he negotiates with a prince for funds, the conversation is peppered with references to the filmmaker’s work. A chance remark by the prince about his father’s music room has Ray noting down “Jalsaghar, Benaras, baijis, all gone” and then again “yellow limestone, golden fortress, sonar kella (?)”. I take a break to go fish out my copy of Feluda.

Song of the Golden Sparrow begins in Alakapuri, the abode of Kubera, the god of wealth. Prem Chandra Guha, a young yaksha, has been found sleeping on the job guarding the Chamber of Modern History. This, Guha says, happened because they were so boring that he — “a certified insomniac” — actually fell asleep. His sentence: a century of banishment to India and to write a history that is not boring.

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So begins the tale of independent India as seen through the lives of the two children, Manhoos and Mary, who open the book, and the banished yaksha, now transmogrified into a golden sparrow. While the novel touches upon issues such as corruption, greed, the political response to Naxalism in West Bengal, and the dispossession of tribals in the name of development, the writing is insouciant and keeps you hooked.

As I close the book, I notice the tagline: ‘A Novel History of Free India’. Today, when the word ‘history’ means different things to different people, perhaps it should be said that this book is not history or a historical. It is a novel that looks back at our past in a different way.

krithika.r@thehindu.co.in