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Passion play
Isheeta Ganguly’s inventiveness in Three Women is a world away from the psychological complexity of the characters on which the novel is based.
In 1884, Kadambari Devi, the wife of Rabindranath Tagore’s older brother Jyotirindranath, died by suicide. She was 25, two years older than Rabindranath, who had been her close companion ever since she came into the Tagore household as a nine-year-old bride. Playmates as children, Kadambari and Rabindranath grew up sharing a bond that included their literary interests.
Some say she was the poet’s muse in his early years. And Kadambari, who was lonely in her marriage—her much older husband had little time for her—probably allowed the brilliant “Robi” to dominate her emotional landscape. We do not know why she took her own life, but the fact that she did so four months after Rabindranath married the girl chosen for him by his family has been cited by legions of literary historians as an indication that perhaps the poet’s relationship with his “notun bouthaan” (new sister-in-law) was more intense than either of them had let on.
Rabindranath was deeply affected by Kadambari’s suicide. She was gone, but he let her spirit waft into many of his works, including several of his later paintings. The character of Charulata in his novella, Nashtanirh—masterfully brought to life by Satyajit Ray in his film Charulata—is widely regarded as having been based on Kadambari Devi and the situation she may have found herself in.
Charulata is a lonely, neglected, intellectually curious wife who falls in love with her bright, ebullient brother-in-law Amal, who is also an aspiring writer. Amal gives her company and feeds not only her literary interests but also her romantic passion. However, the consequences of Charulata’s emotional straying from her marriage are disastrous.
Tagore came back to dwell on a somewhat similar relationship triangle in the novel Ghare Baire, which was also adapted for the screen by Ray. Its heroine Bimala is encouraged to come out of her cloistered existence by her loving and progressive zamindar husband Nikhilesh. But no sooner than she does so, she is smitten with his friend—the flamboyant, morally ambiguous freedom fighter Sandip. Eventually, like Charulata, she, too, has to face the wreckage of her dreams of romantic love, although Bimala’s fate turns out to be darker than her predecessor’s.
In Three Women: A Graphic Novel, Isheeta Ganguly brings together these two famous fictional women and their once-living prototype Kadambari Devi in a sort of trialogue that plays out from a modern-day perspective. The concept is an intriguing one—Kadambari Devi is portrayed as a contemporary woman who travels back in time to parley with her spirit daughters, Charulata and Bimala, who belong to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ganguly had brought the concept to the stage back in 2015 with Three Women: A Musical Theatre, a production that, the book’s blurb tells us, was well-received in India and abroad. The graphic novel is an adaptation of her theatrical imagining of the conversation among these three women.
The slim volume devotes a lot of pages to Charulata and Bimala recalling their hot passion for their respective love interests—Amal and Sandip—and how that passion consumes them even now, and how bereft they feel because these men abandoned them. That is the cue for Kadambari to slip into full-on Cosmopolitan-style relationship advice mode.
She tells them to “play it cool” in this “world of games between men and women”. “Don’t seem like an eager beaver,” she counsels them. She hands out other motivational mantras too—“Be the architect of your own destiny,” she says, while urging them to consult the “rule book” inspired by the “Sex and the City generation” that, presumably, has all the tips a woman needs to win the battle of the sexes. The old, albeit undeniable, feminist argument that a woman is never considered good enough is also wheeled out.
In her attempt to make this a “modern” take on the lives of these three women, Ganguly peppers the speech bubbles with references to a plethora of 21st century artefacts: Xanax, women’s blogs, chick flicks (unfortunately spelt as chic flics), WhatsApp, smartphones, tablets, and a host of others, including two mentions of television anchor Arnab Goswami. No doubt, Goswami would be pleased to know that he is an inseparable part of the author’s idea of today’s zeitgeist.
Ganguly reserves her coup de grâce for the end. Kadambari reveals that she chose to take her own life because “Robi” refused to go away with her when she told him that she was pregnant with his child.
Clearly, Ganguly does not lack inventiveness. However, her inventions are a world away from the psychological complexity that animates the fictional Charulata and Bimala, and perhaps also animated Rabindranath’s notun bouthaan.
Shuma Raha is an author. Her new novel The Sea Has the Answers was published recently.