Studying human interior

Title: Bol Polova Nil Ahasa
Author: Ranjit Dharmakeerthi
Genre: Novel

Though confined to some three hundred pages and subdivided into twenty three chapters, the new Sinhala novel of the well known award-winning novelist Ranjit Dharmakirthi ‘Bol Polova Nil Ahasa’ (Barren Earth, Blue Sky) in many ways resembles more a conventional family saga than a modern creative work with a few characters. The work possesses all the qualities of storytelling ties of human bondages with sociological commentaries and situations blended.

This humane story of an ancestral living conditions gradually changing with the lapse of development stages set in a village off Ratnapura covering areas such as Pallabadda, Ranvala, Akkarabage and a few other indigenous habitats, the names of which may be familiar to the readers of those areas and could perhaps identify the central experiences beyond barriers.

Living conditions

They are named as places of agrarian culture situated in an arid area where more people exist in poverty stricken conditions on agrarian living confined to their own lands and lands possessed by them due to the virtue of the fact that they have come and settled as inheritors of property from their forefathers. The novelist selects with care one of these places as his kosmos closer to his heart and soul, intimately relating their experiences, perhaps after a careful scrutiny of recording events like traditional rituals, ceremonies, transactions, family leanings, customs, gem mining rites, ownerships, religious attitudes, childcare, pregnancy, love and passions packed as his creative area of expression.

The reader is initially taken into such a place where the elderly parents live with four sons out of whom the eldest Lokubande is the inheritor of his father’s legacy, and the second one Siyadoris too is a strenuous worker who struggles with the earth as his laboring source, the third one Ratnapala who has gone to Kantale has come back after several years of work earning more money than the others, with more experiences with the world, the fourth one is Ariyasiri who is shown as a person who becomes an army man and due to frustrations and dismays caused out of unbelievable conditions, becomes a deserter and lives in secrecy serving a politician as a shield for protection and suspected accusation on his obsessed standpoint.

Though hinted as to a vast narrative canvas, the actual commencing of the story line triggers off with the advent of the young beauty Bingunika who gets married to Siyadoris and lives under one roof with others and/or slightly cut off from others. Geographically all the minute details of her behaviour which had led her to take up this marriage goes into the making of another saga. She is led by various other extraneous forces to take up this incompatible marriage life to an alien husband. From the beginning, hand in glove with the central story, she becomes the victim of circumstances, a tragic heroine, which is also predicted as she is not been carefully looked after by her husband Siyadoris , who is otherwise busy with his own fieldwork.

Skilful portrayal

This may also look realistic as it is depicted skillfully by the writer. Siyadoris is shown as looking more tired than an average farmer. In the end he becomes physically sick and had to be taken to the hospital for an operation. This is one of the turning points in the life of Bingunika as well as others. He has to be looked after by others over a period of one year. But it looks as if he cannot suit himself to this behaviour pattern of the average man. While he is getting treatment in the hospital his brother Ratnapala had to attend to some of his matters like being a bystander and helper. Bingunika cannot leave the house alone as she is with a infant who had to be fed and looked after carefully. This entrusting of the duties and ethical code gets some what distorted when Ratnapala develops a soft corner for his sister in law Bingunika.

The wile result may look controversial. Siyadoris is shown diametrically opposed to the behaviour pattern possessed by his younger brother, Ratnapala as he is shown as a person who is aloof and leaves Bigunika to do whatever she wants even at the stage of going to see a doctor when she was pregnant. She had to succumb to circumstances which she had not faced when the younger brother Ratnapala arrives. She too finds from the beginning a soft corner for her brother in law Ratnapala as he takes more attention to her than her husband.

This clandestine affair develops to the grave extent not only in filial differences, but also in an accidental death on the part of Siyadoris, who suspects the relationship which presumably is the high point and the point of attention in the work. Slightly before this event the reader is shown in a very sensitive manner the affinities of the two, the brother in law Ratnapla and Bigunika, which extends to the barriers beyond mere affection and love, but culminates in sex and amorous behaviour forms.

Power of expression

Ranjit Dharmakirthi has sensitively captured in a Lawrentian spirit, which is not simplistic, a point which some may disagree, the subtle nuances of sex and inter-combined passion and lechery that follows. I sincerely felt that this area of narrative is perhaps deliberately overdone presumably due to the power of expression needed for the development of the vision of realism of the saga and felt as needed by the writer himself. The death of Siyadoris may be seen as a deliberate attempt on the part of the writer to culminate his narrative in a tragedy and the killer is suspected as the brother Ratnapala who has to be in custody to pay the penalty. But by a strange concoction the reader sees that Bigunika’s own brother Namasena comes to his rescue by bringing in a lawyer who helps them proceed matters.

The saga does not end there, for the victim now becomes Ratnapala who by sheer justice remains innocent and exonerated from all the alleged crimes. But the narrative takes another standpoint where the chastity of Bingunika is depicted as challenging. She does not become yet another victim of circumstances by leaving the area with Ratnapala though suggested by the latter, instead the reverse happens.

The writer tries all the possible narrative techniques old and new to express his human experience. He even adds a clown-like self inflated character named George, who happens to be a maternal uncle of Siyadoris, as a comic relief. The court scene as depicted by the writer, I felt, is one sensitive revelation of human misgivings. Through George, despite his frolics, the writer tries to depict the vain glory that remain in humans in a tragic situation.

Controversial environs

Whatever the controversies may arrive as regards the sex scenes - I don’t think such a situation will arise in this country in the literary circles, especially in the Sinhala cultural scene - regarding the power of the sexual expression does not abate in an honest writer. The sex line of the narrative is the most powerful area in the work followed by the other events that culminate in the tragedy. The expression of sex scenes embedded add colour and glamour giving more power of the story and retains a steady flow resulting in better reading.

The socio political nuances embedded in the narrative may not add any bright colour to the central events that follow. The Sinhala novelist Ranjit Dharmakirthi may have been inspired by his own observation of a particular area of human interest, and selected it as his creative source of inspiration. But it remains to be said that such events as depicted in this work may not be too alien from even a universal point of view. The controversial American novel of Erskine Caldwell’s ‘God’s Little Acre’ contains the same theme with a different narrative attitude to life. Two different types of writers, living in two different cultures, may write two creative works bearing the same human experience.

Which one is better handled than the other, remains the question of the discerning reader who is used to comparison and analysis as his aesthetic tools of appreciation. I found this novel enticing and gripping at very many moments and found that the authorial comments akin to the story teller and sociologist especially at the beginning of each chapter would have been pared to the minimum to formulate a persuasive readership.

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