Book review: Alice Albinia’s 'Leela’s Book'

Book: Leela’s Book
Alice Albinia
Random House
422 pages
Rs499

Alice Albinia’s first book, Empire Of The Indus, was both a non-fiction travelogue and ‘biography’ of the river Indus. Leela’s Book is a work of fiction that recreates the characters and situations of the Mahabharata and places them in a contemporary Delhi, vividly and realistically coloured by class, political and religious differences.

But even in this work rivers continue to be important, serving as metaphors for both the epic and its author — “Vyasa was a meanderer, and the sluggish river of his poetry had many tributaries, oxbow-lakes and stagnant pools (not to mention too many narrators.)”

As the quote above suggests, Leela’s Book is concerned with the ideas of authorship and differing narrative perspectives. The Mahabharata is a frame narrative, which records its own method of composition — Vyasa, the narrator of the epic and a character, narrates the story to his divine scribe Ganesha. The frame of Leela’s Book is this relationship: in Albinia’s book, Ganesha takes issue with Vyasa’s claims of authorship and credits himself with a larger role in the composition of the epic, while the modern-day Vyasa makes it the subject of his scholarship to deny Ganesha’s existence and role in the epic. It’s these writerly concerns —  of creativity, inspiration, ownership and the things that happen when characters take on a life of their own — that form the main theme of Leela’s Book.

Vyasa, a reincarnation of the epic’s author, is an internationally renowned Sanskrit scholar. The Leela of the novel’s title, Vyasa’s wife’s sister and also his ex-paramour, is a combination of a couple of different characters in the epic.

The story begins on the eve of Leela’s return to India, for the wedding of Vyasa’s son. Leela attends a lecture by Vyasa in New York, in which he expounds his controversial theories on the composition of the epic. Vyasa’s theories have also attracted the ire of the right-wing — “an egg, splatting against Vyasa’s shoulder, leaving its bright trickle of photogenic yellow down his starched white kurta... had first put his face on the front of every Delhi newspaper, and first linked his name with iconoclasm and controversy.”

Here, Albinia seems to be inspired by an actual incident — in 2003, the academic Wendy Doniger, giving a controversial talk on the Ramayana, had an egg thrown at her at a lecture hall in London.

But it’s not just Doniger who Albinia evokes — her portrayal of Vyasa seducing young women at Shantiniketan recalls Mircea Eliade, a famed religious studies academic from Romania, who had come to Calcutta in 1928 to learn Sanskrit.

During his sojourn in India, Eliade fell in love with his teacher’s 16-year old daughter, Maitreyi Devi, and wrote a thinly disguised memoir of this affair, titled Maitreyi (also known as Bengali Nights). Maitreyi, in later years, took issue with Eliade’s depiction of the affair and wrote a book herself, Na Hanyate  (‘It Does Not Die’), to set the record right. The resemblance between Maitreyi Devi and Leela, both Bengali poetesses and wronged lovers, is a strong one.

The Mahabharata does make for an interesting subject, but to anyone who is moderately well-versed in the epic, the ending can be spotted a mile off.

At times, Albinia’s literary concerns hamper the story’s development. Certain episodes — for example, a sexual encounter underneath a buffet table, while waiters are laying out food — seem not just improbable, but impossible.

Albinia has some skill as a writer and her ideas are interesting, but in this reader’s estimation, the package falls short.