In 1980, a year after Mridula Garg’s Hindi-language novel Chittacobra was published, two policemen appeared at her door at night to arrest her under sections 292, 293, and 294 of the Indian Penal Code, commonly referred to as the Act of Obscenity. The case was built around a scene of just two pages that described Manu, the novel’s protagonist, having sex with her husband Mahesh, whom she no longer loves.
Garg wrote about this night—and the following legal battle—decades later for The Hindu:
Books and writers are persecuted not to stop people from reading a particular book but to stop writers from writing freely.
It is with this aim—to silence her—that the court case dragged on for another two years. The case, however, missed the point that the novel’s most seductive moments are not what Garg describes as “mechanical” sex scenes, nor the few moments of passionate intimacy shared between Manu and Richard, the man with whom she has an affair.
The real sensuality emanates from the dialogue, but more specifically, from a woman’s voice. Garg’s new self-translation into English allows a new audience to fall into the whirlpool of an affair. If one chooses to read it from the lens of controversy, the closely-mirrored suffocation of Garg and her protagonist, Manu, that failed to find relief in the Indian justice system, may now find it in a wider readership.
Through the course of Chittacobra, Manu grows alienated from herself. She fell in love with Mahesh and remained by his side, shifting cities and constantly remaking their home, while he never reciprocated any of her emotions. While participating in a community theatre production, she meets Richard, a Scotsman and parson, who routinely visits India and spends the rest of his time tending to the sick and needy in other parts of the world. They strike up a conversation, or rather a witty ping-pong battle of words, and a love affair brews. He leaves, returns, and leaves again, and through these cycles, Manu changes, yearns, and when she can’t say what she wants to, she writes; letters, poems, and volumes of words.
Language becomes the hinge between Manu and Richard, but also between Manu and herself, with palpable tension between what is said versus what is meant. If there were a case to be made about the intensity of female desire under the Act of Obscenity, it could have been found in the dialogue and in the seductive reversals of words and time of Chittacobra. When Manu and Richard go off into miniature monologues, the lines are dreamy and obscure, but when they come together to speak, there is a spark that raises the stakes of the sentences. The two lovers are clever, often mean, and finish each other’s sentences, allowing for comprehension that they individually can’t find. Their speech is a playground, and it often feels as if they’re testing the waters to see which words and sounds work, and which ones don’t. They play with grammatical tense, and Manu slips through time, going forward and back, to finish one thought. Manu asks Richard, “Why do people drink so much?” He responds, “They want to be what they are not.”
“Do they become that after drinking?”
“They want to be, but they do not become.”
“Can they become?”
“Only if they are not.”
“I am … am I?”
“What did you drink?”
Recollection becomes a process of reversals and detours, and any clear linear narrative collapses in the face of a woman trying to tell her story. Memory turns slippery and treacherous, and the more the narrator tries to tell the audience of an experience, the more distant it becomes. This is reiterated in the Epilogue, when the narrator drifts in a timeless space and says, “Go forward … and turn back … forward and back … aimless, unattached …”
What the author sets out to be accomplished in each chapter is rendered inaccessible, and we only come to know the story she wanted to reveal several chapters later. As a result, the novel never feels complete; the ending is only the start of a sentence.
The novel’s history adds another layer of significance to these moments of speech. Everything Manu says now feels heavier because it is only through a struggle that these words are reprinted.