The ever-increasing amount of Indian fiction appearing in English translation has been one of the most striking publishing phenomena of the past two decades. But Lakshmi’s Secret Diary comes to us not via Bengali, Hindi or Tamil, but French. That author Ari Gautier hails from Pondicherry, the capital of the erstwhile French territory in India, is part of the story; Gautier however was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, to a Franco-Tamil father and a Malagasy mother. In Pondicherry, Gautier was educated at the Lycée Français and subsequently emigrated to France.
Lakshmi, it becomes almost immediately clear, is an elephant, one attached to a temple, and this is her story. But the novel, translator Sheela Mahadevan writes in her afterword, has a backstory:
the story of Lakshmi’s real-life counterpart is well-known in Pondicherry. Lakshmi the temple elephant was donated to the Sri Manakulla Vinayagar Temple as a calf in 1995, and she worked there long hours throughout her life. She tragically collapsed and perished in 2022 at the age of thirty-two, after suffering from ill health.
There isn’t, it seems, an actual diary, but the conceit allows Gauthier to have Lakshmi communicate conversationally, about events and, well, the meaning of life. This is not however one story but several. Large swathes of the book are taken with the lengthy stories of other characters: Tripod Dog Baba (who has lost a foreleg, hence the name, and who has pretensions of being a guru), Alphonse the flying fish (who received the soul of a kingfisher who was in turn the reincarnated form of a saint) and Veeran, a wild elephant whose mother lived through Japanese bombing in Burma. Some of this is interactive dialogue; the bulk is backstory told to Lakshmi.
Integral to the stories are discussions of caste (elephants have a caste system too), Indian film history, commentary of how humans mistreat animals and animals-eye-view retellings of tales from the Mahābhārata, notably that of Draupadi:
“If Karna had known that he was the son of Kunti and Surya, my life would have taken a different turn,” Tripod Dog Baba began to narrate a tale. “If Krishna had revealed his identity to Draupadi, who secretly loved Karna, I wouldn’t be sitting here next to you, Lakshmi. If Kunti, who was not fully aware of the situation, hadn’t told the Pandava brothers to share Draupadi among themselves, I would still have my fourth leg intact.”
Pondicherry (or Pondichéry as translator Mahadevan renders it, keeping the French) is vividly described throughout, but it is for the most part a Hindu Tamil Pondicherry; other than some street names and the so-called “ville blanche” and “ville noire”, anything French is largely pushed to some historical (and not always reverential) historical vignettes:
Originally, the deity was called Bhuvaneshar Ganesh, because the idol faces eastward, looking out over the coastline of the Bay of Bengal; the name also alludes to one of the sixteen forms of the Lord Ganesh. However, his peaceful existence was to be interrupted by the Montbrun family, an illustrious family originating from the Principality of Monaco, who had come to settle in Pondichéry in the nineteenth century. Armand and Lucien Gallois Montbrun were the town mayors, and to the servants and people of Pondichéry, they were both known as Bambaram Durai meaning “Lord Spinning Top,” because the local population struggled to pronounce “Montbrun.”
Although some other books of Guatier’s are available in English, Le carnet secret de Lakshmi was his first novel and dates from 2015. One is left to wonder for whom the original French novel was intended: while there is a large audience in India for English-language novels, hardly any Indians read French. The anglophone readership in India is so large that an Indian writer in English can, even if based and published outside India, hope (often quite reasonably) to be read by other Indians. Lakshmi, then, was de facto (if not necessarily de jure) a French novel written for a French readership who might have little context in which to place Lakshmi’s the pondering of the elephantine analogy to caste, or what translator Mahadevan calls
a poetics of “transcreation,” a term that is frequently employed in the Indian context to describe the long-standing tradition of retelling and adapting Sanskrit mythology.
Much of the writing itself is vibrant, however and Pondicherry itself comes alive.