Fruits of the Barren Tree, a translation of the Nepali-language novel Phoolange, is set near Darjeeling, the hill station in India’s West Bengal synonymous with the Raj, tea gardens and domestic honeymooners. Yet the mountainous region portrayed by Lekhnath Chhetri is a far cry from the clichés and tropes that are so often invoked when discussing the region.
The book is one of the few novels set amid the Gorkhaland movement of the 1980s,which saw multiple years of political struggle, often violent, aiming to carve a new Indian state for Nepali-speaking Indians out of northern West Bengal. The movement alleged that political marginalization, linguistic discrimination and economic mismanagement by the West Bengal government could only be overturned by cession from the state.
Against this turbulent backdrop, the book focuses on the life of tenant farmers Basnet and his wife Basneti, their incorrigible son, Jhuppay. After years of struggle, Basnet manages to pay off his loans to the landowner and save up to buy land for himself. Jhuppay is however more interested in stealing from the bazaar or spending his tuition fees on alcohol. As Jhuppay falls in love with Nimma, his coming-of-age story is interrupted by the political events unfolding around them.
The bucolic scenes of countryside life are soon shattered by the violence of the political agitations. Soon everyone is affected by and implicated in the political fighting between the Gorkhaland movement and the supporters of the Communist movement who had won legislative power in the 1977 West Bengal state elections. Both sides were actively competing for the control and support of the local community. Chettri vividly portrays the tensions between those who ideologically supported the Gorkhaland movement but who lacked resources to support it. He shows how lives were impacted and shaped by the movement, how relations were tested and families divided by the violence and how politics can overtake individual friendships and loyalties.
The story is supported by a strong cast of characters. While Basnet, Basnetni and Jhuppay lead even those who make only brief entrances are memorable, such as the troublesome Shaikari-baje who kill whatever birds he found with the catapult that always hangs around his neck or the hairy and quarrelsome Nigale-buda. Through these characters, Chettri offers a tender and sympathetic portrayal of the harsh realities of village life, never doing the disservice of romanticizing it, but remaining keenly aware of the little politics, spats and little victories and quarrels that make up daily life.
The book is full of rich, often highly allegorical, prose. It is a credit to both the writer and translator that this literary style survived the translation process. Fruits of the Barren Tree is a welcome and important addition to the Nepali literature canon, both because of its subject matter and because it’s from the much smaller list of writers writing in Nepali from outside of Nepal. A compelling depiction of family and daily life amidst the ongoing political strife that shows how local communities were caught in the balance between two sides and how politics rode roughshod over the lives of individuals.