Though Kavery Nambisan‘s new family saga Rising Sons skips across towns and cities before ending in the palatial bungalows of Central Delhi, its roots lie in a mostly dry village west of Mysore, where “mud is life.” This is the home of the Ai, the natives of the land before Hindus— bringing with them caste and idol worship—settled in the land.
The beauty of the novel is in its detail. As soon as the Ai are mentioned, the next several pages are devoted to their form of worship, cultural history, and new role in industrialised India. The paths of information are winding but coalesce to create a rich understanding of the history of a small village and the various textures of its inhabitants.
Rising Sons, covering decades and spanning generations, is of epic proportions. Though it tackles many themes, from caste prejudice to the successes and pitfalls of grassroots government, at its core, it is the story of one family. The novel spans decades and covers a family patriarch, Devaraya, from childhood to old age, and carries beyond to his children and theirs. Set in the mid-20th century, the family find themselves in a changing India, one of British subjugation, nationalist sentiment, and finally, the brave yet clueless government of an independent nation. Nambisan details ordinary lives and extraordinary actions with precision, where every word in each sentence is loaded with purpose.
The novel tells the story of Devaraya, his wife, and their four children. Chinni—an adopted girl—and Anna—their youngest son—form the narrative thread of the story, for it is their lives the reader follows beyond the village, until they are middle-aged with families of their own. Devaraya works as a peon in a big city, returning home every fortnight with an iron fist, busy with his village business, a small loan shop for the residents. A family of proud Brahmins, they wear clean white clothes, eat vegetarian food, and scorn lower castes and Muslims.
The novel’s catalyst arrives in the form of Devaraya’s relatives from a past he refuses to speak of, and overnight, the superiority of their Brahmin status vanishes. The disguise of caste was seen as “a wicked act that went against the grain of religion,” though a substantial part of the crowd held “admiration for one who committed a wrong to get on the right side of life.” As the family reels from the dramatic reveal of a caste disguise, their relationships fracture and splinter, resulting in the disappearance of one son and a jail term for Devaraya.
Yet nationalism is rising in India, and with it, notions of a casteless society of free citizens. Anna joins the movement and tours the country, learning from freedom fighters, smuggling illegal pamphlets, and orating to crowds of hundreds. Through Anna’s tours, the novel sheds light on a unique view of the freedom fervour that spread across Southern India, a welcome reprieve from the well-documented freedom fiction of northern and central India. As Anna rises, he is struck with the profound realisation that he was a “witness to the gestational stage of the yet-to-be-born independent government.” The weight of this responsibility is deeply felt; he is one of many “minor instruments that assisted the creators of the Constitution but its significance was not lost.”
Despite the heaviness of its subject, the novel is lifted through Nambisan’s playful arrangement of words. To describe the boys growing up, she writes, “squeezing, nudging and shoving through a narrow isthmus into adulthood.” Like the lives it seeks to convey, every sentence is a squirming array of physicality. Amid the bulk of the novel’s details, these twisting phrases relieve the onslaught of information, story, and character development that the reader must wade through. All are rising sons: the Ai, Devaraya’s children, and the country. The result is tangled and wild, but undeniably beautiful.