The Long and Winding Road

If Tolstoy strove to render history human, pulling its sweep down into the lives of individual men and women, and Pasternak saw history as a great wind that mercilessly blew his characters about, there is at least one more approach to writing the grand historical epic novel: Call it the ornamental epic, in which history is just a sentimental set piece, like an exotic garden or a formal tea party, that provides color and a bit of excitement to characters otherwise lacking in depth.

“The House of Blue Mangoes,” the first novel by David Davidar, takes its place among the last group. Lushly set in southern India, the novel covers three generations of the Dorai family, beginning in 1899 and stretching to 1947, just before independence. The Dorais, for the most part, try to ignore history, or “politics,” as they often choose to call it. At the novel’s beginning, history is symbolized by a road recently plotted through Chevathar, the family village, which is famous for the sweetness of its native blue mangoes. The road, in all its egalitarian straightness, renders irrelevant the maze of paths that tradition has worn through the village to keep the castes from polluting one another.

Despite the obvious social inequities (which do not appear to interest Davidar), all had been peaceful in Chevathar, “[u]ntil the road, the accursed road, had come along and upset the balance.”

Soon a girl is raped by strangers who wander into Chevathar on that same accursed road, and long-simmering caste tensions erupt, leading to the downfall of the Dorai patriarch, Solomon, “that most fair-minded of men.” Solomon’s elder son, Aaron, falls into a life of dissipation and petty crime, whence he makes a seamless transition into revolutionary activism.

When Aaron’s involvement in an assassination attempt on a British official results in his imprisonment and death, his brother Daniel, having witnessed the nasty effects of social engagement on his father and brother, decides to secede from politics in an attempt to step outside the march of history. He makes his fortune selling “Dr Dorai’s Moonwhite Thylam,” a skin-whitening cream, and reestablishes the family compound in Chevathar, naming it Neelam Illum, the House of Blue Mangoes. Daniel invites his entire extended family to join him on the family land, as long as they agree to leave the forces of historic change behind. “I’ve seen politics up close and find it abhorrent,” he says.

Daniel’s plan doesn’t quite work out, of course. He remains unaware of Gandhi’s satyagraha movement of nonviolent resistance until the village boys begin burning their British-made clothes. His son Kannan (daughters don’t count for much in this novel) inherits Daniel’s antipathy to politics and, with his head buried deep in the sand, successfully ignores it almost to the very last.

Davidar appears to share the Dorais’ prim aversion to the muddle of politics and historical engagement. He renders repugnant almost every character on whom modernity has any claim, from the scheming lawyer Vakeel Perumal, who cartoonishly exclaims, “Tradition and custom are the handiwork of puny little men and perverted priests,” to the anti-British revolutionary leader who has a gaze “that betrayed his essential nature--flat and unblinking as a viper’s.”

It’s hard not to sense a certain nostalgia for the (deceptively) benevolent village life of the 19th century. “A general sorrow has come over the land,” laments Solomon just before the 1899 caste battles ignite. “It seems as though the evening of the world is upon us.”

It is to Davidar’s great advantage that the history of the period is so fascinating, for without its minimal intrusion, we would be left with little but the soapy operatics of his plot--the predictable fraternal spat, the marriage that goes wrong in all the time-worn ways. He seems to lose interest at times in his characters, leaping over years with barely a comment, only to sum up clumsily in a sentence or two, as when Daniel’s mother dies and the narrator lets out: “He was grateful he had his wife and children around him, but it was only now that he realized the extent to which he’d depended on his mother.”

It is the details that pique Davidar’s interest more than anything else. He devotes long, loving digressions to the dangerous sport of well-jumping, the intricacies of traditional siddha medicinal practice, the complex social rites of the colonial afternoon tea, the best way to hunt a man-eating tiger, the subtle differences among the many varieties of mango. If only he had as much enthusiasm for the humans who fill his novel, “The House of Blue Mangoes” might not feel as adrift as its recurring metaphor, the blue mango, which is at times possessed with a “monstrous flaw” or is the tastiest thing around, or, perhaps, stands for nothing at all.