Passage to Indonesia – Frontline

Dear Reader,

Let’s start with an excerpt from a novel I am reading, A Dark Tale From Cottonwood Grove, by Mahfud Ikhwan, translated by Annie Tucker.

 “He was well-acquainted with death. His mother had died giving birth to him. His grandfather, the person who loved him most in the world, had left him, vanished, assumed dead when he was only five years old. He had witnessed the death of his depraved father, who hated him, after his body had been flattened by an Indonesia bus on the Semarang-Surabaya route just as he stepped out of his favourite palm wine stall. There were also the people Mat Dawuk had killed. And there was his own soul; Mat Dawuk himself had survived numerous brushes with death. But all of those had just been called ‘dying’. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t often heard the word “gone” and needed some time to process it.

‘Gone,’ he murmured once more, like an elementary school student trying to sound out a difficult word.”

The quoted lines describe Mat Dawuk, the village outcast scarred by loss and abandonment, who is dumbstruck as his beloved wife dies at childbirth, leaving him all alone again. I was left in two minds while reading the story of Mat Dawuk. On the one hand, I was undeniably touched by the pain of the hounded hero. On the other, I had the feeling that I was watching a Hindi/ Tamil tearjerker centring on a goonda hero with a heart of gold who must pay the price of his difference by being routinely misunderstood by everyone around him.

Ikhwan is an Indonesian writer and Cottonwood Grove, where this novel is set, is a village somewhere in Indonesia. I have never been to Indonesia but could relate to much of the novel. Even in this quote, the reference to a bus accident on a busy road, to a toddy stall frequented by its devoted clientele, would all be only too familiar to an Indian reader.

What Indian readers would relate to, above all, is the filmi element in this novel about star-crossed lovers. I wasn’t surprised when I learnt later that Ikhwan writes two popular blogs, one of them on Bollywood films. In this novel too, the seedy, unreliable narrator, Warto Kemplung, is a connoisseur of 1980s’ Hindi movies. 

But the literary works (as opposed to films) that A Dark Tale reminded me of were Joseph Conrad’s novels and short stories, with their South Asian settings and tragic heroes who find brief reprieves in their lovers till destiny catches up with them. This made me mull the irony of my subject position as an Indian reader who, as a student of English literature, is perhaps better acquainted with dead, white, male authors than with living, coloured, genderfluid writers. While I have read thousands of English novels, the only other Indonesian novel (in translation) I have read is Eka Kurniawan’s Man Tiger, and that too because it was longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize in 2016.

And then there is Kevin Kwan, not from Indonesia but from Singapore, whose 2013 romantic comedy, Crazy Rich Asians, was a bestseller. When I read it, the first novel that came to mind was Pride and Prejudice although Crazy Rich Asians is set in Singapore and has a cast of Chinese and American characters. Pointedly, Kwan himself has gone on record saying that his 2020 novel, Sex and Vanity, is inspired by E.M Forster’s A Room with a View. The Western point of reference is quite inescapable, it seems.

Yet, the lived realities of Southeast Asia are very different from those of the West. As parts of the same geopolitical region, the Southeast Asian countries have more in common with one another than with the UK or the US. A Dark Tale should have reminded me of an Indian novel rather than of a work by a 20th century Polish-British novelist. More so because Indian culture—from the Ramayana to Bollywood films—is embedded in the Indonesian way of life. On the streets of an Indonesian city like Jakarta, for instance, one is as likely to hear Tamil as Indonesian. 

Inspired by A Dark Tale and feeling ashamed of my ignorance, I have started buying Indonesian/ Malaysian novels in translation to learn more about that part of the world. Speaking Tiger, which has published A Dark Tale, has a remarkable list of Southeast Asian novels in translation and must be commended for its efforts in bringing this literature to Indian audiences. Readers like me who want to expand their knowledge of contemporary Southeast Asian writing can also look up the Reading Asia series in The Hindu, featuring interviews with current Asian writers.

And do read Geeta Doctor’s review of A Dark Tale in the latest issue of Frontline. It is delightful. As is Bhavya Dore’s review of the Booker-winning novel by Samantha Harvey, Orbital. I am often disappointed by prize-winning novels when I get to read them. Dore found Orbital boring and doesn’t mince words in saying so in the review. Her candour makes the review stand out. 

In other news, spring—a season I am not too fond of—is in the air. Every year, when the sun starts getting brighter and harsher, I mourn for winter, which, in T.S. Eliot’s words, kept me warm. And there it goes—another dead, white, male author whispering in my head.

I will be back again soon to crib more about my pet peeves. 

Till then,

Anusua Mukherjee

Deputy Editor, Frontline