A second reading of Kiran Nagarkar’s fascinating Cuckold forces the recognition that Meera, the Bhakti saint brought alive in its pages, plays at best a peripheral role in the novel. So would it be fruitful to see how and why Nagarkar’s story succeeds in humanising this figure which has become part of folklore? Meera is legendary; she has been considered a fitting subject for not only painting, poetry, plays and dance but also comic strips such as the Amar Chitra Katha series, and film. But all these representations propagate the conventional Meera myth; and perhaps some of the value of Nagarkar’s novel comes from the fact that he dares to break down the stereotype of the purely saintly Meera, not by denying that she was indeed a mystic who achieved oneness with God but by painting her as more than this alone. The flesh and blood woman who occupies some of the pages of Cuckold is delightful, unforgettable and completely convincing as a character, and the personality traits which Nagarkar endows her with are justified by the popular songs of Meera still sung all over India. What Nagarkar does in these songs through humour and a colloquial idiom is quite singular, and part of the humanising process. Here is one of the songs Nagarkar creates and ascribes to the Meera of his novel:
Get him on the double
Tell him it’s an emergency
The doctors have given up.
I can’t bear it
I think I’m going to die
It’s a slipped disc
A shooting pain up the spine
A fire in the brain
A comet bursting in the kidneys.
Is he here?
Call him, tell him to rush
Tell him, it’s the end
I’ve got galloping TB
The left lung’s collapsed
The right one’s dead
And the soul, it’s fled
Has he come?
Sound the alarm
Knock on the door of heaven
Get him out of bed
It’s terminal
Cancer of the upper intestines,
It’s spread into the esophagus.
Spilt into the lower bowels,
The liver, the bones, the breast.
What? Hasn’t he come yet?
Ask him to come fast
I’m about to breathe my last
Nothing serious really
Just a routine heart attack
Tell him I died
With one eye open.
Lying on the pyre
Just to check
If he came
With a smirk
On his face.
And a tart on his arm.
If he won’t come soon
Let him come late,
I’ll wait.
If it makes him
Feel important
To be inconstant
Why, of course
I’ll indulge him.
Because Giridhar
Lover
Move over
I’ve got another. (Nagarkar 91-93)
As readers, we celebrate this human depiction after we overcome the first shock of Nagarkar’s radical strategy. Nagarkar depicts Meera not only as a scheming go-getter but also as a mystic so desperate to become one with her aradhya (deity) that she buys into her own belief by accepting her indigo-painted husband as the Krishna of her erotic fantasies. Like Mysticism itself, Nagarkar’s novel makes this leap of faith a simple matter. Meera is imperfect, yet still a saint.
Meera is first mentioned in the novel as the Maharaj Kumar’s bride. The autocratic and patriarchal side of the crown prince is seen by the reader when he forces himself on a fearful Meera on their bridal night. Meera refuses to be owned physically by her husband, rejecting this seeming colonisation. She repulses him with her unyielding body and her insistence that she belongs to someone else even though her husband physically penetrates her. In her fear and resistance lies her humanity. In the end she stanches the flow of blood from her husband’s bleeding member with her chunni and holds it gently till he falls asleep. Meera is both the enemy and the one who heals: complexity and ambiguity is the hallmark of Nagarkar’s portrayal of this historically one-dimensional figure. One may, if one so chooses, also interpret the Maharaj Kumar’s suffering after his ravishing of Meera as a confirmation of her divine status as the betrothed of God.
The Maharaj Kumar is emasculated in this scene, only one of the several times Nagarkar does this in his novel. There are many reasons why Meera (referred to as Greeneyes and later the Little Saint in the novel) comes alive as a normal person rather than the traditionally saintly figure in this novel. The Maharaj Kumar’s intense humanity is also responsible for this effect. He is, after all, the first person narrator of the novel for the most part. The first person narrative exposes the Maharaj Kumar’s insecurities because he is extremely deprecating of himself, even presenting an unflattering picture of himself in many parts of the novel. Ranjana Sabu says of Nagarkar:
In the Maharaj Kumar, he creates a fond son, a master statesman and war strategist and an, at times, anachronistically forward thinking crown prince. He is also the arrogant crown prince who, incredulously, finds himself cuckolded by a rival he cannot fight – the Divine Flautist – Lord Krishna.
Jealousy eats away at the Maharaj Kumar after Meera’s rejection of him and her subsequent divulging of the identity of her beloved. He hates ‘the Flautist’ as a rival, but also feels hurt, betrayed and confused, because Krishna is the deity with whom he has felt a special connection in the past. The Maharaj Kumar is a flawed, yet self-aware character who sheds light on Meera without deifying or sanctifying her. The presentation of his character largely eschews the stereotypical and shows his humanity. He is ambitious, interested in statecraft and warfare and covets the crown as a royal prince is wont to do, but this unusual Rajput prince also uses guile in warfare, hates unnecessary bloodshed and even explores his feminine, tender and emotional side. This is apparent when he dresses as a woman at Meera’s insistence during one of his nightly escapades masquerading as Krishna. This scene is one where the Maharaj Kumar is simultaneously uplifted and emasculated. Meera plays kikli with him, and they switch gender roles, he in a woman’s clothes after she has shaved his body and she in the pitambar which he wore while pretending to be Krishna. As they whirl together, the Maharaj Kumar briefly experiences the elation and ecstasy which Meera, and perhaps all bhaktas feel, and gains an insight into Meera:
He envied the simplicity of her universe where everything she did or thought was an act of devotion. Sex was worship and so was looking after his father and cheating while playing cards and laughter and standing on the swing and tossing the earth back and forth and singing and dancing. Her whole life, the highs and the lows, the tantrums and the pleasures, everything was an offering as much to herself as to her god... She engaged with life as if there was no tomorrow. (Nagarkar 494)
This passage in the novel reveals the secret of the simultaneous separateness and oneness of the Bhakti saints in relation to worldly affairs. Meera is striving for unity with the divine through her everyday life. Nagarkar uses this engagement with the world to humanise her without compromising Meera’s status as a devotee whose entire life revolves around her Krishna. Late in the novel her husband comes across her in a state of perfect calm, completely at odds with her usual animated self, and radiating light. The novel describes his desire to cup this light in his hands. In another incident, the Maharaj Kumar becomes a voyeur when he sees Meera in a state of erotic arousal because of her mystic experience that Krishna has come to her bed. It is at this point in the novel that the Crown Prince becomes desperate to connect with his wife, perhaps almost as desperate as she is to merge with her lover:
He was struck then by a terrible realisation... the truth was, he didn’t give a damn about the past, all the humiliation and the pain he had suffered, not even the shameless exhibitionism of emotion he had witnessed today.
He wanted in. (Nagarkar 189)
Meera and the Maharaj Kumar are both complex characters, struggling to fulfil their desires like normal human beings. Nagarkar masterfully prevents the reader from judging his characters through his staunch refusal to present them as black or white, as legend has done with Meera herself. Meera has been seen as a victim of societal and religious orthodoxy and her husband’s cruelty. In Cuckold, Meera does not become the object of the reader’s sympathy and reverence because of her worship of Krishna and her husband’s use of force. But neither does she become merely the unworthy wife who denies her husband conjugal rights.
These characters are presented to us against a well-fleshed out socio-political and historical backdrop of sixteenth century Mewar. The backdrop and setting certainly serves to make the characters, including Meera, more human. The novel dwells a great deal on the military might and strategy of the renowned Rana Sanga, the Maharaj Kumar’s father, as well as the crown prince himself. As mentioned earlier, if one were to count the pages devoted to power politics, warfare and the shenanigans of the royal zenana, these pages would make up a greater number than the pages in which Meera is mentioned. Then there are also the pages of subtle and not-so-subtle digressions on a staggering range of subjects, from classical music to the story of the Maharaj Kumar’s father’s accession to the throne and many others besides. They reflect the interests of the protagonist and strike a personal note. Nagarkar’s Meera is larger than life because of the Maharaj Kumar’s desperate wooing of her, rather than the space given to her in the novel or her sainthood. While the common people of Mewar do revere her, Meera is politic enough to downplay her popularity as far as possible. In an amusing aside, the Maharaj Kumar mentions her keeping a low profile because it wouldn’t do for her to have people fall at her feet in her father-in-law, the King’s, presence. Moving Meera to the margins of the story serves to make her more human than saintly.
In view of this marginality stemming from limited representation, it is interesting to consider Nagarkar’s own revelations on the genesis of Cuckold. In a conversation with Arnab Chakladar, the author reveals how important Meera is to the novel:
... when I was young, I had decided that there were two subjects I would not deal with. One of them was incest ... The other subject that was taboo for me was Meera ... Because I thought she was such a bloody bore! She was always wearing white and she always had that ektara and she was always looking inward. Of course I had completely bought into that kitsch myth of her...What I discovered later on was that I was as much a victim of stereotypes as anyone else.
... Meera really crosses both state and language borders. I don't think she's a great poet like some of the other mystic poets but her language is on your and my tongue, without our realizing it. Well, here was the irony: This is the most well-known woman in India and we know absolutely nothing about her husband ... how can it be that we know nothing about this man but we constantly represent him as some vicious guy hell-bent on bumping off his wife ... I kept going back to the 'missing' husband and I started doing a sort of desultory reading of Meera. I discovered her husband's name was Bhojraj... I've always believed that if anyone is more macho than the Latins, it is us Indians except we're such hypocrites about it and cloud and cloak the issue in high-falutin words. Anyway I thought I would make this guy a real wife-beater and so on. Fortunately the book and the characters took over and it turned out to be a very different book.
The Meera legend, as many of us already know, has as its protagonist a sixteenth century woman belonging to a powerful Rajput clan who, according to Tharu and Lalita, in one poem
...speaks about a childhood vision of Krishna which made such an impact on her that she declared herself his bride and dedicated her life wholly to him. Though she consented to marriage with the crown prince of Mewar, it was a marriage in name only. In her heart she was wedded to Giridhar Naagar (Giridhar Gopal in the Hindi-speaking regions) and acknowledged no other husband. (90)
Legend has it that Meera’s religious practices were a source of embarrassment to the members of her husband’s family. Tharu and Lalita elaborate on her struggles with her husband and his family:
In the most popular legends concerning her, her husband, the Rana, makes two attempts to kill her, but she is miraculously saved both times. Once a poisonous snake is concealed in a basket... On another occasion a deadly poison is mixed into her drink ... (90)
These incidents occur in the novel, but they occur in the Maharaj Kumar’s absence. He is away at the warfront when his Dai and lover Kausalya writes to him about the burning to death of Meera’s companion Kumkum Kanwar and the delayed-action poison in Meera’s food which fails to kill her because of the timely action of the Bhil doctor, Ekaji. In Nagarkar’s fictionalised account, Meera contracts cholera at the fag end of an epidemic of the disease which hits Chittor during the monsoon, and it is the Maharaj Kumar who nurses her when the doctors have given up. Additionally, Meera has been praying to her beloved Krishna to save the people from the pestilence and the populace is convinced that she has bartered her own life away to save the people of Chittor. Her eventual recovery is hailed as a miracle in the novel and the people begin to revere her more than ever before. By showing us a Maharaj Kumar who cares enough to personally nurse a sick wife and the people’s love for Meera, Nagarkar walks a tightrope which makes us as readers accept both these characters and their strange relationship. He is weaving stories around the kimvadanti (oral tales) that are popular about Meera, but twisting them to suit his own ends. He forces the reader to acknowledge that the struggles could not have been Meera’s alone; while the Bhakti saint must have suffered the pangs of separation from her deity, Nagarkar concentrates on the troubles which rear at the Maharaj Kumar from all sides.
The protagonist of Cuckold is therefore the Maharaj Kumar, Meera’s beleaguered husband. The language which the Maharaj Kumar uses in his autobiography (as opposed to the formal language of his introduction to a military treatise) mirrors Nagarkar’s colloquial idiom in the novel. Nagarkar’s earthy language and style too plays a role in the humanisation of Meera. The Maharaj Kumar comments on this phenomenon are noteworthy, and some of them are probably true for Nagarkar’s choice of colloquial language and racy idiom in the novel. Of course, Nagarkar’s choice is obviously deliberate and artfully exercised, unlike the Maharaj Kumar’s.
But the language and the thought processes of the two texts were different without any conscious intention on my part... I did not have a plan for my memoirs but its language came as a shock to me. I tried to resist it, at times tore up page after page but finally gave in... (it was) a cross between the language of the court and the colourful, pungent and coruscating dialect of the eunuchs, servants and maids in the palace. I had no intention of striving for a cold and clinical objectivity (that kind of honesty, I was more than aware, was a sham and unreadable to boot) but I was amazed to discover such a strong, personal tone in my narrative... I smiled wryly and decided to carry on. Maybe I was enjoying myself too much to stop. (Nagarkar 345,346)
It is largely through the Maharaj Kumar’s eyes that we see, hear and experience the legendary Bhakti saint. By devoting greater space to Meera’s husband and presenting Meera as merely a part of his story, the text views her through Other, yet sophisticated eyes. These eyes, sharper than those of the adoring populace, show us a human Meera. Of course, Nagarkar sneaks in several sections where we learn about Meera (and other people) through a third person narrator, but this is done unobtrusively, almost stealthily. I say stealthy because the narration moves between the Maharaj Kumar’s first person and third person with fluidity and ease; and the shifts from one kind of narration to another do not follow a very rigid pattern. Hira Stevens points out that Nagarkar uses artifice and convention in the narratology of the novel to achieve his ends, even though his characterisation and other aspects of the novel are realistic.
Most discussions of realism focus on the content of the work, rather than the form. They see “realism” as involving, among other things, truth to life in the presentation of character, scene and social setting; closeness to the experience of the reader; the use of contemporary middle-class values and perceptions. Most discussions also touch on language, but mainly to comment on the use of prose rather than poetry. What these discussions tend to ignore is the extent of convention that exists in the handling of form in the realist novel; in other words, to narratology. (145)
In the beginning of the novel, it is in the Maharaj Kumar’s interactions with Meera that the third person narrator comes into play. It is as if the Maharaj Kumar is being viewed from the outside in these incidents, as is Meera herself. This mode of narration allows Nagarkar to retain the mystic quality of the saint and still make her appear human, because the vulnerability of both characters is apparent. Yasmeen Lukmani has some interesting insights to offer on Nagarkar’s use of third person narrative:
We even have a change in first person narration, from the use of the first person to the third person in the same paragraph. This is the reflection of a complex series of mental moves between degrees of objectivity in the analysis of character... (The Maharaj Kumar) while referring to himself as “he” ... is looking at himself through the eyes of others, and when he speaks through the pronoun “I” ... is looking through his own eyes. (120,121)
Some of the third person narration appears when Bhootani Mata, a deity from the spirit world seemingly born out of the evil in the human heart and kept alive by superstition and fear, possesses the Maharaj Kumar. The erotic and the magical, which are often seen to be a part of mysticism, are both embodied by Bhootani Mata in the text. She is represented as having supernatural powers and once, as copulating with the Maharaj Kumar as a beautiful woman, rather than as the hideous old woman which is her conventionally accepted form. Nagarkar subtly underlines that the erotic and the magical are as accessible to the ordinary Maharaj Kumar as they are to those who are acknowledged mystic saints such as Meera. The author does not debunk mysticism but reaffirms through different stratagems that the mystic too is human.
To return to Bhootani Mata, the Maharaj Kumar initially visits her sanctum for help in revenging himself against Meera’s rejection, but his feelings towards his wife fluctuate wildly from a protective urge to anger and frustration and include many other shades besides. He is therefore unable to firmly state what he wants from Bhootani Mata. This lack of definition in his desires is an important clue to Nagarkar’s use of the third person narrative; it seems to indicate a lack of control in the Maharaj Kumar. Ironically, it is the artifice used in the narrative technique which allows Nagarkar the flexibility to express the complexity of his characters to its fullest extent.
However, some flashbacks of the Maharaj Kumar’s boyhood and the narration leading up to his marriage with Meera are also in the third person, reinforcing my assertion that Nagarkar deliberately eschews rigid logic in his mellifluously varied use of this device. When Meera pays the customary visit to her paternal home for a couple of months after her marriage, too, a third person narrator describes what the Maharaj Kumar could never have seen. Roughly halfway through the novel, the Maharaj Kumar refers to his wife in a first person narrative for the first time. At this point in the novel, he is describing his return to Chittor with his victorious army after he has taken Idar from the Sultan of Gujarat. The populace of Chittor has been instigated by the Maharaj Kumar’s stepmother Karmavati and his stepbrother Vikramaditya and is venting its ire with the Maharaj Kumar’s ‘dishonourable’ guerrilla tactics which have won the war, when Meera intervention saves him:
‘You’ll stop now,’ a soft low voice spoke up. Slowly, very slowly, the crowd froze. My wife, all of five feet two inches parted the people and walked towards me. She had a gold plate in her hands and in it were a lamp, kumkum and camphor. She did an arati, put the plate down and touched my feet. ‘Welcome home, Maharaj Kumar.’ Her voice rang and ricocheted across the ramparts of Chittor. ‘Eklingji be praised. You and our friends and our armies have brought honour and victory to Mewar and its allies.’ (Nagarkar 272)
Thus the novel uses a multi-pronged strategy to humanise Meera. She is presented as someone connected with the divine but also as a politically and socially savvy princess, who is able to exploit her diplomatic and other abilities to turn every situation to her advantage.
In an amusing section of the narrative, Nagarkar shows us the beauteous Meera’s possessiveness when the Maharaj Kumar marries a second time, more because of political exigency than personal desire. Meera completely rejects the Maharaj Kumar’s new wife Sugandha, who is ordinary looking and therefore does not justify Meera’s envious reaction. When the Maharaj Kumar is unable to consummate his new marriage due to what can only be called, in an attempted imitation of Nagarkar’s humour, ‘selective impotence’ and wanting to blame someone else for his own inadequacies, rails at his new bride, we see that he is far from perfect. This pushes Sugandha into the arms of her stepbrother-in-law, Vikramaditya. Greeneyes tolerates this affair, but swings into action when Sugandha packs her things and tries to leave.
‘What you do with your time is your business but your place is in your husband’s home.’
‘What husband? That man who can’t ...?’
‘I believe we share the same husband. I will not have you speak ill of His Highness, the Maharaj Kumar... Leave your things where they were.’
‘And pray, what will you do if I don’t?’
The Little Saint’s voice was matter-of-fact, ‘I’ll break your leg and lock up your room from outside.’
‘That won’t stop me. When I’m recovered I’ll leave.’
‘No, you won’t. I’ll break your leg again.’
My second wife refrained from testing the Little Saint’s resolve. (Nagarkar 500,501)
It is clear that the very human emotion of jealousy makes Meera extremely protective of the same husband whom she has tormented through her own sexual rejection. After his marriage to Sugandha, Meera suddenly begins to woo her husband in her own unusual way, dressing to kill and wearing the colour green because it flatters her the most. She also discourages her husband from coming close to Sugandha:
‘May I suggest Your Highness, that pity is no substitute for love? Nor is duty.’
Was she a mind reader, this woman who would not be my wife nor would allow anybody else to be? She knew she had scored a direct hit and smiled her saintly smile. (Nagarkar 539)
Nagarkar’s Meera hates losing to her husband or indeed, anyone and the novel’s description of these incidents is pure entertainment, while also turning Meera into a flesh and blood character. Her penchant for getting her own way and her passionate nature are revealed to the reader when she raves, rants, cheats and throws tantrums while playing cards and chess. This nature is perfectly compatible with the Meera of the songs where passion for Giridhar Nagar overflows and winning over her beloved is all that matters. Meera is prepared to use all possible strategies to get her way; and the ancient neeti (policy), more often employed by rulers, of using sam (persuasion), dam (buying one’s way out), dand (punishment) and bhed (divide-and-rule) to gain an advantage are all part of her repertoire. She is a schemer and manipulator and uses these abilities in all her interactions. The Maharaj Kumar writes:
I won the game of chess but she didn’t make a habit of losing. She was an unorthodox player ...she had a bizarre and volatile approach to the game and no qualms about changing her strategy midstream. It was both, a ploy to throw the opponent off his guard and the natural bent of her mind. She took astounding risks ... she was shrewd, contrary, disciplined in her own perverse fashion ...
‘You cheated, I don’t know how you did it, it was somewhere between your seventeenth and nineteenth move,’ she flung the chessboard at me... Her tantrum was so unexpected and so genuine, I lost control and laughed idiotically. She picked up whatever pawn, camel, king came to hand and flung it hard at me. Tears were streaming down her face. (Nagarkar 294)
Nagarkar’s description of the games of cards played at Kumbhalgarh reveals Meera’s human side to an even greater degree, because it’s wit and humour draws the reader in:
As the days passed, one thing became clear: (they) were completely outclassed by the Princess. She looked what she was, a little saint whose innocence shone through like burnished armour while she masterminded every devious scheme of self-advancement, buccaneering and profiteering known to man or woman and many unknown to both...
‘Damn that fly,’ she slapped her chest hard, ‘it’s been bothering me since we started playing.’
The Maharaj Kumar leaned over and gripped her hand...
‘Let go of my hand, Highness.’
‘I will. Once you let me have that fly.’...
The card fell from her hand. Mangal picked it up to reassure himself that it was real paper and not a trick his eyes were playing with him... The Princess was not amused.
“You planted that card in my hand, Highness. You are an abominable cheat.’
She threw her cards down and stomped out of the room. Mamta ran after her and brought her back after much pleading and coaxing. They resumed the game. The little detour seemed to have improved the quality of her cards enormously. (Nagarkar 351, 352)
Nagarkar’s tongue-in-cheek humour creates a richly complex representation of Meera. The Maharaj Kumar’s thoughts on the acceptance of Meera in Chittor reveal this and humanise Meera futher:
My wife, as the finance ministry was discovering, is not just a rare and living treasure, she is Chittor’s biggest economic asset. (Nagarkar 394)
The novel fictionalises the legendary story of Meera with attention to physical detail including the visual, bringing to life the colourful desert of Rajasthan and its people, as well as the fort of Chittor. The Meera who occupies this place is utterly human, a skilled archer who has been trained by her uncle, yet diffident when she is praised for her skills. She retracts her feet when devotees want to touch them but tells the Krishna idol to worship her because she is as worthy of worship as Krishna himself. Contradictory, impetuous and joyously child-like as well as childishly petulant, caring yet self-absorbed, dutiful and extremely efficient, Meera refuses to be easily slotted. Nagarkar dresses Meera in bright colours. It is as though the Meera legend whose colours have become drab with the passage of time is being restored to vibrant life.
However colourful their stories may be, Cuckold points out that all saints are human; they are selfish. Nagarkar is probably referring to the completely individual quest of the Bhakti saints, whose longing for union with their chosen deity was the single focus of their lives. By juxtaposing Meera with Leelawati and Kausalya, both of whom love the Maharaj Kumar, Nagarkar emphasises how difficult it is to have a saint in one’s personal life. Leelawati, the woman who idealises the Maharaj Kumar when she is a child and then falls in love with him, ironically refusing, like Meera to consummate her marriage with her husband, writes:
No living creature can be more self-centred than saints. They are self sufficient. There is no life beyond themselves. When they need you, they use you. There is no malice in them, nor is there memory...
Let the Princess be. Leave her to her God...
You are the most lonely man I know. (563,564)
And we learn from Kausalya’s letter that in her desperate desire to render justice and happiness to the Maharaj Kumar, she has tried to murder Meera. She urges the Maharaj Kumar to leave his wife:
The saddest part in all this was the influence she had over you. You seemed to lose your mind when you were with her. She would not give you a son and she made you the laughingstock of Mewar...
The legend of the Little Saint will become greater with every passing year... Love and overheated poetry will make her immortal. As for you, Highness, if Queen Karmavati and Vikramaditya don’t get you, the Princess and her lover will. Either way they’ll wipe out your memory. (Nagarkar 598,599)
In Cuckold, though, Nagarkar does exactly the opposite: he ‘re-members’ or revives memories of tales told long in the past and through these stories, questions, re-visions and then re-draws the borders between the ‘normal’ (human), the ‘divine’ and the ‘mystic’. One of the stories he rewrites for symbolic effect is the tale of the parijat tree as told in the Bhagvat Purana. In this text, the parijat, a rare and special tree, is stolen by the divine Krishna from Indra, ruler of Swarga (the heaven where the good soul enjoys bliss) and planted by him in the garden of his queen, Satyabhama to assuage her jealousy of her co-wife Rukmini. The parijat sheds its fragrant flowers at night. In Cuckold, it is the human Maharaj Kumar who plants a branch of the tree in Chittor. He brings it back from Kumbhalgarh, where he has come closer to Meera by pretending to be Krishna and has been used to showering her with the Parijat flowers in the mornings. Meera expresses regret that they have to leave Kumbhalgarh and that the Prince will never bring her parijats again, and the Maharaj Kumar assures her that he will.
The twist in the story is that the parijat does not thrive in Chittor. The gardener tells the Prince that he is giving the plant too much attention. And it is the subsequent lack of attention on the part of the Prince that revives the plant, allowing him to shower its flowers on the Princess again. Yet towards the end of the tale, the parijat begins to shrink and wilt. Nagarkar does not spell out the symbolic meaning of this occurrence, but we can connect it to the Maharaj Kumar’s obsession with Meera. The Prince is under attack from all sides and must assert himself to save Chittor and its people, Rajput honour and belief by preparing to repulse the Mughal Babur, but cannot concentrate on important matters of state and strategy because he is too busy being Krishna, too busy playing the cuckold, too busy dancing to Meera’s tune. The wilting of the parijat tree, as the negative reaction of his skin to the applications of indigo are perhaps pointers that he needs to give up the pretence of being divine and re-inhabit his human persona. If this is so, can the novel be read as a critique of the sort of mystic experience which puts itself ahead of human needs? Perhaps, but it is only one of the possible readings, as we see in the epilogue of the novel.
Nagarkar’s final twist comes in the epilogue, which gives the reader the option of multiple endings, as is noted by Meenakshi Mukherjee in her essay Celebrating Cuckold:
...the author leaves the possibility open for a series of final alternatives. Cuckold is indeed that kind of novel in which “what happened next” is very important. Whether or not you are interested in the subtler play between fact and fiction, realism and symbolism or pragmatism versus idealism, merely at the level of story it is a totally riveting read. (35)
In a diabolically clever move, Nagarkar inverts a popular oral tale which is told about Meera in one of his multiple endings; a tale which fascinated me as a child in which she does not die, but merges into the Krishna idol at Nathdwara, Rajasthan, a corner of her saree protruding from between the idol’s lips. The Maharaj Kumar has already decided to follow his wife, even to the gates of hell at the end of the novel. The epilogue recounts the story of a mystical battle between ‘the Blue One’ (Krishna) and the Maharaj Kumar. The Flautist embraces the Maharaj Kumar who vanishes, the end of his turban showing at the lower left edge of Krishna’s chest. He who pretended to be the Flautist to come close to his wife eventually becomes one with him. In the novel, it is he who achieves what Meera herself hungers for. This is the true humanisation of the philosophy of Bhakti, where love, commitment or indeed constant engagement is enough to forge an unbreakable link, and where ritual is superfluous. This translates in the novel as the Maharaj Kumar’s obsession with the Flautist, even though this is negative: born out of enmity, jealousy and pretence. The obsession is reason enough for him to become vileen in (subsumed by) Krishna. The Bhakta too becomes leen (rapt or engrossed) in the deity and longs to be subsumed by this deity, annihilating the self (or the personal and sometimes, the body itself) because it was a hurdle postponing the union with the divine. The disappearance of the physical body, as seen in the story when the Maharaj Kumar vanishes, is an end craved for by almost every Bhakta. In the novel, the Maharaj Kumar has displayed the same obsession with Meera, but since she is not divine like Krishna, but human, blending into her is not possible, however much her husband may desire it.
Her choli and chunni were wet. She slipped into his arms. He tried to hug her tightly but her liquefying flesh kept slipping away ... he wanted to annihilate the separateness of their bodies and become one with her. There was no way they could hold on to each other. (Nagarkar 496)
The narrative which follows makes it clear that Meera is connecting with her husband physically at this time only because she sees him as ‘Krishna Kanhaiyya’. Nagarkar’s narrative strategy as a teller of tales and moreover a ‘twister’ of tales becomes clearer still at the end of the afterword of the novel, when he writes
So much for the facts.
As for the rest, storytellers are liars. We all know that. (Nagarkar 606)
Cuckold abounds with stories told at many levels. What do these lies or fiction achieve? It is these stories which bind the mystic, divine and human in a believable manner. They build up a tale in which ‘the truth’ becomes fuzzy; but they humanise the hard, crystalline facts of history and subvert the stereotype of the saintly Meera. We are happy to believe these ‘lies’ about Meera and quite delighted to note that she is only slightly different from all of us.
Jaya Kanoria
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Sophia College for Women
Mumbai
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Works Cited
Chakladar, Arnab. “A Conversation with Kiran Nagarkar.” Another Subcontinent: South Asian Society and Culture. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Jan. 2011.
Lukmani, Yasmeen. “Narrative Technique in Kiran Nagarkar’s Fiction.” The Shifting Worlds of Kiran Nagarkar’s Fiction. Ed. Yasmeen Lukmani. New Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt. Ltd. 2004.103-139. Print.
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “Celebrating Cuckold.” The Shifting Worlds of Kiran Nagarkar’s Fiction. Ed. Yasmeen Lukmani. New Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt. Ltd. 2004. 25-37. Print.
Nagarkar, Kiran. Cuckold. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2001. 2nd Impression. Print.
Sabu, Ranjana. “The Cuckold: The Meera bai legend retold.” www.chillibreeze.com , N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Jan. 2011.
Steven, Hira. “Romance, Realism and the Postmodern in Cuckold.” The Shifting Worlds of Kiran Nagarkar’s Fiction. Ed. Yasmeen Lukmani. New Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt. Ltd. 2004.140-153. Print.
Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, eds. Women Writing in India. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.
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