The death of a slice of history I The Dollmaker's Island by Anuradha Kumar I

They are on the government records but no one has seen them for ages. Their craft seems to travel places but no one remembers hearing them. Yet, everyone has heard about the Dollmakers, or at least some version of their tale. Anuradha Kumar gives us an island that moves with the river and carries with it a drifting story. On the Dollmakers’ Island a voice, a ladder and some boats are missing. What is also silently lost is the history and identity of the dollmakers. Kumar says she sees the dollmakers as symbolising the neglected and the faceless of the society. They could, however, also be seen to symbolise the fringe that doesn’t want to be institutionalised.
The Dollmaker’s Island is Anuradha Kumar’s fifth work. Books for children have been among Kumar’s earlier works. In her latest, she gives us a curious mix of genres, a novel that could perhaps be called a fairytale for adults. The novel moves like a puzzle through a maze of history which is familiar yet has an Alice-like feel. What Kumar does with time is both intriguing and amazing. In her hands, time seems to lose its properties. It is neither linear nor perpetual, neither persistent nor final. She audaciously sidesteps it at one time and dresses it up in her story at another. In a span of 240 pages, her novel resurrects the great kings from Ashoka to Aurangzeb, and the mighty British from Clive to Curzon. She compresses time and trivialises what is known in the adult world as facts and physics. Her story places all the three — the kings, the British and the government —
on the same pedestal, i.e. the ruler, and projects their continuity against the losses of the ruled, Dollmakers.
The Dollmakers are a notorious pack. They have stayed away from the government and caused it pin-pricks for ages. Leela, the protagonist, has lived timelessly and now moves into the era of emails and Internet as she acquires a computer. But Leela’s voice is lost on the day the government finalises the fate of the island. Government representative Ronen Ghito swings into action and is determined to solve the mystery.
While the story, at one level, works as a strong social and political satire, it also, on the other hand, has a love theme as Leela awaits the return of Shyam, a playwright, imprisoned for writing an “ambiguous” play. The story opens in the partition-era with Lord Mountabatten, Radcliffe and others attempting to draw a line through the Dollmakers’ Island. At the island, years later, Leela has lost her voice while the Headman and the Mouldi play out their years-old rivalry. They both have their credentials: the Mouldi, a letter from Curzon while the headman, Gandhi’s glasses. In an Orwellian style, the government is on the island and Leela must cooperate with them in the probe. The plot deepens while Leela looks for Shyam on the Internet as she is also suspected of hiding secrets in her tightly-bound braids.
The climax sees a computer virus annihilate history, turning the island and Leela “ahistoric”. The progress of the story alternates with the history of the island. In a parable-like set-up, the novel simplifies and attempts to understand conflict on one hand and ridicules its history on the other.
Kumar’s prose has a flavour of poetic ambiguity. Each character and event serves as an independent symbol yet mingles smoothly into the story. Kumar doesn’t weigh down the symbols with meanings, she allows them a life of their own. As the symbols remain open to the readers’ interpretation, a distinct style emerges.
In this state of free meanings, Kumar brings in the discipline of consistency and pattern that makes her work truly remarkable. The book compels second and third readings as symbols stay fecund. Her brand of poetic ambiguity is not that of an abyss of dark meanings, but that of multiple analogies and the reader enjoys the unravelling of the puzzle prose that is almost solved yet isn’t.