Spellcasters | Fiction | Rajat Chaudhuri |
Niyogi Books ( 2023) | ISBN: 978-93-91125-88-2 |
Paperback | Pp: 318 | Rs. 495
 

An intricate spatio-temporal mélange .

Rajat Chaudhuri’s Spellcasters is about time and place as much as about their counter-narratives. The novel is divided into five sections: Incantations, Thrall, Visible and Invisible, Ouroboros, and Telos. As we enter into this world “of the alternative reality of collapsed time, hallucinatory visions and spectral visitations” (says Amitava Ghosh) at once strikes us as uncannily familiar and fascinatingly unfamiliar.

The book’s blurb attempts to guide us through the whereabouts of Chanchal Mitra, a business reporter by day, and dream catcher by night. A whiff of relief to the reader who has hardly navigated the mazy book cover pivoting an unflinching one-eyed gaze. Is this the relentless gaze of the panopticon, one wonders. It gears the reader toward an eclectic mix of psychological thrill, climate adventure, and a promising interplay of dreams, desires and inclement weather. This is a crime thriller peppered with a generous dose of drug dealings and mysteriously inexplicable plot twists. But it does not stop there as we are let into “the interface between mental illness, spirit possession and the effect of entheogenic drugs on our minds”- says Chaudhuri in the acknowledgements. While tracing his growth through fiction, non-fiction, and activism, Choudhuri finds himself indebted to the writings of Aldous Huxley and Sudhir Kakkar among others, and the psychiatrist Anurag Mishra who helped him delve into the nuances of certain types of mental illnesses that inform the plot of the novel.

When Mitra rues: “But who is listening? We had stopped listening to each other long before it came to this” we are alerted to the deep psychological musings waiting to catch us unawares. We brush it aside for the moment but the narrative keeps bringing us back to it, as if it exists as a purposeful rejoinder to this apocalyptic integration of the bizarrely magical and dubiously real. Is this the same world we inhabit that is precariously poised to undertake (or has already undertaken) a “phantasmagoric journey”? - a timely warning we must immediately take notice of. It is the ominously pervasive “smog that has blinded us all…driving us on to nowhere land” (9), reminding us of Eliot's The Waste Land and its depiction of spiritual and moral emptiness. A vividly powerful play of adjectives bordering on the subversively dystopian greets us when the author dismays the insensitive disregard of nature: “Illusions aplenty. Blackwater refuses of the grey sprawling city - the emptiness of bloated bellies, aborted foetuses, the wasted wants of a megapolis swim below its foundation through choking sewer pipes.” (59)

In the chapter ‘Hypnosis’ Chaudhuri dissects religious determinants through a distant observer’s lens. What transpires is a wry sense of humour cleverly dovetailed with clinical precision; when the entire country is swept away by Lord Ganesha’s stint at consuming milk: ‘Is he drinking with his mouth or drawing it in through his trunk? the man asked energetically. …. Don’t you think he will soon lose his appetite?’ (67) Chaudhuri has his tongue in cheek without making it too obvious. Contrary to the demands of authorial reticence the magic realists adhere to, the author shares a visibly fraught relationship with ritualistic mysticism. The volatile market and religious gimmicky fraudulently collude when Chaudhuri unveils the dark underbelly of a dangerously misleading consumerist culture and a profit-driven economy: “By the time the traffic eased there were already rumours of milk being sold in the black and stories of milkmen being waylaid. Milk riots had broken out in northern regions” (68).

Chaudhuri deploys an intriguing intersection of time and space, the real and the imagined, the occult and the manifest, the invisible and the visible, outlining their elusive slippery parameters. In the chapter “Train to Bhaskarnagar” the narrative voice passingly remarks: “The woman from last night is sitting opposite to me. She looks real in the morning light. But one can never be sure” (89). Bhaskarnagar is the third city we arrive at, the desert city with its rose-hued walls that bear a close resemblance with Jaipur, through a labyrinth of narrative demands, first in the “manic city” of Aukatabad and then in Anantanagar. As the two or three strangers (Mitra, Kapoor and Sujata) chug along we get a fair account of what Chaudhari is set to uphold, the fact that “we are beginning to breach all planetary boundaries. Our cities are suffocating, and so are our villages” (91). Chanchal Mitra, in a premonitory lament, points at the mad rush for power stoked by greed, which will ultimately bring disease and a doomed future for our children. The journey turns out to be a planned/unplanned one, brought upon by Mr. Kapoor, a character who seemingly is a business tycoon. Sinking into a dream-inducing reverie Mitra finds his city “flattened with sledgehammers and glass, steel and concrete monstrosities taking up their place” as the planet bears the brunt of unbridled ambition. One is reminded of the postmodern political geographer and urban theorist Edward Soja’s theory of the Thirdspace: “a fully lived space, a simultaneously real-and-imagined, actual-and-virtual locus of structured individuality and collective experience and agency”. It stands for something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation and representation.

The cityscape with its doom-riddled settings is both hyperreal and viscerally real. Chaudhuri’s sharply etched poetic imagination jostles through the dark alleys of the enigmatically shady; “…the drunk looking familiar, throat parched like sandpaper, the drunk looking like the thug from the hotel and deeper in the night, silence losing its battle with the pounding of his heart” (144). The novel in its closing pages explores the agonised and fragmented modern individual, torn apart by a past he is unable to come to terms with and the heavily taxing “illusions of the present”.

There is a riveting use of intertextuality in the novel. The character of Caligiri as Chaudhuri says is inspired by Dr Caligiri of the well-known work of German Expressionist cinema The Cabinet of Dr. Caligiri. The journalist’s song in ‘The Barefoot Tribe’ is quoted from Sushma Iyengar’s article in Pastoral Times. The Nine Unknown Men belong to a period from much before Akbar’s (the talented courtiers or the navratnas) as they carry resonances from the fiction of Talbot Maundy to the cult classic The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Negotiating this plethora of references can be daunting as well as exhilarating. They add to the rich complexity of the spatio-temporal mélange this novel invigoratingly encapsulates. Amidst the nightmarish vision of a future society and the aimlessness experienced in contemporary times the novel triumphs with its panoramic fascination, with the available and the unavailable contours of knowledge.