‘Saraswati’ by Gurnaik Johal: Traversing continents, centuries through legend, memory

Gurnaik Johal’s novel ‘Saraswati’ is an ambitious, attractive book. The seven chapters are named after rivers — Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum, Indus and Saraswati. Each chapter tells a different story, has a different character at its centre, and is followed by a famous qissa retold with slight but studied change. The stories connect continents and traverse centuries through history, legend and memory — memory live, lost or submerged.

Johal is a canny researcher and smart inventor, trying to match an inventor’s cunning with a researcher’s labour. The result is as it had to be in a first novel by a talented storyteller: a promising though uneven accomplishment. One cannot but admire the flight and range of his imagination as reflected in his sentence craft.

Genre-mixing can be risky. And risk may or may not be rewarding. In this instance, it offers to the reader quite a platter. There are the gratifications of political journalism, the thrills of romance, the drama of historical fiction and the musings of philosophy. But genre-mixing succeeds only when it transcends the limitations of a genre, which it does not in this case. Each chapter is actually a story, and remains a story. It does not grow into a novel. It does not have the necessary unity, including that of style and continuity. The ‘origin story’, intended to bind the different stories and retrospectively produce the effects of a novel, remains only a joining device.

Johal’s literary powers glow brighter as the novel proceeds. When you enter the second chapter, you feel his imagination has found a body, something it was looking for in the first chapter. Compared to the first, the second chapter has finer psychological insight and a stronger narrative drive. But half-way into the fourth chapter, those powers seem to be fading. You see the writer puffing and stuffing. He resorts to implausibilities: Satnam’s decision to participate in arson, Jay’s death, for instance. The book bloats in places, until the powers return. You wish the Muse did not doze off so often. You wish the book were leaner and less uneven. You wish the stories had the spontaneity of rivers and flowed into a sea, instead of rewinding to climb back to a ‘genetic’ spring.

But they do possess, at their best, something of the mysteriousness of rivers. Johal evokes a sense of mystery that steadily deepens and holds you in its enchantment through abrupt deaths, unwrapped tales, and discomforting yet strangely consoling meditations. “There would likely have been hundreds or thousands of generations inside his body, vast family trees, empires and civilisations of minute beings… Their skin, when touching, less a border than a permeable membrane, a site of crossing.”

Mortality, in a way, is the presiding deity of this book, and it is reincarnated as a sort of immortality through ceaseless metamorphosis, through eternal becoming: “Everyone is searching for a creation story, but there is no such thing. There are only conversion stories, stories of change.” This is one of those moments when the book turns to look at itself. In such moments, it shatters the magnifying glasses of partisan political reading — neti, neti, neti (not this, not this, not this) — and eludes gloriously the attempts at confinement.

This is no ordinary achievement by a 27-year-old writer. A British-Indian, Gurnaik Johal debuted in 2022 with ‘We Move’, a book of short stories, and won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award. He is the kind of promise that redeems itself with surprises.

— The reviewer is former professor of English at Punjabi University

Book Review