Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a hefty 542-page story of how India was transformed by the British, and how Christian missionaries influenced Indian culture. However, it is told through the eyes of Sanjay -- an immortal poet trapped currently in the body of a typewriting monkey. Sanjay (the man) lived through the arrival of the British, and fought to keep the traditions of his country from becoming quaint fairy tales or bastardized folklore.
For example, Sanjay as a young boy is taken away, along with his closest friends Sikander and Chotta, by the British at the permission of Sikander & Chotta's father, who believes he is helping them become educated in order to rise above the status quo of India. Sikander's mother, Janvi, protests and forbids the father to do the same with her two daughters. There is a great standoff, but finally, the father has the girls kidnapped from the mother's tent. At this, Janvi builds a pyre of sandalwood and burns herself upon it in protest. Sanjay later sees one of the Englishmen's documentations of the event:
"The captain desired to educate his daughters in accordance with the norms of civilized society, to deliver them from the dark pit of ingnorance, but their mother, seeing in this breach of the ancient sanctity of purdah a violation of her own overly-proud and sensitive Rajpoot honor, took her own life by immolation. Thus the interior darkness of India, that centuries-old barbarism, took yet another life."
Sanjay at that point commits his life to fighting injustices through words. A fight that eventually leads him to commit a serious act of sacrifice in order to become immortal.
Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Published Book. With prose passages like the following, where Sanjay as a boy travels with a caravan, it's easy to see why the novel garnered such praise:
"Gajnath lifted the mangos from Sanjay's hands, and the pink, soft tip of the trunk stroked his wrist for a moment, like a finger . . . Gajnath swung up, looming, and Sanjay laughed in delight; watching Gajnath walk away, Sanjay understood all the various allusions in Ram Mohan's dictation to beautiful women with elephant-walks: there was that unhurried, graceful placing of one foot, then the other, the body swaying above, that delicacy."
Richly layered, Sanjay's stories often embed tales within tales so that unless you commit yourself to reading at least 50 pages at a stretch, you may forget some of the roles of the less-frequently mentioned characters.
Although the book is highly charged with politics, and you are given a view of the British as self-righteous, patronizing invaders who see themselves as saviors of a "decaying civilization", Chandra delicately weaves in fantastic stories of mythological romances and battles. This weaving helps keep the book from ever bordering on diatribe.
