Book review: The Scent of God

I reviewed The Queen of Jasmine Country for India Today:

Poet Sharanya Manivannan's novel on the coming of age of the saint-poet Andal is lovingly researched and fiercely imagined.

Sharanya Manivannan is a poet at heart. She has published two books of poetry (Witchcraft and The Altar of the Only World), of course. But her prose, too, is ceaselessly lyrical. It's best not to approach The Queen of Jasmine Country like a regular novel, therefore.

Sure, there are richly drawn characters and a narrative, if not precisely a plot, but one keeps wanting to stay and re-read, not move along. The writing demands sensory immersion, making this slim 143-page novel a deliciously slow read. Each paragraph is a time capsule of flavours and smells and visions that will transport the attentive reader into a world lovingly researched and fiercely imagined.

In the town of Puduvai, in 9th century Tamil Nadu, a young girl named Kodhai describes the year she turned 16, acquiring both a sexual self and the powerful poetic voice that would make her immortal as the saint-poet Andal. Bhakti is nothing if not personal, and when we meet Kodhai's adoptive father, Vishnuchittan, he has already departed from the intellectualised religiosity of his Brahmin heritage to walk that path. As Kodhai puts it: "My father, the son of a priestly teacher, wanted only to knot garlands for his god and to sing to him." And later: "When he closed his eyes, verses came to him whole, and in them he loved his lord like a mother does her child."

Kodhai follows her father, in both her life and her poems, creating an even more intimate relationship with the divine. The first time she wears Vishnuchittan's garland for the lord, she is a child, playfully transgressing the boundaries between sacred and profane. But then the lord chides her father for chiding her, and the child's pleasure grows into a full-blown adult attachment, body merging with soul: "I became the consort of that god who wants only to be draped by a garden-fresh garland that has first belonged to me."

Manivannan is not the first Indian writer in English to explore the sensual possibilities of bhakti. Girish Karnad's striking play Flowers (also about a garland-making priest) and Kiran Nagarkar's marvellous Cuckold (about Mirabai) come to mind. But Jasmine Country travels in a world of women. Kodhai's neighbour, young as herself, is married into wretchedly normal wifehood: "I have seen her mouth thin as a line in the sand, her hand over her belly almost a fist." Meanwhile, Kodhai keeps the pavai nombu vows with the cowherd women, praying for a lover to surpass all lovers.

The flame of Kodhai's erotic yearning makes her like other women, and simultaneously distinguishes her from them. "I have been denied what should come to all in the material world, and I want to transcend it. But I also want its deepest ecstasy. I do not know how else I will survive." Like Andal herself, this is a rare and incandescent book.

Published in India Today, 31 Dec 2018.