INTRODUCTION
Climb an uphill. Wait for a
moment to take a breath and casually look down. And say to each other,
"Look! Can you see that signpost hidden in the bushes? That is the one
that announced the start of the uphill. From that point onward, we started
moving up with speed. And see how far we have come within a short time!"
Similar feelings should gather in one's
mind after reading this novel, A Tale of
Fengadya.
On this Earth, the human culture is
dispersed all over. It has left behind many signs of its existence over the
period of last 30 to 40,000 years. Many of these signs are nothing but the
signs of his animal-ness. But some signs are definitely of his humanness.
Particularly, at which point in the
history, did man perceive his humanness? When he perceived it, how did he
accept it? How did the animal in him came to know about his humanness?
This novel tries to give answers to these
questions.
The theme of the novel sparked in my mind
when I read a quote produced by a Christian missionary doctor, Dr. Paul Brand
who has worked in the field of leprosy at Vellore medical college, India.
In his book, 'Fearfully and Wonderfully Made', he writes beautifully in one
chapter, on the subject, The Bone.
In this chapter, he gives a quote from a
social anthropologist, Dr Margaret Mead. When Dr Margaret Mead was asked by a
reporter, "When do you declare that the human civilization has started at
this particular point while doing excavation?"
Her answer was, "Not roads, not
utensils, nor the constructions, but when I found a healed femur bone, I
declare that the human civilization has started here!"
This particular answer by Dr. Margaret
Mead enthralled me!
Being a medical person by profession, I
immediately understood the gravity of the statement! 30 to 40 thousand years
back, when the man was living in the jungle, when he was fighting for his own
survival, when he had to hunt his food on his own, it was a well accepted rule
to leave behind the wounded person and to go ahead. So later in excavation we get
either the intact femur bones or the broken femur bones.
When we get a healed femur bone, however,
it means that some person had actually lifted the wounded person to the cave.
Had hunted for the wounded person. Had fed that wounded person for at least six
months! Thus, the broken femur of that
person had healed, to announce this wonderful happening when found in the
excavation by present-day man!
I started wondering, who this person was?
How he stood against the routinely accepted rule?
The novel that developed has unique
characteristic.
First of all, brevity. The sentences
tended to be short and crisp. It became the convergence of space, time and many
cultures into a single place of particular time frame.
The names of the characters emerged
strange and unique. They have to be different from those of today. The names
that are correlated to the appearance got upper hand. For example, Lameo
for lame. Longleggy, implying one with
long legs.
The novel in the process became
Pre-historical rather than Historical one. It became Pre-social rather than
Social.
The novel became somewhat, a poetic truth.
As the Nobel laureate Peter Medwar has
observed, "The poetic truth can be interpreted as a distinct, separate and
parallel truth. It cannot be compared with scientific truth or the actual
reality. Being one of the alternatives among many, the poetic truth helps us to
enter an entirely different universe and helps us to understand the reality in
a different perspective. It enriches our understanding of reality."
The history showed in the novel, A Tale of Fengadya, is also a kind of
poetic truth. The claim of Dr. Margaret Mead, which turned out to be the
stimulating point for this novel, may be declared obsolete or irrelevant by
some another study in the future, but that cannot negate the poetic truth in
this novel. This poetic truth in the novel has now become an independent
existence on its own.
I may say as a writer, that the success of
this novel lies in the following realization:
If the reader, after completing the novel,
wonders for a moment:
"Where do I stand today? Am I in the
Dhanbasti ? Or is it that I have not left the cave of Fengadya at all? Or am I
living in the man eater Vaghoba Toli even today?"
Everybody is familiar with the scientific
work, `The Ascent of man’ by
J.Bronowski. Modestly I can claim, that I have written
a small literary volume of Ascent of man,
in the form of this novel, A Tale of
Fengadya.
--- DR
ARUN GADRE.
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