Leaf, water and flow – Avadhoot Dongare, Translated from Marathi by Nadeem Khan

Description

We live as social beings. But our being social includes power structures of various kinds – from the language that we speak and write in to the state or anti-state actors that claim to run some of these structures. The novel attempts to grapple with these structures, the individuals who are part of these structures and also who are in conflict with these structures. There is politics, there is an egret who has seen a baby die in a village in central India, there is an author (perhaps the one who had written a novel titled The Story of Being Useless), there is a teak-leaf which is dying, there is a ‘professional revolutionary’ who has come out of incarceration, there is an adivasi woman who was once part of a Maoist dalam, there is a wife of a police sub-inspector, and there is a reader who reads this novel and ends it with his comments. There are some more such voices in the novel. Some of them tell their stories, some of them try to contribute to the stories of others, and a few of them are perhaps also thinking about how to end this binary and be a part of all the stories.