Storyteller, teacher, citizen of three worlds: on Karno's Daughter: The Lives of an Indian Maid

[Okay, here’s one of those increasingly rare “You have to read this book!” posts. The last three or four books I read for review were so underwhelming that I was worrying about having developed an attention-deficit problem. But Rimli Sengupta’s delightful Karno’s Daughter has somewhat soothed those anxieties. We so often hear high-sounding talk about Important or Essential books (people on the lit-beat get quickly exasperated by such descriptions in publishers’ press releases or on jacket blurbs), and in the middle of it all comes a slim, unassuming work like this one, which deals with so many “important" things and does it with such lightness of touch. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Here’s my review for The Hindu]

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Rimli Sengupta’s Karno’s Daughter: The Lives of an Indian Maid opens with a beguiling description, all warm colours and visual contrasts, of a little girl walking through a Sunderbans paddy field in 1969. (“That’s Buttermilk at six.”) Noticing a large ocean crab, she knows she must – though her hands are already full with the day’s labour – catch it and carry it back home to her rice-cultivating family. The next few pages give us a tale of pluck, excitement and reverie (“the impending meal of crab and rice took on mythic dimensions”), eventually tempered by the realities facing poor, struggling people.

The crab episode makes a good short story on its own terms, and is a fine way of drawing a reader into the book, but with hindsight we will see that it is also a subtle metaphor for Buttermilk’s life: a life spent multi-tasking, looking out for others, taking initiatives against great odds, anticipating rewards… then watching as much of it crumbles away. And yet, through it all, not falling to pieces herself.

This lovely work of narrative non-fiction comes from the simplest of premises: the author, who lives in Calcutta, is telling us the life story of her part-time maid (we learn why she is called Buttermilk in a casual aside, much later in the book). There is clear affection and closeness between the two women, but there is also Sengupta’s awareness of her own privileges, and a degree of guilt – “Simply put, Buttermilk makes my life possible. For this, I pay her a monthly salary that just about covers dinner for two at a nice restaurant” – that should be shared by any well-off Indians who pause to consider the gap between their lifestyles and those of their servants (or whatever other politically incorrect but accurate term you want to use).

A book about a poor person, written by someone much more advantaged, is by its very nature – especially in a climate of relentless political discussions around every creative work – vulnerable to allegations of cultural appropriation. It might be asked: what authority does Sengupta have to get into Buttermilk’s mind-space, to speak for her? Personally, I found Sengupta’s methods both credible and respectful, whether she is giving us chunks of text in her maid’s voice or telling the story in the third person. Sometimes, quoted speech from Buttermilk is interspersed with the author’s own commentary (perhaps just a brief clarification here or there), and the effect is that of attentiveness, care not to get things wrong or to over-simplify. There is a clear sense that Buttermilk, though she will never be able to read this book, is a participant in its telling.

And she is an unforgettable protagonist, a storyteller herself (perhaps on occasion a story-maker, as most of us are when revising our pasts) as well as a performer who points to her own goosebumps while telling a particularly fraught tale; a jokester who quips that rice vendors use powder to make the grain look whiter in much the same way as the father of a dark-skinned girl might do while trying to get her married; a philosopher with a stoical attitude toward both government and God (we’ve gone to doctors for many years, now God should get a chance, she says knowingly). When driven to despair, she might broach the possibility of suicide, but she is innately a survivor.

Like Vishnu’s Vamana avatar, Sengupta tells us, Buttermilk straddles three realms: she moves constantly between the village (where she keeps a close eye on her land, the ownership of which always seems to be in dispute), the city (where she works at several houses) and the suburbs, where she lives in a slum. We meet her family, including her dimwitted son Bonomali, who keeps getting into trouble, and her daughter-in-law Rupa, chosen for her plain looks so she won’t be in a position to leave her husband. And an enduring presence, though the author never meets him, is Buttermilk’s father Karno, an ill-starred man – like his near-namesake in the Mahabharata – who nonetheless managed to imbue his daughter with something of his own spirit.

Getting to know Buttermilk, Sengupta becomes aware of how limited her own sphere of experience is. One of the pleasures of this book is that the author – the educated, “sophisticated” woman – learns about so many things from her subject, and we learn along with her. About rice: its many varieties, the planting and harvesting and everything that comes in between. About land management and the ground-level workings of caste politics. About how a slum – which, from a distance, looks unchanged to us city folk – develops over time, even as the young people in it become more aspirational. About the hurdles in the implementation of Aadhaar, and the special difficulties it posed for the poor and voiceless.

This is the most unobtrusive sort of great book: slim, fast-paced, chatty, peeling back new layers with minimum fuss or a throwaway sentence. When Buttermilk returns after taking extended leave for the harvest, we are told “The city homes she had abandoned for those four days were bathed in wintry dust” – another reminder of how dependent city people in India are on their domestic workers, and how few rights the latter have. (In one of many passages where she lightly shares information and research, Sengupta tells us that these part-time workers have no access to grievance redressal or collective bargaining, because labour laws don’t apply to them, and in any case, "well paid and empowered domestic workers would be contrary to the interests of India's vast urban middle class.")

Only very rarely does something in the use of language ring false. On one occasion, the author quotes Buttermilk as saying "They [campaigning political parties] will feed us a set menu the night before the vote." The sentence felt a bit off to me because “set menu” is a very specific term generally used in the context of posh restaurant meals; something more basic like “fixed meal” might have been better here. But this sort of thing is an exception, and only serves as a reminder of how many more potholes there are for anyone writing a book like this, which Sengupta deftly sidestepped.

Karno’s Daughter manages to be uplifting and sad at the same time, a testament to the human spirit without being pedantic, tritely triumphal or showily sensitive. Despite knowing that this was a short, fluid book that could be finished in a couple of sessions, I found I was procrastinating – reading only 10 to 12 pages at a time – partly because there is so much to savour and digest, which a casual reading would do not justice to, and partly because I wanted to stretch the process out; perhaps to replicate the way Sengupta herself learns the story, in bits and pieces. And by the time I reached the end, with a reference to another crab feast –more fulfilling for our Vamana-like heroine than the one described in the first chapter – I thought I knew exactly how overwhelmed and sated Buttermilk must have felt.

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[Related posts: Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers; Pratima Devi and her dogs]