Review: Sanatan by Sharankumar Limbale
A sprawling work that presents the story of a Mahar named Bhimnak and his family in pre-Independence India, this is also an examination of the collective punishment wrecked on untouchables and Adivasis by upper castes across geographies
If reading for you is an exercise primarily in pleasure seeking, then Sharankumar Limbale’s novel will make you deeply uncomfortable. Imagine a landscape ravaged by a bloody battle, and the blood-seeped pages of an ominous book lying scattered around mutilated bodies. The battle in question is the war waged by upper castes on the bodies of Mahars, and the disfigured book is a harrowing archive documenting that barbarity in the form of a novel: Sanatan.
A quick Google search led this reviewer to believe the novel, which was shortlisted for the 2024 JCB Prize for Literature, is the story, set in the pre-independence era, of a Mahar named Bhimnak and his family. But that isn’t strictly true. Throughout this sprawling work, Limbale shifts perspectives at the most sensitive plot points and occasionally even forsakes the plotline and characters — Bimnak Mahar goes missing for a solid 100 pages.
The author is, in truth, devoted to the larger story of the collective punishment wrecked on untouchables and Adivasis by upper castes across geographies. The action is scattered in varied locations including the kingdom of Jhol, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, and the docks of Liverpool. The only thing binding the lower caste people across these disparate places is the experience of naked poverty and catastrophic ends.
The novel opens with the festival of Holi being celebrated with yells of joy in Maharwada. The basics of Mahar life are quickly established as abuse and dehumanization mar the celebrations. Despite the unimaginable violence, the Mahars continue to serve the Brahmins. Here, the author’s rage is palpable as he condemns the Mahar’s acceptance of his karma.
A lot happens in Sanatan and numerous characters die within the span of six chapters; lower caste characters who have spent their lives in submission suffer the most violent deaths. Even those who change their religion or cross the seven seas, cannot escape the scourge. In the afterlife, for a brief minute, the scales are tipped in favour of the marginalized when a ghost haunts his murderers. But as tradition dictates, a quick bhoot shanti salvages the situation. And so, the cycle continues.
Brahmanical cruelty and entitlement are on display throughout the novel with the untouchable’s body being rendered as a site of brutal violence. Limbale walks a tightrope when it comes to writing about the Mahar’s body, sometimes using animalistic comparisons to underscore its physical strength. At other times, the Mahar is exquisite; his defined muscles and taunt skin are a constant source of fascination for the author. This is somewhat discomfiting as it plays straight into the fetish around Dalit bodies. The Brahmin’s body is simultaneously a symbol of desire and contempt for the untouchables. One Mahar character even mutilates himself by chopping off his penis to prove his loyalty. Others become hyper-religious in the hope of gaining approval from Brahmin villagers. Still, the Mahar is always looked at with suspicion, and Brahmin paranoia endangers his life at regular intervals. Mahar invisibility too is repeatedly stressed. The Mahar enters the village guarding his shadow so as to not pollute upper castes. Whether it is the construction of village temples, cleaning of streets, or performing hard manual labour, the Mahar has to forfeit his right to complain even though his labour is an important block that holds life in the village together. The labourers are paid in stale food, which the villagers think is some sort of quid pro quo. These dismal conditions spark a wave of mass conversions.
This section challenges the current Hindutva view of the past as being full of violent Muslim conquests that ensured conversions by the sword. The flight from Brahmanism was further accelerated with the rise of the British. Christian imperialism has its exploitative history, but in that moment, it promised a new possibility to the untouchables. This power tussle plays out continuously through the novel with upper caste Hindus vociferously opposing conversions but refusing to reform religious practices, and Christian missionaries using the situation to their advantage with even their sparse displays of kindness becoming a huge attraction for the downtrodden.
So, when the British arrived to enlist the Mahars in their army, how could they refuse their only recourse towards social mobility and dignity? But that is just one side of the story. Limbale presents the tangled web of vested interests with great clarity. As the British started usurping tribal lands for development projects, the accompanying destruction led to mass displacement and the erasure of indigenous economies. The Adivasis are persecuted by the British army, which has enlisted a large number of Mahars. Each party acts out of self-preservation, and the British take advantage of that, fighting the marginalized through the marginalized.
Limbale’s fierce documentation of this exploitation uses the supernatural as an important thread to hold it all together. The hyperrealistic accounts of the daily lives of Mahars includes meticulous descriptions of cow skinning and consumption of the dead animal’s meat. In a somewhat Malgudiesque fashion, each incident is a separate story. Together, they invoke the malaise of orthodox Hindu society and its caste system. It is a world steeped in superstitions, myths and omens, where the fantastical is often the deus ex machina. The surroundings respond intently to Mahar grief with trees and even dogs having an intimate connection to deaths. Some scenes read like folk horror stories featuring crows, vultures, demonic possessions, and sacrifices. Sometimes, the marginalized become possessed and, in a role reversal, terrorize the upper castes. These powerful scenes where the body is taken over by a psychosis of sorts are both cathartic and terrifying.
The authorial voice takes a didactic tone towards the end. It is clear that Limbale is keener to present a comprehensive history of the Mahars than simply tell a story. The multiple tales of a range of characters are like candles flickering in a storm; they go off abruptly, with Mahar characters only reappearing sporadically in the penultimate chapter. Also excessively dialogue-heavy, the novel gets exhausting after a point.
The problem with a work of such huge scope is that its involvement with its individual characters cannot be anything but perfunctory. This could very well have been a non-fiction book. Limbale writes about how India’s nation-building was concurrent with the consolidation of the Hindu majority and at the cost of Dalit and Adivasi autonomy. It is also more important for him to tell us the stories of Dalit icons like Ishwar Prasad, who have been relegated to the footnotes of history, than to persist with his fictional characters.
Still, this is an important work and the reader is shaken by its devastating concluding chapter, which is, perhaps, a reference to the cyclical nature of things. In the end, Sharankumar Limbale has a message for the Mahars: disenfranchisement awaits them and their only hope is to rewrite their history and ferociously refuse its erasure.
Rutba Iqbal is a writer based in Delhi. She writes on books, art, culture, and movies.
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