Ancient scholar Vararuchi is an unyielding figure central to many tales set in different eras. In one such Malayalam folk tale, his colourful life provides a spectacularly vivid account of the origin of the land and culture of Kerala. The fascinating folk tale of Vararuchi, his wife Panchami and their twelve children, including the likes of Perunthachan and Naranathu Bhranthan, is narrated in Kottarathil Sankunni’s Aithihyamala, a vast collection of legends about the southern state. Two-and-half decades ago, Vararuchi’s life became the focal theme of Malayalam writer N Mohanan’s novel, Innalathe Mazha. Translated into English last year as What The Rains Foretold, the novel, which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1998, questions the innate notions of knowledge in the story of an unlikely couple who sets forth on a journey of conflicting challenges.
What The Rains Foretold begins with a teenaged Vararuchi standing in the royal court among wise men from far and near in a contest to become the King’s Royal Pundit. Coming with a solution for every challenge, the young scholar wins the contest, but turns down the position to continue his quest for truth. On a long road to knowledge in the following years, hard work helps Vararuchi unravel the mysteries of stars, planets and astral bodies at Aryabhatta’s school of learning, the nature of earth at Kanaadan, ayurveda at the feet of Charaka and Susruta, and discourse and debate from Brihaspati. He invigorates his intellect at Vachaspati’s, sharpens critical appreciation of the arts from Mammadabhatta, language at Kundakan’s and opens new frontiers of physical sciences at the school of Chaarvakku.
Seeking truth can also lead to uncomfortable realities as the now wiser Vararuchi finds out. It turns out that at the beginning of his unmistakable mission of learning, he had arbitrarily schemed to cast away a girl child newly born in a low-caste hutment to escape from a prophecy linking him. Years later, without realising it, the scholar is led to the same girl, now grown up after miraculously escaping from the jaws of death. Bitten by the girl’s beauty and intellect, Vararuchi seeks her hand in marriage from her adopted father. Soon, the young woman’s identity is revealed to him, sending him on an exasperating path of guilt and despair. Every time a child is born to the couple, Vararuchi refuses to see its face and forces his wife to abandon the newborn. There are now twelve children, all growing up without their parents’ knowledge.
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Mohanan’s novel, which opens a window to the legend of Kerala’s origins that rest with Vararuchi and Panchami’s twelve abandoned children, casts a shadow on the unrelenting human pursuit of knowledge. A prolific short story writer, the author brings a glaring contemporariness to a folk tale. Focusing almost entirely on the conflicting journeys of Vararuchi and Panchami, the book separates the human from the knowledge to show the long gap between progress and development.
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Panchami’s Dalit origins clash with the high-caste Vararuchi is born into. The conflict also reflects the futility of soaring to the heights of science when nothing changes on the ground. Mohanan, the son of celebrated Malayalam writer Lalithambika Antharjanam, passed away a year before the arrival of the new millennium that brought many more new technologies to the virtual world. In the real world, however, Innalathe Mazha is a red flag on achievements without action.
What The Rains Foretold
N Mohanan
Niyogi Books
Pp 171, Rs 395
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
