With Krishna's Eyes: Review

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"See Krishna, first we must do our duty. Follow dharma. And most times, it hurts. But to love something doesn't mean to give up dharma."

As I first heard of With Krishna's Eyes, I expected to find a male protagonist in a mythical plot. However, the upcoming Indian English writer Sunny Singh has given me a pleasant surprise. The novel is about Krishna, a young girl in modern India. The novel is all about her bonding to the western upbringing and Indian tradition.

As the first girl child to be born to her family in five centuries, Krishna always finds herself caught between the modern world of loose ties and the old ties of obligation. A rebel by birth, Krishna has to confront the fact that her dharma comprises an act as conforming and backward as it is subversive. She is not a Meera who is pain crazy for the love of her man (Lord Krishna). Her search lies in her dharma (duty) as advocated by Lord Krishna.

Krishna, a warrior in the world of filmmaking, a US-educated member of a proud Rajput clan called to her home village in a part of India. Here Krishna has to perform a strange duty to make a documentary, all too non-fictional, about the last days of Damayanti, a strong-minded lawyer willed for the voluntary sati. Forced as a matter of family honour and obligation to live this intense contradiction, Krishna finds herself accepting a major part in a drama, which she does not approve of but tries her level hardest to understand.

Krishna the filmmaker had to go through the ultimate anguish of living someone else's sati under her own skin. This major element of fear is etched into the reader's mind from the very beginning of the novel. Having survived from the 9/11 incidents, this is another traumatic experience to the protagonist. Here the novel transcends from an American gothic realm to the Indian gothic realm.

The novel also showcases the sociological and ideological situation in India. The act of Sati was banned in India after vehement opposition. Now, upon Damayanti's request to perform Sati, the religious fanatics voice for her rights while leftists and secularists lead an opposition to her. On the other side, local peasants and functionaries consider her as a living goddess and worship as Sat-mata. In this situation Indian or foreign, will sense something of globalised India's attempt to come to terms with itself. The novel is about India's ancestral fears and still-alive past anxieties, its painful efforts to live through them once again in order and finally to exorcise them.