To cut a long story short

This is a commendable experiment to make philosophy more accessible but the good intentions are marred by poor editing and strange choice of phrases.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell said the following about his famous student Ludwig Wittgenstein: “At the end of his first term at Cambridge, he [Wittgenstein] came to me and said, ‘will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not? If I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut. If not, I shall become a philosopher.’ I told him to write something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was a complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term, he brought me the fulfilment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence I said to him, ‘No, you must not become an aeronaut.’ And he didn’t.”

How many people can claim to have read much philosophy in their lives — especially the less-than-accessible Russell and Wittgenstein? Sundar Sarukkai, a professor of philosophy, in his debut novel ‘Following a Prayer’ aims to correct the lack of philosophical education among the general population. And that is, still, the good news.

The beginning of this book, about a young girl who stops speaking after returning home from being lost in the forest, brings to mind certain works of Kannada literature. I remembered the little girl born to a mute mother who spends her first few years without uttering a single word before bursting into speech one day to everyone’s astonishment in Poornachandra Tejaswi’s novel Jugari Cross. The grandmother reminded me of the mystical ajji in Mookajjiya Kanasugalu by Shivaram Karanth. Unfortunately, the resemblances end there and the promise of a reverie amidst the quaint charm of the Western Ghats is broken quickly as it becomes rather apparent that the characters are but mouthpieces for a long explication on the philosophy of language.

A forced telling in English?

The mystery surrounding the girl’s refusal to speak soon feels like tiresome obstinacy as her younger sister, her polio-afflicted friend, their schoolteachers, their grandmother, their parents, the wise village singer (who displays uncharacteristic articulatory skills) launch into debates about language, god, and everything metaphysical: Is language a lie or the capacity to lie? Is language writing or speech? Is meaning absolute or is communication a result of the consensus of approximation? Is mathematics the language to be aspired for? Is objectivity truth? Is there a pure musical note? Is music language? Do aural patterns have visual manifestations? Except, not in so many words. They are the words of rural children, and not Russell and Wittgenstein, in case we have forgotten. The characters intersperse their discussions with eating and sleeping and going or not going to school in a bid to keep it real.

The writing feels like the work of a novice translator paying obeisance to a Kannada original. It seems as if the incidents were thought about in Kannada before being hastily converted to English with little heed to idiomatic smoothness. And the tedium of the narrative is matched by poor editing. Strange phrases and word choices (police stations are ‘hesitantly dark,’ dogs ‘swat flies,’ words ‘dribble into silence,’ eyes are ‘wide open for sounds,’ mouths are ‘set in frowns,’ cooking sounds are ‘sullen,’ someone enjoys the ‘voyeurism of ordinary days’), shoddy sentences (‘he hoped something had not happened to his mother,’ ‘she refused to look at her at all,’ ‘It would soon become a habit like all habits,’ ‘her father came out of the bathroom bare-bodied, a towel wrapped around his waist’), random capitalisations and italicisations cry out (silently, like the protagonist) for a blue pencil.

The novel might have sounded better if it were written in Kannada, which would retain the organic relationship between the story and the language. Stories in Indian languages are spared the strict compartmentalisation of genres of Western literary traditions. Magic and realism in them are not separate entities that their pairing needs special mention. In Kannada, a story is a story; it entertains, it educates, it creates a larger world. Without the humdrum choice of suspension — or not — of disbelief owing to its forced telling in English, the novel might have been more engaging in Kannada.

Prof Sarukkai’s decades-long work to bring philosophy out of the high tower of academia and to make it more accessible to everybody is well known. But owing to its heavy didactic and expository nature, this novel brings to mind the saying about good intentions as pavement material. Extending the earlier anecdote about Russell and his famous pupil to this instance, I feel fiction is to Sarukkai what aeronautics was to Wittgenstein, and like him, he must remain a philosopher. To give it due credit, it is a commendable experiment. But I feel the book might have made a fine short story of 6,000 words. To cut a long story short, the 240-page novel is 220 pages too many.