There is already a huge backlog which I have to clear up out of my books and while last few weeks provided with ample opportunities to clear it up, work and other family duties have stuck again and I am going slow with reading and reviewing again. Weather is flip-flopping between extreme hot to cold and we are confused between keeping the windows opened or closed at night lol.
This week I had the chance to read The House of Awadh by Nitin Kushalappa MP
I started reading this one without reading the blurb or context. With under a 100 pages, this seemed like a quick read, so I decided to pick it up as I didnt want to jump into longer books at this point of time.
The cover seems decent. You can figure out a marriage ceremony being done.
The first thing that hits you when you start reading the first ten pages is the speed of the book. It seems like the author is rushing to introduce all characters, and there are so many of them, and their life choices, their destiny in a very short span of time. The story just rushes from one character to another and it becomes a very demanding read. The setting is modern day India and you are confused as to why the author is rushing so much.
By the time you reach the 11th or 12th page, you realize that this is modern day retelling of Ramayana, with all characters and situations modified to suit modern times. Once you grasp this, it becomes an easy read, because now you know these characters and you know the situations which are going to happen, or happening currently. Now the characters are known so its not that demanding anymore.
Nitin has a huge daunting task in front of him. Previously, there have been attempts made to retell Ramayana in another context. Mani Ratnam's Raavan or Manoj Kumar's Kalyug ki Ramayan were both such attempts and despite the brilliance of Mani Ratnam, both attempts tanked hugely. So, its not an easy task to retell Ramayana in modern context. With that task in hand, Nitin has done a good job by retelling the story where Rama is a software expert along with Lakshmana while Ravana is a mafia don and Hanuman is a lawyer and so on...
Nitin has done a huge amount of research going much beyond and above of what is mentioned in Ramayana. He has tried to gather as much details and incorporate as much characters as possible and tried to weave a modern day story around it. While turning the pages, there always is a curiosity of how he has interpreted the forthcoming event as mentioned in Ramayana. How he has mentioned the Sita Swayamvar, how he interprets Agni Pariksha, how he interprets Shurpnakha incident and so on. He has done a thorough research and applied a huge deal of imagination of which event would be interpreted as how. Most of the times, he has been successful and when those events occur you want to applaud the author for his imagination and open mindedness.
On the flip side, perhaps the biggest enemy of Nitin's book is its size. Ramayana is a huge subject, and even when modernizing it, it still is a huge subject. I dont know what compulsion Nitin had to finish it up within a 100 pages. There are a lot many events which just come out of nowhere because Nitin had to interpret it to be a part of his book but there is not enough back story and not enough reasoning provided. At many times the book feels rushed and honestly its a disservice to Nitin himself because there is such a diverse and vibrant world he had painted and so much effort went into research and interpretation but the number of pages restrict him.
Still, this book is a huge effort and mostly it succeeds in binding you. Barring minor inconveniences, its a brilliant read and the interpretations of a thousand year old text in modern context comes very natural and modern. The best part for me was that despite modernizing the epic tale, he stayed true to the source text. This for me was an attempt worth applauding.
I would go ahead with a rating of 4.5/5. I again appreciate the task that Nitin set out to achieve and does shine brilliantly.
You can buy the book at
https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B083JMV55B/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title
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