Resumo de The World Of Devbaug's Damu

Damu Devbagyachi Duniya
(The world of Devbag?s Damu)
By Dr. Y.A. Raikar
Rs. 340
Ayapa Publications
India
This is the story of a diffident teenager struggling to guard the cocoon of his insecure ambition from the gory diktats of an obliged upbringing. On one hand, is a clear sky of youthful horizons ripe with promise; on the other, is custody with its code of conduct waiting unabashedly to parade him throughout. Set against the backdrop of the pre-independence era in a tiny Indian village, supposedly near Mumbai, the story moves back and forth as Damu, an adolescent of seventeen years, is found grappling with the post-matriculation realities of a hesitant career-to-be while secretly nourishing the dream of a promising life that beckons him from the mists of the unknown. In what is neither exaltation nor melancholy, Damu takes a look back in time at the string of multi-coloured characters and events that influence his world in respective roles and times. The author?s style is delightfully capricious in each of these trinkets of observation and insight - in the sketch of his parents and relations, teachers and elders, his peers and idols, his family house, his dark secrets or his soaring aspirations.

Lurking in the protagonist?s seemingly matter-of-fact discourse is a poignant picture of his captive resignation as well as his ardour to break free - both gasping in the vicious circle of a providence thrust upon him. Devoid of any central theme to formally bind them together, these mini-narratives tell a story of extraordinary metaphorical eminence but only as the lad would have seen it - through his careful observation, creative imagination, incomplete grasp, helplessness and the starry-eyed awe for the privileged around him. Piece by piece, these inconsequential episodes unfurl enough to hint at the hypocrisy of family relationships and the highbrow of social custom. But in the exposition of the paradoxes so intricately woven in the social fabric, the author avoids any overt condemnation or resort to personal angst. On the contrary, he gainfully employs deadpan humour to set the reader thinking, gradually inducing him to read between the lines to devour a pathos of timeless endurance, interspersed in the whole epoch of despair and frustration.

In many ways, the book falls under the genre of anti-autobiographical writing. Every time the author moves near self-revelation, he seems to turn away before he comes too close. Much like Peter Eagleton?s definition of an anti-autobiography.

?...writing it in such a way as to outwit the prurience and immodesty of the genre by frustrating your own desire for self-display and the reader?s desire to enter your inner life.?

The universality of the sentiment lurking in this script makes it a deserving candidate for translation - to reach the readership in the offing, one that?s waiting to be tapped beyond the language cordon.

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