Image Credits- Amrita Sher Gil
You want to throw out your arms, run like a bird across the sand, cry out with relief, the relief that feels like joy. You have arrived, and in one instant you have recovered what you thought was lost: clarity, clarity, the promise of clarity.
- Rosarita, Anita Desai
With Rosarita, Anita Desai has returned to the world of literary market, after a calm of over a decade. Published in July of 2024, Rosarita is a short-length novella in which the author builds bridges between history and memory, prose and poetry, as well as the aesthetic and historical experiences between two far-off countries of India and Mexico. Remembered for her works on cultural and historical significance such as Cry, the Peacock and In Custody, Desai brings out a wholly novel experience of melting of different cultures through shared experiences in the everyday lives of women in Rosarita. If the protagonist’s grandfather is portrayed as having an absolute dominance in the household, marked with the expression “If there was a god, it could only be The Husband”, the Mexican culture is brought to a comparison with it in terms of gender relations in the old woman’s own household who accompanies the protagonist throughout the novel. If the protagonist’s Indian mother lacked agency when it came to making major decisions about the household and even herself, the old woman (the Trickster) in Mexico finds herself duped off the rights over her own property. Written in the second person, the dream-like narration immediately connects with the reader by figuratively placing them on the same park bench in San Miguel, Mexico, with the protagonist, Bonita from the opening page itself.
Crisp in its sentences and short in length, Rosarita traverses continents to explore the shared experiences of the colonial past and the world of art within them. The following line from the novella is expressive of the structure of its sentences and that of the story itself: “Rosarita – as the Stranger urges you to call this mythical mother – Rosarita had come to paint in San Miguel. Did not many come to pursue that art here where there were world-famous art schools, celebrated maestros?” (Desai). It is a quintessential sentence of Rosarita for several reasons. The narration is in the second person, where the addressee is the reader who is supposed to be a part of the unfolding story. It moreover, establishes the significance of the Stranger, an old woman who meets Bonita in a park and entangles her in her stories. The Stranger (later called the Trickster) makes the protagonist question her own sense of the past by narrating an alternative past of her mother in San Miguel. Here, subsuming memory in the overwhelming significance of exchanges between Indian and Mexican art world is made as a pathway towards reinterpretation of gendered experiences of past and present—which the novella carries out throughout.
The novella tells the story through Bonita, an Indian student of Spanish language in Mexico, whose chance encounter with an old woman in a park one evening ends up in a roller coaster ride of memories which include newer possible explanations for the inexplicable encounters with her own mother in the past. The old woman (later called ‘the Trickster’ due to her suspicious demeanour and actions) leaves Bonita intrigued by stating that she knew her mother. Though most of the Trickster’s narrative about her association with Bonita’s mother look dismissible to the latter on factual grounds, she is captivated by how it fills the voids in her memory. What begins as a dubious narration of the old woman’s association with Bonita’s mother when she was training under a painting Maestro in Mexico leads to a journey of exploration of the self and the family, shared art history of India and Mexico, and the Mexican landscape—a journey which stands to tie it all in an explicable whole for the young girl. Whether she comes out successful in this pursuit – and whether the author succeeds in providing a fulfilling experience to the reader – might be a matter of subjective interpretation of each reader. However, what is certain in Rosarita is Desai’s signature ability to hold the reader in disquieting moments amidst mundane life as a methodical deployment of aesthetic experience to open up larger historical questions. Although based in completely different settings, Rosarita shares this quality with Desai’s 1984 novel, In Custody. While In Custody is about the socio-cultural pillaging of the Urdu language and literature by historical forces of the modern Indian nation-state, Rosarita’s inquiry is of artwork concerning the Partition of India and the Mexican Revolution, and the lives of artists in their domestic and social settings during the times of their unfolding. One of the ways in which the historical moments in the two contexts have been compared is in the Author’s Note where Desai remarks, “When the Partition of India took place in 1947, trains carried untold numbers of refugees across the new borders of India and Pakistan, which bears some resemblances to the historical role played by trains in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, carrying both the militia and the revolutionaries.” The comparison between two cultures and their history of art in the novella is based in the author’s project to bricolage the memories of shared history of political violence. Trains being one of the obvious symbols of comparison between the Indian Partition and the Mexican Revolution, showing the modern nature of these historical uprisings, Desai builds the comparison through the history of art and gendered experiences.
Image Credits- HarperCollins
On the cover of Rosarita sits a self-portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil, giving tribute to women’s contribution to avant-garde paintings—a quintessential choice for a text which dwells on the lives of women and their contribution to art in times of political crises. Bonita, together with her absent mother and the Trickster, represents crises which have different particularities but are still tied together through gendered experiences of the world determined by forces that are above and beyond their control. Another aspect of the three women’s lives that the novella craftily addresses is their family and their relationship with the male members of their household. With a seemingly open-ended narrative, Desai ensures that the various aspects of the characters’ lives are developed with each other to ensure a real-life depiction. The significant role of women in painting during major historical developments has been marked. However, the actual depiction of art that the novel deals with remains overshadowed by narratives about the ravages that they have been subjected to—perhaps just how the author intended it. The short length of the text is a further testament to the author’s intention of not dwelling on the details of the artwork but on the lives surrounding them in history. Rosarita, therefore, becomes a requiem for the artists, especially women, and their experiences vis-à-vis the promise which the world of art comes with, in the wake of familial and political crises. Moreover, these experiences are universalised by the characters, who, despite hailing from vastly different parts of the world, make sense of their own lives through each other. Such is the truth of the universal nature of sorrow and gendered dispossession which Rosarita emphatically brings out.
One finds something of Desai’s own reflection in the protagonist in their shared commitments and disposition. Like Desai, Bonita’s prime allegiance is towards language and literature. However, she becomes the quintessential curator of the memories of lives revolving around paintings. In putting a student of language among the plunders of Mexican art-world (represented aptly by the deplorable personal life of the Trickster), Desai reveals her own commitment to the craft, which has repeatedly come up in her novels. In Custody, though about the Urdu language and literature, is a conservatory of the ravages of the life-world represented by it. Much like the Urdu teacher of In Custody, the old Trickster is desperately trying to preserve whatever of the Mexican Revolution art world that can be preserved. Bonita, whose memories of her family are blurred and whose life is full of uncertainties, receives the responsibility of carrying a world that she was never a part of—or that’s how she initially perceived it. In the moments of uncertainty – which the text captures masterfully – the characters all melt into each other, much like their beliefs and the paintings of Partition and the Mexican Revolution. Rosarita holds us still on the question of the significance of art in the middle of socio-political crises and leaves us with uncertainties which are to be used for deriving our own answers. It is a novella for all those who continue to believe in the significance of art in a warring world—and for those who do not.
By Asif Uzzaman
Asif Uzzaman is a research scholar of English literature in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur. He has previously studied literature at the postgraduate and undergraduate levels at JNU, New Delhi, and Hindu College, University of Delhi respectively.
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