Everyone likes a good hanging, do they?
Tag lines sell articles. An advertising tag line can tease in a peculiar kind of charm to the product it is meant to promote. Like 'when beauty meets quality', or when 'make. believe', makes the reader or viewer cogitate on the unspoken experience of living the product. When the looks of the product which is necessarily made to look other than what it really is attempts to mate the hyper-expressive language tinkered to do just that, the customer is made to willingly savour the illicit passions of the unsaid. The desire for the material fingers the linguistic foreplay and the killing feel to have it, know it rises inside. The ad line adds much in terms of the unstated, hooks one closer but leaves the distance untraveled, yet approximated.
But do books require these tag lines? A subtitle like tag line which supplements the text's argument at one level and mystifies it at another? A teaser which pokes the intellectual ribs? How many of the books we have come across carry such titular props? The train of thoughts also brought to my mind the question, how far can such tag line of a book be like / unlike that of a movie or a product? What prompted these thoughts in me was the line I found on the English translation of K. R. Meera's acclaimed Malayalam work, 'Aarachaar'. The title has been rightly translated to 'Hangwoman'. Let me keep my worries as to whether that translation can measure up to the string pulling which Aarachaar performs in me. Since the very act of translation is mined with red herrings of the kind, let me leave that there. But the line at the bottom of the English version made me wink.
After having read the novel, I have reasons to think and wonder. What exactly does the translator ( am sure she has had the licence of the author to do that) mean to achieve with that? The novel which she has translated is death scented and death dominated. The central figure of the novel is equipping herself to inherit the work of a hangman from her father. Chetna Mallick waits long and hard, puts herself slowly through the paces of becoming a Hangwoman. But the wait is worth every knot on the rope, every twist in the noose. The complex narrative of the novel which defies easy labelling takes the reader on an intellectual odyssey through the oceans of gender infested waters. A tense narrative, Aarachaar pushes to the front yard the politics of death.
Chetna who has to don the mantle of the Hangwoman does so under the pressure of the moment, though nothing in the book makes the reader clearly distinguish between a choice and a chance of the act. Many would surmise that she made a choice of a chance. But equally strong will be the argument that she was there for the act, the role. But when the line 'everyone likes a good hanging' positions on the cover, with the benefit of hindsight, this reader disagrees. Did Chetna love the act of hanging? If she wanted to do the act as an act of making a point, as an act of Turning the corner, as an act of coming of age, what kind of a love was that? And how good does the woman does the hanging? India Today's reviews called the subtitle an "ironic master stroke". How does irony make its masterpiece here, I fail to grasp.
The line has a ring of populist and consumer flavour. The everyone loves a good hug, good dad, kind of tone it has. The meticulous move of the novel is a studied March of tightening the noose around the patriarchy bred misconceptions. It grabs the whole of the history of the wider human domain and Chetna presides over the kill with the penchant of a charmed assassin. The convulsions she passes through in the process is the heart of the book. The moment when she actually performs what the line calls ' a good hanging' is worth viewing close. The hug of the to be hanged and the Hangwoman, is worth a moment of salvatory bliss. The way the two erect a relationship that escapes the radar of the taken for grantedness. The confident efficiency of the Chetna whose hanging skills will be tested and certified by all and sundry which belies the emotional angst she passes through. The hangwoman, the hanged and the thousands who have willingly allowed to be suspended on the readerly noose from the start. Which of these testifies to the claim of the tag line?
Aarachaar is a work which places voyeurism in a delicate angle. It is not just the media which tracks the potential hanging that I am talking about, it is the state of 'mediatedness' too that I mean. Viewing, watching, gazing, glaring, ogling, well, the kaleidoscope of the eyepiece keeps working, keeps making the reader work, in all possibilities. By the time the narrator has been lead to the final act, the act of hanging, the act of watching the hanging has been shorn off all its customary feel and fierceness. As I commented earlier, it has become a sublime act of self submission. The suave way of walking away at the end of a finished master act. It is not a 'marketed hanging'. It is not the billboard display for a commercial gimmick. It is not an act which we measure with good or bad scales. It rises above such gratings.
Why did the translated text require such a 'sub title tag line'? And, how does it leverage the effect of the novel? In no way at all. I also need to additionally wonder from the angle of a reader who reads the English version only. Will a perceptive reader enjoy the line? I would love to conclude otherwise. Every one likes a good read. But not a tag line at the start which itches to sensationally sell what lies between between covers. Especially when what lies inside is something which defies branding, a story which has taken off on its own and tends to live itself off on its own terms. The irony of P. Sainath's excellent work, 'Everyone Loves a Good Drought' can afford to carry this kind of an irony. But not K. R. Meera's Aarachaar.
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