Review: Leaf, Water and Flow by Avadhoot Dongare
A postmodernist novel that emulates every feature of the genre to perfection, Leaf, Water and Flow is, at its core, an attempt at understanding and compassion
From the very first page, it is abundantly clear that Leaf, Water and Flow is not a typical work of fiction. First published in Marathi in 2015, Avadhoot Dongare’s experimental novel, translated by Nadeem Khan, has been longlisted for the 2024 JCB Prize for Indian Literature. It is hard to sum up this essentially plot-less novel in a few lines. The narrator admits as much in the first chapter: “The subject of this novel is not something that can be expressed in brief… I sat down to write the subject, and all that came to my head is these stories.” A series of short sections focusing on different individuals from varied socio-economic backgrounds who have all congregated around a hillock follow this statement. Some of these people reappear in later chapters but most figure in the novel just this once, never to be seen or heard from again.
The longest chapter is from the point of view of Bhaskar, an older man who is deeply involved with the Maoist movement. The book has other characters too who are sympathetic to the Naxalites or to the larger proletarian struggle, highlighting voices from the peripheries. Apart from these, there is a chapter narrated by an egret and another by a dead teak leaf. There are poems, even a diagram. The author’s friend in real life, who has written the afterword to the novel, also appears in an earlier chapter but as a fictional version of himself based on another real-life person.
In a later chapter, the narrator runs into an old friend by chance in Amravati. Now in his thirties, this man works as a clerk in a bank (and has featured in an earlier chapter as Bhaskar’s regular interlocutor). He is fond of reading and shares his critical thoughts on different subjects on his blog and on Facebook. He gives printouts of these ‘jottings’ to the narrator who compares them to a patchwork quilt laboriously woven together over time: “A quilt should basically be a product that puts together pieces that would otherwise have been wasted, right? And whatever pattern has to emerge emerges by itself. It’s the companionship of the pieces that is important; where else will the warmth come from?” The book reproduces all of the clerk’s entries and this description suits it well too. It is a patchwork novel, a work of collage or a terrazzo tile, a mosaic as narrative.
At its core, the novel is an attempt at understanding and compassion, going beyond empathy. In one of his ‘jottings’, the clerk friend asserts: “We continue to remain ourselves. We cannot become the other person and the other person can’t become us. Our sorrow is ours and the other person’s sorrow is theirs. There’s just one remedy for this: the novel.” Dongare ably explores revolutionary violence and epistemic violence, revolution in theory and in practice, the agentive subjects of the state and the passive objects of its brutality. Even as he emphasises the necessity of revolution, he highlights disillusionment with the ways in which it is brought about. All of this leads to a polyphonic novel that makes space for a plurality of voices, that interrogates the structures of society and the strictures of craft, even as it moves liquidly, with a natural rhythm of its own, that wholly personifies the title.
Leaf, Water and Flow is the textbook example of a postmodernist novel that emulates every single feature of the genre to perfection. There is, of course, the matter of the narrator. It is never certain how removed he is from the author figure repeatedly mentioned in the novel or how removed is this nameless author figure from the writer Avadhoot Dongare. There are layers of metafiction at work here and the novel constantly draws attention to its construction. The reader is repeatedly shaken with the realisation that art is artifice. So much of the novel is actually about the act of writing it with the author figure collecting parts and pieces from here and there that the final result is an ever-mutating work. Demanding the reader’s time and attention even as its tone and tenor changes with each chapter, this is an intensely rewarding read.
Nadeem Khan’s remarkable translation captures the changes in cadence across chapters and uses various Englishes for different characters as a reflection of the original novel’s attempt at embracing “varied voices with their dialects and also the dialectics of their surroundings” in Marathi. The novel’s chimerical jumps are akin to water: “See how water moves in nature: frothing, meandering, stopping, springing, gushing, steaming cascading. It is the same with a story… The more open and unrestrained they are, the better.” This pretty much encapsulates the defining feature of Avadhoot Dongare’s work. Books that make you think are few and far between. By ingeniously bridging the divide between form and politics, between reader and text, Leaf, Water and Flow leaves a lasting mark.
Areeb Ahmad is a Delhi-based freelance writer and literary critic. He is @Bankrupt_Bookworm on Instagram.