‘Register Me as Kulbhushan’: This Bengal partition novel is a paean to the human ability to adapt

One of the characters in Alka Saraogi’s Hindi novel Kulbhushan ka Naam Darj Keejiye – translated into English by John Vater as Register Me As Kulbhushan – is Malli. Malli is born to the Hindu Amala, whose affair with her Muslim neighbour Ali ends in tatters, leaving her pregnant. But the washerman Shyama, dark-skinned and pockmarked, marries Amala and dotes on her as well as the baby she bears. Malli – her name a portmanteau of Amala and Ali – is his daughter, even if he did not father her.

It’s an interesting idea to mull over: who are we? Malli may be half-Muslim, half-Hindu by blood, but the man she knows and loves in her early years as her father is Hindu. Or is he? Because Shyama, while brought up by a lower caste dhobi and his wife, was not really their child: he was given to them as a baby (and already circumcised: therefore Muslim?) by a kanfata yogi. And when tragedy strikes, Malli is brought up by a man with an even more complex relationship with names and identities: Kulbhushan. Kulbhushan Jain, aka Gopal Chandra Das.

The double lives

A Marwari, his family originally from Rajasthan but settled in the East Bengal town of Kushtia, Kulbhushan is the...

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