In an interview given prior to the launch of her third novel Sleeping on Jupiter at Asia House in London in April 2015, Anuradha Roy commented:

“There are difficulties and oppressions of many kinds in India because of poverty and inequality. And children, especially children … are the most powerless. Their exploitation is so commonplace and institutionalised that it has come to be seen as just normal, and so massive that it feels beyond alteration. Brutality towards the powerless — the poor, children, women, animals — no longer seems to bother the majority … There is more and more acceptance of [this] as simply part of what is routine across the country.”

The bleak picture of India which Roy sketches here is reflected in Sleeping on Jupiter, which was subsequently longlisted for the Man Booker Prize annually awarded to the “best” novel published in the UK and in English “regardless” of the nationality of its author (Roy is Indian and lives in Ranikhet, Uttarakhand).

Sleeping on Jupiter may be Anuradha Roy’s attempt to bear witness to circumstances she feels she cannot otherwise alter

Her previous novels — An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), and The Folded Earth (2011) — have also dwelt on the darker side of life on the subcontinent in the early and mid-20th century, presenting stories of pasts overshadowed by sorrows and futures haunted by separations. Her latest, contemporary-set novel, however, is the most potentially controversial: a story of historic sexual abuse in Jarmuli, a fictional town renowned for its Vishnu and Sun Temples, the latter replete with erotic panels, situated on India’s East Coast.

At the start of the novel, 25 year-old Nomi, braided, toe-ringed, tattooed, backpacked, and studded with piercings, arrives in Jarmuli from Oslo on the premise of researching a documentary film “on religious tourism, temple towns”. As the narrative unfolds it becomes apparent that she is searching, that indeed she has already searched over seven seas to find a shore that might echo the one in her “first memory”: the one on which she lost her mother following the bloody murder of her father and perhaps her brother, before her arrival with other refugee girls at an isolated ashram, and before the forcible piercing of her ears with a dead child’s rings.

Nomi’s arrival in fact, therefore, appears to be a return, and over the course of Sleeping on Jupiter’s five Jarmuli-set days, recollections of her sickly encounters with the now abandoned ashram’s famed Guruji, related in the first person, are interspersed with the story of three older women and their holiday break, their guide’s familial and romantic struggles, and Nomi’s attempts to assimilate Jarmuli’s sights and sounds. Some comforting, some more insidious, these impress upon her semi-alien consciousness as she scans the town’s white-sanded beaches and less salubrious residents, hungering for a fight, and fearing for what a moment of recognition may bring.

Sleeping on Jupiter may be an attempt on the part of its Indian author to bear witness to what she feels she cannot otherwise alter. “Massive” oppressions of the kind Roy outlines in the words cited above bear down on the existences of its most significant protagonists, male as well as female, each of whom has in some measure survived (and in some cases inflicted) cruelties which remain unnoticed by the bustling crowds in the shrine-studded, jasmine-scented seaside destination which Roy conjures.

These protagonists, like the Jarmuli coastline’s hazardous currents, tug our attentions farther off, into deeper waters. Rather than being offered their tales as exemplary of the effects of certain social issues, we are immersed in the struggles of Nomi, Suraj, Johnny and Badal (who once “dreamed of living on Jupiter and sleeping under its many moons” ... )

Yet to interpret this Indian English novel as an exposé of “the endless, treacherous hypocrisies of Indian society”, and its oppression of women and children (as The Guardian’s critic, for example, did), seems to marshal it to a cause it does not (quite) seem crafted to fit.

This is not because Roy’s narrative does not portray the temple town as a sinister, liminal space where “riptides could suck in swimmers and innocuous waves could turn savage, picking people off the sand”, or portray traumatic incidences of visceral, physical violence and exploitation enacted largely by men, including men of religion (it does, in detail, which is graphic). Rather, it is because of the author’s interest in the individual characters she creates: the strong-willed but distant, self-cocooning Nomi; her volatile, addictive, guilt-plagued local “point man” Suraj; the wary chai-wallah Johnny Toppo, who sleeps in a tarpaulin shack by the beach; and even the haughty temple guide Badal, who falls surprisingly in love with Raghu, an idling tea-boy.

These protagonists, like the Jarmuli coastline’s hazardous currents, tug our attentions farther off, into deeper waters. Rather than being offered their tales as exemplary of the effects of certain social issues, we are immersed in the struggles of Nomi, Suraj, Johnny and Badal (who once “dreamed of living on Jupiter and sleeping under its many moons” and still hankers to feel himself part of the universe as he dips his feet in Jarmuli’s waters) to find ways physically and mentally to persist — to “step into the sea, swim and land” on some more hospitable shore, beyond the reach of life’s swirling waters.

Roy describes “the process of writing [a]s one of coming closer and closer to the characters, of unpeeling them layer by layer until you know them — and even then not completely”. One can almost feel her grappling with this as she shifts from consciousness to consciousness in Sleeping on Jupiter, in and out of the characters’ several heads. The results are not always entirely convincing, for example when we are suddenly made party to the feelings that apparently inform the sullen Badal’s contempt for his vacuous elderly clients: “he longed to be with the real seekers, those who would understand the depth and gravity of his words”.

Rao’s projected motivations seem here rather trite. Yet there are apposite moments, such as when we perceive through the paranoid, hung-over Suraj’s onlooking eyes the activities of worshippers “going from shrine to shrine, searching the stones for some traces they had come to find” with a devoutness and certainty he finds “inconceivable”. These effectively conjure the non-believer’s vexed relationship to belief in a land still so steeped in faith, despite its potential for corruption. Ultimately, it is such fragments of poignant perception, which in turn inform the narrative of child abuse in Indian religious institutions, that make reading Roy’s novel enriching.

The reviewer is research lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at Teesside University. Her monograph, Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie, was published in 2015.

Sleeping on Jupiter
(NOVEL)
By Anuradha Roy
Quercus, London
ISBN 978-0857053473
256pp.