Dreams of Pangea: a book by Indian writer Shubhanga Swarup published in Russian

Anna Berseneva, writer

The debut novel of the Indian writer Shubhanga Swarup "The latitudes of hardships" (Moscow: Phantom Press. 2021. Translated from English by Vladimir Babkov) manifests a widespread interest in books that take place in India, Southeast Asia and other places, until recently attracting close reader attention.

This interest is not cognitive - at least not primarily cognitive. The geography of the novel - the Andaman Islands, Myanmar, Nepal - cannot be called trivial, of course, but the author is clearly not striving to simply satisfy the reader's curiosity about exoticism. Travel romance? Also not, although his heroes are the official Girija Prasod, who in 1948 organizes a state forestry service on the islands and at the same time seeks to "document the past in all its immensity, to trace all the roots that stretch from the elusive changeable present into an unknown prehistoric era" a wife who sees the future and ghosts, their daughter, their maid, her revolutionary son, his smuggler friend, and, in fact, all the other characters in several stories connected to each other - are on a journey, real or mental, constantly. Are readers attracted to Buddhism in its everyday incarnation? It seems to be getting closer...

And if it is even closer: the basis of interest in novels such as "The Latitudes of Hardships" is, perhaps, the fact that the perception of the world, which is embodied in this text and, relatively speaking, in the South Asian attitude to life in general, best meets modern needs be aware of nature, civilization, history and human thinking as a natural unity.

In 2019, speaking at the largest literary festival in Asia in Jaipur, Shubhangi Swarup said that she wanted to write about ecology and climate change on the planet in fictional language, because world literature was too fixated on man and his problems, ignoring the problems of nature and the balance of the universe. The formulation of the writer's task is alarmingly pragmatic, but the novel's artistry is undeniable. There is nothing poster, journalistic, illustrative in it - the integrity of all that exists appears to be complex and poetic. Both these qualities are subtly and expressively conveyed by the brilliant translation of Vladimir Babkov.

Here is the official Girija Prasod reflects on the supercontinent, which included all the present lands: “Perhaps Pangea dreamed of becoming a myriad of islands. Perhaps myriads of islands are now dreaming of becoming one. Perhaps, like the ridiculously dressed sailors who were sent around the world by crazy queens, parts of the world have discovered that the end of one world is the beginning of another... ”This is a vivid expression of the type of consciousness that increasingly dominates in modern times. One of his will take: what was previously called great conquests and geographical discoveries, is now perceived as the whim of crazy queens.

Perhaps the Andaman Islands were chosen as the main scene of action because geological phenomena here directly affect the thinking of people and their behavior in society. As a result of a natural cataclysm, tectonic plates are displaced, after which the Earth is transformed, "as after a long meditative work" - and immediately the revolutionary escapes from prison through the gap in the wall formed at the same time. Natural, social and personal events are connected in some primordial way. In the same way, all earthly creatures are connected to each other ("The islands do not distinguish between ants, centipedes, snakes and people. They involve all of them in the primitive struggle for survival"), and spirit with physiology ("To survive separation, he must was to start a new life. Catastrophically new, at the very thought of which his hemorrhoids exacerbated. Having got out into the endless ocean space, he took refuge in a shell of silence. Stillborn tears gave rise to persistent constipation").

Such a consciousness revealed itself to the world relatively recently, but immediately brightly and victoriously. It occupies an ever more important place in the world society - this is evidenced by the readers' interest in books in which it is shown so expressively as in Shubhanga Svarup's "The Latitudes of Hardships".