Once upon a cow

Artificial insemination is the unlikely topic of Radhika Jha’s new novel. Animals are a good subject.

The morning of our interview has been an introspective one for Radhika Jha, one she spent wondering what made her write Lanterns on their Horns, her second novel. In Delhi for a few weeks from Tokyo, where she lives with her diplomat husband and two children, she says thoughtfully, “I wanted to write about the transformation of a village, because not much has been written about rural life in India,” running her hand over the cover of a fresh copy, with its beautiful sepia image (by John Kenny) of a sari-clad woman wading through a herd of cows.

 

The cow in Lanterns on their Horns is a metaphor for change in Nandgaon, where Jha sets her novel. A “junglee” cow is artificially inseminated with the sperm of a foreign bull, setting off a dramatic chain of events as Nandgaon is split down the middle between those who support such cross-breeding using new-fangled methods and those who vehemently oppose it.

The idealist Manoj Mishra, a “failed” PhD in history, whom we meet at the start of the novel, believes cross-breeding may be the perfect solution to end rural poverty. But is it? The uptight village headman Gopal Mundkur, a character dear to Jha, feels differently. “As a writer, you tend to have your sympathies with one character. I began by making the headman the bad guy. By the end of the novel, my sympathies had turned to him.”

Jha’s debut work, Smell, which opened to mixed reviews in 1999, preceded a collection of stories, The Elephant and the Maruti. “I like to write about things that don’t get talked about. Who thinks of our sense of smell? I also like to explore in my writings, our relationship with animals. In the West, animals mean only meat, and money. But in India, we view them as companions. Sometimes, we often forget, we are half-animals too,” Jha remarks.

She recalls that it was an image in her head of a man on a bicycle carrying cans of frozen semen that brought her the subject of her new book. “I love cows. For me, that image was a metaphor for India,” she declares. “It may sound pretentious,” she acknowledges quickly, “but there is some truth there, so I decided to pursue the process of artificial insemination.”

On the ground, research proved to be quite a task. With her two-year-old son in tow, Jha set off for Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh, to learn about village life. “The first time I went, I tried to blend in, salwar kameez and all. But they were convinced I was a government agent trying to find out the cost of their land. There was suspicion because of the issue of displacement over the Narmada dam,” Jha explains. Driven out by the locals, she returned a few months later, this time “in T-shirt and funky sneakers, determined to anger them enough to speak,” she laughs.

Motherhood, meanwhile, had made writing doubly hard. “It took me more than five years to get done with Lanterns on their Horns. I had two sons in between, and believe me,” she says, shaking her head, “being a mother is difficult. Most mothers stop working when they have children.”But the book also gave her the perfect excuse to take a break, from time to time. As a trained Odissi dancer, she also started performing periodically, “to keep alive the art in me”.

Taking long breaks from her book, she always returned to it full throttle. “I also blended into my writing chance encounters. I like things to happen ironically. Because life” — she says, knowingly — “comes back to you in surprises.”

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LANTERNS ON THEIR HORNS
Author: Radhika Jha
Publisher: HarperCollins
pages: 471
Price: Rs 399