A tale of hope and justice, Ruthvika Rao’s The Fertile Earth reminds one of Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things in some ways. Part of the story is told through the perspective of innocent children who are trapped in the crossfires of prejudiced adults. This is the story of Vijaya and Sree, daughters of Mahendra Deshmukh, and Ranga and Krishna, sons of the washerwoman in the Deshmukh household. The Deshmukhs are the feudal lords of the village of Irumi, which is the stage in this epic saga of love and power.
Krishna is roughly the same age as Vijaya, while Ranga is older. Like Estha and Rahel did with Sophie mol in Roy’s The God of Small Things, Vijaya makes a fatal mistake. Ranga and Krishna are unfortunate to be caught in this tragedy and they are made to pay for Vijaya’s mistakes. This is not only a tale of feudalism and caste hierarchy but also one of the cruelty of adults in the way they deal with children.
Vijaya’s mother hates the spirited nature of her elder daughter but dotes on her younger daughter Sree. This creates an ugly rift between the two sisters that culminates in a deadly accident. Much like Roy’s incandescent novel, Ruthvika Rao’s debut deals with the subject of love laws – who can be loved and how. While intercaste sexual relationships aren’t uncommon in India’s history, they have often been devoid of love and consent. They are often used as a method to assert caste dominance. When Vijaya Deshmukh falls in love with Krishna, it upsets the rules in place and turns into a rebellion against the caste hierarchy.
Rao’s prose brings alive the social hierarchies in the village of Irumi situated in the Eastern Ghats. The novel opens with a gruesome show of the death of the Deshmukhs. This happens decades after Krishna and Vijaya first meet and become infatuated with each other as children. We witness the murder of Deshmukhs through the eyes of a young boy who works in a tanning settlement that has been shunned by the villagers. The villagers do not touch the people born there. They believe that the earth there has been polluted for perpetuity from animal carcasses and blood.
Rao writes about generational ties between the women of the Deshmukh household. Vijaya’s mother resents her, and this makes Vijaya more rebellious. She believes that the reason for her mother’s strong dislike is that she is not beautiful like her younger sister Sree. This causes a rift between the sisters, culminating in a dreadful accident. Vijaya cannot remember when she stopped doting on her little sister, when what she felt for Sree became so much closer to hatred. Vijaya’s heart is heavy with guilt and she wants to escape Irumi and get away from Sree. Her mother blames her, and this alters their relationship forever.
Rao captures the enormous power the Deshmukhs had by virtue of their caste. She writes, “…their sight had the power to melt the skin off skulls.” The villagers might pray at the village temple, but the Deshmukhs were the real gods of Irumi. She writes about Surendra Deshmukh as he beats Ranga for stealing a mango from his orchard, “It was a lesson a master must know how to administer. In the eyes of the vetti, he knew that compassion and tenderness were peculiar things, just as the vetti mind was a peculiar thing, one that had to be conditioned with a constant stream of cruelty, so that his mind would expect it as part of daily life, just as he expected sleep to come for him at night…”
Krishna learns early in life that he will only get what he earns and not what he deserves in life. His elder brother, Ranga, is forced to work as an unpaid labourer in the Deshmukh household in exchange for Krishna’s freedom. Krishna is sent away from Irumi, away from Vijaya, his education sponsored by the Deshmukhs. But decades later, as they cross each others’ paths, Vijaya and Krishna are still very much in love.
Ranga, on the other hand, joins the Naxalite movement against feudal lords. He breaks away from the quiet subservience of being a vetti and rises to the rank of a commander. He is joined by another woman from Irumi who lost everything to the cruelty of the Deshmukhs. The Fertile Earth captures a country in the throes of an explosive rise of violent Naxalite movements seeking to restore justice to a post-independent India plagued with cruelty and feudalism.
The Fertile Earth, Ruthvika Rao, Penguin India.