Reviewed by Ruth Latta
**warning-plot reveal**
Outcaste
by Sheila James
Goose Lane Editions
May 2024, Paperback, 324 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1773103020
When Sheila James was twelve years old, her history teacher asked the class to write about their ancestors. Growing up in Nova Scotia, Sheila knew little about India’s history or her extended family. Her father drew her a map of India, circa 1947, indicating an area in the middle, “the princely state of Hyderabad.” Later, as an adult in India studying language and music, she read We Were Making History,” a book about the women who joined the communist movement and fought the feudal system from 1946 to 1951.
Outcaste is not Sheila James’s family story, but is the result of intensive research over the past ten years. Her parents, who came from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and grew up during the independence struggle, told her “great stories,” but, prior to her research, she lacked a context for these anecdotes. Outcaste is set in Canada and India and extends over the fifty years after Indian Independence from Britain, from 1947 to 1997. The time shifts build suspense, and each transition is well-signalled.
Outcaste opens with a freedom-fighter, Malika, hidden in a tree. She has been assigned by the communist resistance to assassinate the new district commissioner, appointed by the Nehru administration. From her vantage point, she recognizes an acquaintance, Rayappa, in the official car, and refrains from shooting him.
Then the story shifts to June 1997 and the release of a patient, Professor Irwin Peter, from the psychiatric hospital where he has been since 1985. In June of 1985, he flew from his university position in Nova Scotia to Toronto see his natural-born daughter, Anasuya, and his adopted daughter, Jaya, and to insist that Anasuya fly to India to see her mother. The daughters have done something, as yet unspecified, of which he disapproves. He has tickets for Anasuya and his granddaughter, Anya, for Air India Flight 182. On June 23, 1985, a bomb exploded on that aircraft en route from Toronto to London, England, All 329 people aboard, mostly Canadian citizens, died in the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history. Anasuya was listed among the dead; Anya wasn’t, but Irwin believed she was gone too, and his guilt led him to a suicide attempt and breakdown.
In 1997, Jaya takes him in upon his discharge from hospital, though they have been estranged since the events of 1985. He learns that Anya didn’t take the fatal flight. A musician, she’s been travelling and keeping in sporadic touch with Jaya.
The reason for Irwin’s interference in his daughters’ lives, with such sad consequences, provides suspense, as does the arrival of a letter to Irwin from Raghunandan Reddy of Korampally, India, asking if he can provide an elderly family member, Ashamma, with information about a woman named Malika, last seen in 1948.
“For the longest time, Irwin wanted to forget…Now he longs to remember,”the author tells us. As part of his therapy, he kept a journal listing those he loved, those who loved him, and those with whom no love was lost. The list of names piques reader curiosity about characters yet to appear.
The action then shifts to Korampally where the wealthy landlord, ninety-seven year old Raghunandan Reddy, is in palliative care. In a discussion about making amends to the many women he has hurt, his swami (priest) suggests that he compensate just one, so he chooses “a lowly creature with whom [he] fathered a most unfortunate son, now dead.”
The families of Irwin Peter, Raghunandan Reddy and the “lowly creature” Ashamma, are entwined, as Jaya and Anya gradually discover when they go to India with Irwin. The author feeds readers bits of information and gets us caught up in the genealogy puzzle while she also paints a picture of India.
Part Two of Outcaste takes back us to 1947, when a twenty-year-old college graduate, Rayappa, accompanies an Oxford professor to Korampally to help him research a book about a typical village in rural Hyderabad. Rayappa, who has taken the English name, Irwin Peters, keeps a notebook in which he records his observations of village life, the names and roles of villagers, and, eventually, his own feelings. The professor and Rayappa are to spend a year in Korampally as guests of Raghunandan Reddy.
Through Rayappa’s eyes, we see the feudal organization and caste system in play. On the village outskirts, their bullock cart driver disparages a young man of a lower caste, a blind basket weaver with a club foot. Farther along, three peasant girls, one of whom is Malika, are waiting at the well for someone of higher caste to draw them some water, because, as “Dalits” or “untouchables,” they are forbidden to touch the rope and bucket. In fact, Malika’s family converted to Islam, as Rayappa’s (Irwin’s) family adopted Christianity, believing that the higher castes would treat them like human beings.
Most scenes in the novel achieve several things at once, developing the characters key to the complex family story while also showing the caste system and the political realities of the day. When Gandhi comes to Korampally to speak about the dangers of Hyderabad joining Pakistan, he addresses the peasant untouchables, with whom he’d lived for a while in 1934. When he urges them to practise proper hygiene, Rayappa (Irwin), thinks Gandhi should instead be telling powerful men in government to quit starving people off their land, denying them access to clean water, and abusing the Dalits.
Malika’s father, injured at the hands of Raghunandan Reddy’s son, Linga, is in debt to the Reddys, so Malika has to work in the their compound cleaning the latrines. The blind, disabled man, Vijay, easily recruits her into the Communist Party of India (CPI) because her family has no one to help with the harvest. The CPI has organized student volunteers to assist, as neighbours are busy with their own crops and the landlord’s.
In time, Malika becomes a Party squad leader who helps peasants wrest the land from their feudal lords, as happened in Spain in the 1930s, and elsewhere in the world at various times in history. The Reddys are driven out of Korampally (though only temporarily) and their cattle, tools and land are distributed equally, with all debts wiped out. Many villages are similarly liberated, until, in 1948, the Indian Army invades to free the state of Hyderabad from the Nizam and the peasants from the communists. A sharpshooter who’s involved in the struggles even when pregnant and nursing, Malika is a composite character that Sheila James has created from the experiences of real women. Gripping scenes of guerilla actions keep readers on the edges of their chairs.
James’s characters are well-rounded in the E.M. Forster sense. In contrast to his canonical A Passage to India, however, Outcaste shows the suffering and heroism of the lower castes. Grittily realistic, the novel depicts violence in various forms: the burning of homes and crops, beatings, prostitution, child sex slavery, rape and murder.
Outcaste is also poetic:
“What is it that enables some to cheat death at every turn?” the author asks. “That nurtures in some the tiniest grain of hope, even in the harshest conditions, and allows them to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Perhaps it is not so much the qualities within a person that makes them persist, but the inspiration of others that urges them on.”
Outcaste would make a gripping movie, and deserves to win major prizes. Kudos to Sheila James for creating this educative work of art.
About the reviewer: Ruth Latta’s latest novel, A Striking Woman, (Ottawa, Baico, 2023, info@baico.ca), is a story of true love and trade union organizing.