South India Storyscapes: COVENANT OF WATER – Abraham Verghese, PAINTER OF SIGNS – RK Narayan
This has been a year of great reading experiences. There have been good books made better by their pairings with other experiences. I’ve spent the first month of summer in the stories of South India. ‘The Covenant of Water’ is a 2023 novel by Abraham Verghese that travels from 1900 to the 1970s in Kerala. ‘The Painter of Signs’ is a 1976 novella by RK Narayan set in fictional Malgudi (thought to be inspired by Mysore) spanning a few months in the late 1970s.
What do they have in common? They’re both written by South Indian men, set in South India and between them spanning most of the twentieth century. Because of the immersive nature of both stories, I found myself pondering narratives about South India – how they treat gender and religion.
‘The Covenant of Water’ is a first for me in so many ways. I am put off by books that everyone is talking about (just as with movies and shows). Demented marketing whispers of bad products to me. And this book has come into the spotlight because Oprah featured it in her book club.
I also do not like books that are such tomes. I have been a writer long enough to recognise the self-indulgent narcissism in a story that goes on so long.
But I took a chance and I have no regrets. The first page of ‘The Convenant of Water’ hooked me. The language was simple, the characters engaging, not belying the literary nature of the genre. Thereafter I decided to embrace it, pretentious, celebrated tome and all. As my pair-along experience, I listened to Oprah Winfrey’s 6 part conversation with the author.
The book is among other things, a love letter to Kerala, a close neighbour to one of my histories. It affirmed one of the voices in my upbringing – that of my father who grew up in small town Tamil Nadu. And it’s a testament to the unique cultural politics of South India.
Patriarchy & politics in North & South India
My father would frequently point out discrepancies in what became popularised as the narrative of Indian life. Notably religious diversity and gender roles, both things that have come to be very important to me as an adult. Could that have happened because of the contradictions I absorbed about these things, growing up?
My trip to Thanjavur (Tamil Nadu, South India) last year was an eye-opener into what ‘small-town India’ looks like. It wasn’t a world of women being relegated to kitchens. I noticed women of all ages and across classes walking around, working office jobs as well as running shops. Careerwomen, higher education after marriage and kids, even divorce – these shock but exist with much more honesty in South India than I have seen in all my years in Mumbai.
Churches and temples equally dotted the landscape, quite at odds with the saffron-first image we are given of India. South India doesn’t hate Muslims the way North India does, my father would say. And in ’The Convenant of Water‘, Verghese writes,
“In South India, particularly in Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar, they do get along. The violence to their north feels as though it’s happening on another continent. Malayali Muslims, whose bloodlines reach back to merchants from Arabia who scudded to the Spice Coast in their dhows, have nothing to fear from their non-Muslim neighbors. Geography is destiny, and the shared geography of the Spice Coast, and the Malayalam language, unites all faiths. Once again, the fortress of the Western Ghats, which has kept invaders and false prophets at bay for centuries, spares them the sort of madness that leads to genocide. In his notebook Philipose writes, “Being a Malayali is a religion unto itself.”
The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese
‘The Painter of Signs’ doesn’t make a lot of references to communal differences. But Raman, the intellectual main character is depicted as a rationalist – someone who rejects the religious rituals and structures of his world. The book features a run-in with a local Hindu godman, who resists their message of population control. The core tension of the story is how Daisy lives her ideals while Raman merely intellectualizes his — and how threatened he feels by her clarity. It’s a refined commentary on gender presentation and political ideologies.
I was reminded of a Clubhouse conversation with a Delhi poet with Communist leanings. When challenged by him in a poetry prompt, I wrote this piece. It highlights how every single political ideology has exploited and ignored female bodies. His response?
“Aap toh achcha likhte hain magar is waqt, current political scenario mein feminism ko laane ki zaroorat nahin thi.”
(You write well but in this was not the right time in the current political scenario to bring up feminism.)
Indian women – our votes count but not our opinions. I was amused to find that every woman who heard that piece loved it and it made every man uncomfortable, most of all the woke ones. At the time, I was inclined to think that North India was more patriarchal than South India. But I concede that that is not true. Patriarchy in South India is just subtler in its erasures.
‘The Painter of Signs’ takes on the highly gendered question of reproductive rights. It does so without outright comment, only showing you characters’ actions and leaving you to draw your own conclusions. ‘The Convenant of Water’ isn’t about a specific gender issue but it refuses to erase them (the way my Delhi friend did). There is a definite statement being made about female empowerment by way of the journeys of the characters. And I think that kind of subtlety speaks of the politics of the authors, RK Narayan and Abraham Verghese respectively.
The Covenant’s blurb promises a book about a matriarch and I wouldn’t fault you for picturing a formidable old woman controlling the purse strings and lives. Isn’t that how popular Indian narratives portray a matriarch? But Big Ammachi is only one of many powerful female characters in this book. Female power is shown navigating the patriarchy, poverty and politics with love, loyalty, ambition and resilience. Similarly, The Painter’s Daisy is a prudent if somewhat impatient lady, not an unpleasant shrew.
The subtler misogyny of South India
It’s wonderful to see male storytellers craft female characters who are pleasant without being doormats to men. But even these beautiful books pedestalise women, albeit for their moral character, rather than their bodies. Every male character in The Covenant is weak-willed, impulsive and finds redemption at the cost of women. The two male characters who aren’t that way are flattened out of any personality by poverty, class dynamics and fear. The weakest female character (a religious scold) is still a better human being than the best male character. That kind of characterisation may have begun with reverence but ends in pedestalisation. It excuses men for being flawed and suggests that women are born divine and stronger. This is not feminist.
Maybe because of this, I felt the need to follow this book up with an old one that I remembered from my childhood – ‘The Painter of Signs’. RK Narayan’s novella is probably not fit for a ten-year-old. But I’m glad I read it then. The main female character, Daisy, shaped me in so many ways. How I think about reproductive rights, bodily autonomy and even sex today is informed by this book. While it shocked me at the time, the story normalised premarital sex and countered Bollywood’s toxic messages of izzat.
But reading The Painter as an adult meant seeing things I didn’t know to notice earlier. ‘The Painter of Signs’ also pedestalises Daisy and lets Raman, a would-be rapist go scott-free. Did Daisy truly reciprocate his affections, or is this where male authors start rationalising coercion as consent?
‘The Convenant of Water’s Philipose never ends up facing up to the magnitude of his sins on the woman he claims to love. And it is a woman – his daughter – who must make her peace with her tragic past. Without giving the plot away, a woman author would not have tied up Mariamma’s trajectory as cleanly. Even the most sensitive of male authors fall short when it comes to examining the nature of women’s familial relationships with each other.
I believe RK Narayan also penned a short story thought to have been a sequel to ‘The Painter of Signs’. That story suggests that an unforeseen pregnancy was the reason for Daisy’s behaviour at the conclusion of ’The Painter of Signs‘. This feels like a tremendous disservice to the powerful nature of Daisy’s character. It paints her as a coward, someone who feels shame and guilt over an ideology that she has been championing with conviction throughout The Painter.
Even today’s readers judge a woman who chooses a career or an ideology over a man. Unwed pregnancy simply downgrades their reason to hate her to a more mundane one than ‘her ideological fervour scares me’. It does so without reducing the extent of the misogyny. And thus, I find the same sad realities affect my intellectual, progressive brethren from South India.
Ten days after I finished reading both these books I was still melancholic. Still waters don’t just run deep, they also breed toxins. Maybe my journey with books needed this trial by water too.
Book Review: The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A 12-year-old girl loses her father and shortly after, her uncle tells her that she is to be married the next day to a 40-year-old widower with a child of his own. She arrives in a rural, barely inhabited Parambil with her silent husband and her first question is “Why is it so far from the water?”. This question is the thread on which a whole host of lives, relationships and more hang. This is Kerala in 1900, not yet a state in British India but small dwellings between the tapestry of canals, backwaters, rivers and lakes. Water shapes every aspect of life.
This was surprisingly easy to get through, despite being an absolute tome of a book. The writing flows as fluidly as does life in the water-drenched state. The blurb suggests that it is about the life of one character, ‘Big Ammachi’. But really, it’s about the history of Kerala through most of the twentieth century, seen through the lens of one family that begins with nothing and goes on to develop into a thriving village/township.
Indian narratives in this century tend to focus on mostly the North Indian Hindu-Muslim conflicts with British colonisers and the Punjab-West Pakistan partition. Very little, if at all attention is paid to the simultaneous partition that happened in Bengal-East Pakistan. And almost nothing is acknowledged of how South India lived through that hundred years. This is a good book to start on that journey if you are so inclined.
In addition, Indian narratives tend to focus on two major religions – Hinduism & Islam. That picture ignores a whole range of other belief systems, both spiritual and social that have existed for centuries and continue to thrive in their own enclaves.
Indian Christianity is a relatively small minority but given India’s population, that’s a large number of people. In addition, Christianity came to India in waves and was embraced & integrated into local customs in a myriad of ways. Kerala Christians are very different from Goan Christians, for example.
The caste framework intersects with local tribal/cultural/geographic practices. Malayalee Christian brides & married women still wear a ’taalimaala’ (a gold chain around their necks) with a cross engraved on a leaf as a pendant. Churches were often separate for the backward castes (and may still be in parts of the state). Cross this with colonial legacies as well as Britain’s own caste system of Protestants versus Catholics, English versus Irish and more and you have a rich novel.
These are heavy issues but the author takes the characters through all of them with a light hand, never losing either the gravitas or the sense of humour. There is astute, sometimes wickedly funny commentary on the social practices, corruption, and conflicted politics. We see the gradual replacement of the British Raj with Indian elites, the rise of Communism (as well as its journey into militant Naxalism), and the wave of Gulf immigrants.
Through it all, the characters are funny, brave, flawed, earnest, damaged, cruel and more. The male characters are just a shade more nuanced than the female characters. All the female characters are strong, exert their will and hold each other up – a shining testament to Kerala feminism. The child bride at the start of the book is treated with much love and gentleness by her sister-in-law and she grows up to build that strong foundation of love for all the characters thereafter.
A humorously named Decency Kochamma threatens hellfire on all the local kids and is the comic relief well into her seventies. A self-possessed 9-year-old Elsie helps a broken man heal from his horrific wounds, both physical and emotional. The irrepressible Odat Kochamma steals the wooden false teeth of her daughter-in-law’s father when she’s thrown out from their home and puts them on for fun when she likes. The men in contrast seem weaker, either more easily defeated by circumstance or bratty by privilege. Several deaths occur, all of them poignant, none of them gratuitous.
The book also chronicles healthcare through that century, from rudimentary local practices to the rise of modern medicine. The author draws from his own experiences as a doctor of infectious diseases during the AIDS epidemic. While this story ends before that time hits, leprosy sees a much more sensitive, nuanced portrayal than most of us have ever encountered.
And with all of these, it is still a deeply personal and emotional story. It’s beautiful.
Book Review: The Painter of Signs by R.K. Narayan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is one of RK Narayan’s middling books. Or to be precise, not as spectacular as Swami and Friends or possibly his best-known work, The Guide. But Narayan wrote no bad stories, just some like these that are less than impressive.
Raman is a confirmed bachelor in his thirties who lives a life of creative and intellectual satisfaction in Malgudi, all his needs being catered to by his aunt. He is a painter of signboards, a profession that today may seem like a low-wage one requiring no great skill set.
The book was first published in 1977 and one chapter references a 1962 diary as being ‘more than ten years old’ so this is likely the mid-70s. Raman himself has a college education, is well-read and has an artist’s opinion on typography & design that he brings to his work.
There is only one other person in the town who does the same work and Raman’s opinion of him is one of sneering condescension (since the man pays a meagre amount to other people to paint the letters correctly) rather than stern competition. He carries a satchel bearing Gandhi’s likeness and ponders on managing one’s impulses and living a worry-free life.
Then he meets Daisy, a government worker tasked with taking the message of population control to the nearby villages. She commissions him first to paint her office signboard and then asks if he will join her in touring the district to scope out walls that can be painted with this message. The entire book is about Raman’s unwholesome obsession with her as he swings between denial (and blaming her for the distraction) and desperate creepiness (sneaking into where she’s sleeping to assault her).
I first read the book when I was around 10 or 11 since my family were fans of the author. I don’t think it was an inappropriate age to read this at all. As Daisy remarks during one of her village sermons, let the children stay, it’s even more important for them to understand this. The ‘hum do hamare do’ campaign was picking up at that time and the forced sterilisation drive had happened about a decade earlier (also the subject of a short story in RK Narayan’s collection Short Story Collections by R. K. Narayan: Gods, Demons and Others, Malgudi Days, the Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories.
Reading it as an adult was intense since Raman’s behaviour feels so terrible seen through a 2025 lens. He is presented as a good man, self-aware, educated, and disciplined. The story depicts his fall from grace like a meditating sanyasi being disturbed by the evil wiles of an apsara, rather than as a critique of masculinity’s convenient rationalisations of misogyny and violence. It’s also not easy to brush it off as ‘that’s how people used to be in those days’ since we have Daisy, so remarkable even by today’s standards.
Daisy knows her own mind, has laser-focus on her goals, is undeterred by religious men, village elders or anything else about conservative India. She manages Raman’s skills as well as his attentions with economy. During the would-be assault, she escapes and only refers to it when he brings it up and even then as,
“I heard a tiger scratching under the cart so I climbed up the tree before it entered”.
Given her behaviour throughout the book, this does not appear to be coyness but a diplomatic way to navigate the many unsafe situations she is in. She knows that even the witnesses and the law authorities will not protect her and will turn to moral policing because of her work.
She formed a big impression on me at that age and I find many of the questions she poses to Raman and the world still relevant. Why does marriage mean erasing a woman’s identity? What kind of love is there in a man who wants his partner to dismiss her lifelong ambitions to be a permanent caregiver to him? At what point will men be willing to release women from their lifelong drudgery and let them go to their deaths in the way they want?
I am still undecided on whether Raman’s views speak for the author’s views too. He also echoes a lot of the men in RK Narayan’s stories – seemingly independent-minded, intellectual even when they’re illiterate (like ‘The Guide’s Raju) and eventually controlling of women. The Bachelor of Arts too had a protagonist who was very like this.
This book juxtaposes two interesting character motivations – A man who champions the Age of Reason and avoids sex as he thinks it reduces him and throws it all away for sexual satiation & ownership. A woman who is passionate and headstrong which lets her be sexually involved without needing social sanction and chooses the path of activism for population control. In the 1970s, India already had access to birth control devices and contraceptives. While we never see the specifics of Daisy’s work, she doesn’t appear to be preaching abstinence (that’s a Western Catholic viewpoint and doesn’t align with the more nuanced spirituality/body politics of India).
Eventually, it is hard to tell who seduced whom and who is truly culpable of anything but messy human interaction. Just like sex and birth. I think this book should be required reading for anybody interested in reproductive rights, especially in India.