What is knowledge, really, if not the sediment of someone else’s certainty? Whether it is the questions you ask, the answers you find, the traditions you blindly accept, or the morality you swear by, it was handed down and accepted, the way a child inherits a surname and mistakes it for a self. Before any answer, there is a question. Before any question, there is the permission to ask or think it. Most of us never reach that threshold, for we inherit our questions, our gods, our place in the order of things.

Rooted in Ambedkarite thought and building a mythology uniquely its own, The Seekers by Gautamiputra Kamble, translated by Sirus J. Libeiro, lives on that threshold.

As the title suggests, this is a book of seeking. Across five stories, incompleteness is the only constant, a hunger for something perpetually just out of reach, something the inherited world has no word for, a shared dissatisfaction with the answers on offer. The journey, in each case, moves inward and away.

In one story, a girl sees the sun for the first time and turns to stone. In another, a pramukh (village chief), stripped of status and wealth, digs a cave and disappears into it for 18 years. When a writer eventually tracks him down, hoping to make a story out of him, the pramukh offers only silence. Months pass. No words. The writer realises, over time, that a man who withholds his words withholds his story, and without the story, he cannot be made to exist in someone else’s telling.

In the translator’s note, Gautamiputra tells Sirus: “The two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, exert an immense influence on art and literature around us. Even if the epics aren’t referenced directly, art and literature is infused with a certain worldview that is shaped by these stories. Through Parivrajak [The Marathi original, first published in 2004], I wanted to put forth a different philosophy.”

And a different philosophy it is. For example, we grow up on stories that sing of kings and their conquests, their valour measured in terms of the enemies they made and the battles they won. However, when Kamble’s king in the titular story, “Parivrajak”, is given the ultimatum to fight or leave, he chooses to leave. His interiority comes from curiosity rather than from cowardice or shame: “I will search for reasons. Reasons why people, who flounder in pain like fish out of water, are so eager to fight. Reasons why people are keen on making enemies even at death’s door.” By stepping away from tradition, he risks not being granted a story but remains unfazed by that possibility.

No patience with the romance of tradition

The central issue in most of these stories is not ignorance but conceit, the arrogance engendered by what we think we know. In “Shilpasan”, a statue of two figures invites countless interpretations: “woman-man, sister-brother, husband-wife, mother-son, father-daughter, teacher-student, student-teacher and so on. However, no eyes had ever looked beyond the limits of traditional relationships and considered them to be simply two humans. No, not ever.” In this story, no one can agree on the colour of a curtain: green, blue, black, or white. “The true colour of the curtain was probably something entirely different.” What we see is seldom the thing itself. What we see is couched in our inherited vocabulary.

For the uninitiated, the experience of reading The Seekers can be disorienting. “The book is trying to tell a story that hasn’t been told before. Consequently, that uncanny feeling is bound to follow—about lands that feel familiar but aren’t exactly so; of names that resemble sounds they’ve heard, but not exactly; of characters who say and do things which we don’t really expect them to, and so on,” Libeiro said. The almost-familiar is always more unsettling than the completely foreign.

The book has no patience with the romance of tradition. In “Parivrajak”, Kamble writes: “You people imagine yourselves to be lovers of tradition, but in truth, you are afflicted by it. Tomorrow, if someone invents a practice of crossing a flooded river once a year, you’ll miraculously discover the courage to do it.” Then again: “You know how difficult it is to transgress custom—be it a mighty river or a meagre stream.”

In “Tales of Viroopnagar”, he mockingly writes of the town that it is “obsessed with its old traditions and remnants of its ancient past…. So long is the shadow of the past that even the new things in town bear façades of antiquity.” In “The Search for the Sixth Sense”, a character searching for perception beyond the five senses is told to “use the senses you have and try to live. Don’t worry about that which is blatantly bad. Instead, search for that which is wicked but masquerades as virtue; use your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and your entire body.”

Despite the magical realism threaded through the stories, the settings and the problems are quite familiar. “The plight of the women and of the voting sticks is the same—they are present and absent at the same time,” Kamble says in “Tales of Viroopnagar”.

In the same story—a story with many stories within itself—an arhat (an enlightened person), witnessing a lamb about to be sacrificed, asks the simplest possible question: Why? The question is enough to splinter the town into two groups, one for tradition and the other against it, both eventually ready to kill each other.

The Seekers flows with the ongoing motion of seeking; to promise resolution would be to reproduce the very certainty it resists. What remains, then, when you close it, is the question you started with, except now it feels different, more your own. And that is the hallmark of great literature.

Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world.

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