Obsession and Namelessness in Devibharathi’s THE SOLITUDE OF A SHADOW
In The Solitude of a Shadow, Devibharathi presents a complex picture of a vengeance-seeking narrator fractured by trauma, caste, and identity crisis.
The narrative of Devibharathi’s The Solitude of a Shadow begins with an ominous warning: “Karunakaran had turned up before us like an evil spirit after nearly thirty years.” Thus unfolds the unnamed narrator’s quest for revenge against the rich and influential Karunakarn, for the latter’s abuse of the narrator and his sister decades ago.
Solitude is the first novel by veteran author Devibharathi to appear in English, after it was translated from the original Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman and published by Harper Perennial India in 2024. As the novel opens, the narrator has just joined a government high school as a clerk where he finds himself face to face with Karunakaran. This is when he decides to quench his thirst for vengeance, and starts on a path from which there is no return. His first course of action is to tell his sister Sharada—now a married woman and mother of two grown-up children—of Karunakaran’s return. He sends an anonymous letter to Karunakaran, detailing both Karunakaran’s misdeed, and the narrator’s own thirst for revenge. When this proves ineffective, the narrator ingratiates himself into Karunakaran’s household as a jack of all trades. Gradually, while disguising his true identity and motivations, he becomes an important figure in the household, finding himself in a perfect position for revenge.
While revenge may be a dish best-served cold, however, it isn’t a dish that can be served by everyone. So, it is with the narrator of The Solitude of a Shadow, too. The narrator’s plans never really comes to fruition—at least not the way he would have liked them to. He is a man marred by indecision, doubt, passivity, and despair. This is reflected from the beginning when he first sets eyes on Karunakaran; even at this point, he has to remind himself of his sister to keep himself steady and on his path: “The man who had occupied my vengeful heart for thirty years was there in front of me in flesh and blood. I felt disoriented for a moment. Then I remembered my sister Sharada’s brown eyes wandering endlessly like mine in an unfulfilled quest for revenge.”
The Solitude of a Shadow can, thus be read as a novel where the protagonist-narrator is exiled to a place of his own making, a place of mental distress and warped realities from which there is no return.
His disorientation, and the quest for revenge propelled by the thought of his sister, become a motif in the saga that follows this first meeting. Despite being an insider in the Karunakaran family, the narrator fails to act upon his opportunities. For instance, there’s a time when during a hunting expedition that he is left alone with Karunakaran. He has anticipated such a scenario and has brought a knife with him for this purpose. At the opportune moment, however, he finds himself paralyzed and incapable of killing Karunakaran, even as the latter sleeps defencelessly before the narrator.
The narrator says, “However, as if a man, or a wild animal, or a small but dangerous creature of the forest, or something else altogether, had got in my way, I remained passive and immobile, staring at my enemy as though I was trying to make sure that it was really him. I wondered if it was cowardice.”
This constant indecision on the part of the narrator which continues throughout the narrative reminds one of the dilemmas of two literary figures: Hamlet and Prufrock. Like Prufrock, Devibharathi’s narrator too cannot seem to gather the courage to take the plunge, reiterating the Prufrockian question, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Like Hamlet, he exists in a state of chronic mania and anxiety which only keeps on increasing as the book progresses. A strange apathy seems to overtake the narrator when it comes to taking any action, something that he cannot explain even to himself—let alone to Sharada, who waits to be avenged.
Eventually, Karunakaran and his family do suffer a downfall, but it happens so without the narrator’s efforts. The act of ‘revenge’, however, comes in the form of this nameless narrator seducing and then abandoning Karunakaran’s daughter Sulochana, who is to be married to an unworthy man after the family’s ruin. In a way, this revenge is cyclical to the incidents thirty years prior in the narrative. And yet, this act of retribution is as much masochistic as it is sadistic, for while the narrator hurts Sulochana in the process, he is not unscathed himself.
Caste and class are also important dynamics that feature in Solitude. Karunakaran is from a higher caste and has money. The narrator, on the other hand, comes from a poor family who often borrowed money from Karunakaran thirty years ago and his caste makes him a butt of taunts by people like Sulochana’s mother-in-law.
When at a later point in the novel, the narrator discloses the past relationship to Sulochana’s already doubtful mother-in-law and husband, he suffers from a deep mental anguish. The narrator continues to be with the family when everyone else has abandoned Karunakaran, and does everything he can to help the family. At this point, he seems to be living in a sort of twilight zone, a penumbra where he is unsure of the reason behind his actions. This leads him further and further into a downward spiral; a time comes when he switches cities to get away from Karunakaran, but realizes that he seems to have become the man he hated. He starts a relationship with Sugandhi, a married woman, and this leads him further into mental anguish.
Disillusioned and disenchanted by what he ends up becoming, he says at a point, “Some days, I would be overcome by guilt and disgust at myself. I used to think of Karunakaran as the embodiment of evil, and had wandered like a ghoul for thirty years wanting to wreak vengeance on him. Now I felt I had become exactly like Karunakaran; in fact, in terms of morality, I had fallen far lower than him.”
This self-disenchantment leads to a fractured sense of identity for the narrator, where not just he but even others mistake him for Karunakaran. He is split between the past and the present, and the narrative, too, begins to transition between time.
By the book’s end, the narrator has become a shadow in every sense. He has no one with whom he can share his deepest fears, longings and anguish and he is cut off from everyone he was once close to: Sulochana, Sugandhi, Sharada. His mental torture and anguish remind one of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov; but while there’s some hope of redemption for Raskolnikov at the end of Crime and Punishment, none seems to be on the horizon for our unnamed narrator—especially in keeping with the last sentence of the book, which seems to challenge the reality of the entire narrative.
Our perception of the narrator is shaped entirely from the single, life-altering incident in his childhood, which continues to dominate him till the end of the book, and keeps him from becoming someone other than an agent of vengeance. It is this fear of further isolation and lack of identity that keeps him from exacting that revenge, for who is he once the deed is done?
Another interesting aspect of the book is Devibharathi’s decision to leave his narrator unnamed. In an essay published in The New Yorker, Sam Sacks writes that namelessness is “an increasingly familiar trait in the fiction of exile” and describes namelessness as a disease which “tends to afflict women, minorities, the poor, the outcaste—those treated as background extras in the primary story lines of history.”
The Solitude of a Shadow can, thus be read as a novel where the protagonist-narrator is exiled to a place of his own making, a place of mental distress and warped realities from which there is no return. Besides, he comes from a caste and class that has often been treated as an ‘extra’ in the grand stage of social life; this is reflected in the author’s decision to not give the narrator a name, even when he is centre stage.
The narrator’s namelessness also reflects how the his identity is wrapped around the need to exact revenge. He doesn’t require a name because he sees himself—and wants the readers to see him—only as Karunakaran’s nemesis. What’s more, he becomes a shadow of Karunakaran first by becoming indispensable in his household and commanding the kind of respect which comes from being close to such a powerful figure, and later by following a trajectory similar to Karunakaran’s in the past. Because of his inability to take revenge, he is no more than a shadow of an image from his childhood that has dominated him ever since, of “the scrawny weakling who had stood before him [Karunakaran] holding a sickle in his raised hand” and taken the oath that “‘No matter how long it takes, I won’t rest until I have chopped you to pieces one day. I will avenge this, da.’” His present self feels no more than a spectre of this vengeful young boy, doomed forever because he can neither rest until he has exacted revenge, nor after it.
It’s also possible to draw a parallel between the narrator and any of the unnamed, shadowy, revenge-seeking assassin figures, who often populate thriller and spy fiction. The difference lies in the fact that The Solitude of a Shadow is interested in giving its readers a peek into the working of the narrator’s tortured mind and not an adrenaline rush inducing, edge-of-the-seat page turner—although Devibharathi’s novel, too has the potential to be finished in a single sitting.
In his Translator’s Note, N Kalyan Raman writes that the book, “describes with painful clarity the poverty and isolation of inhabiting an obsession, a shadowy existence…” This “poverty of isolation” keeps the narrator isolated not just from the characters in the novel but also, to a great extent, from the readers who get to know of the narrator only in terms of his great obsession. Our perception of the narrator is shaped entirely from the single, life-altering incident in his childhood, which continues to dominate him till the end of the book, and keeps him from becoming someone other than an agent of vengeance. It is this fear of further isolation and lack of identity that keeps him from exacting that revenge, for who is he once the deed is done?
Caught in an existence that is neither here nor there, the nameless narrator’s identity becomes so wrapped in Karunakaran’s shadow that he gradually becomes Karunakaran. The story’s idea of obsession and becoming the object of one’s obsession has striking similarities with that of another great obsessive relationship of literature, that of Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. But while Cathy’s declaration of “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” has echoes of a (problematic) love, which mingles between ecstasy and toxicity, Devibharathi’s narrator’s admission of the same comes from a place reeking only of isolation, moral bankruptcy, and deep mental anguish. That the novel successfully captures all this in less than two hundred pages is a remarkable achievement.
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Sneha Pathak is a writer and translator currently based in Gurugram, Haryana. Her book reviews and other writings have appeared in Purple Pencil Project, Kunzum Review, Mystery and Suspense Magazine, Muse India, Kitaab Quarterly etc. Her first book of translation was published in 2023. She can be found on Instagram at @reader_girl_reader.
