Pursuit of Freedom by Laxmi Parasuram: book review

Pursuit of Freedom (2016) is set in a remote village in Kerala, India, in 1940, nearing the end of British colonial rule, and in America in the 1960s.

Maya is a 12-year-old girl in 1940, and about to enter an arranged marriage ‘like a calf to be sold and sent away to anoher house’ she writes. She wants to go to school instead. Headstrong and rebellious, Maya defies her father Sekhar.

There are several narrators in this novel – Maya and Maya’s mother Ammalu – which juxtaposes the similarities and differences between two generations of Indian traditions, particularly concerning girls and marriage. Household servant Velayudhan, and private tutor Vasudevan Nair, who is secretly teaching Hindi to Maya, reveal the differences in Nair and Brahmin customs.

Sekhar is also a narrator, who can’t understand his ‘adamant, self-willed and conceited’ daughter. He tries to break her will with the cane until her ultimate defiance.

From a Catholic boarding school to America, Maya travels as far as she can in the pursuit of freedom.

After the halfway mark in the novel, the writing becomes more interesting as Maya attends university in America where her definition of freedom is tested. The multiple narrrators cease, and Maya takes the sole reins in describing her journey and her destiny.

In the 1960s, Maya has to come to terms with her heritage and all that she wants to forget with all that is socially, climatically, politically, historically financially, religiously, philosophically, sexually, and linguistically different. Back home, the tension between India and Pakistan, and the outbreak of the Bangladesh War, brings into view another definition of freedom.

The times are confusing – her Indian friend Pankaj falls in love with an American boy and her American friend Judy falls in love with an Indian boy. And Maya? A professor questions her ‘abnormal mental make-up’ which challenges her ‘fighting spirit.’ She finds answers in literature.

I am not a fan of bold font for emphasis, nor the excess of narrators. Fortunately, the exploration of freedom and a young girl’s awakening and transition to adulthood is well developed against the backdrop of foreign policies and cross-country international relations.

The feminist narrative is not aggressive; rather, it is a quiet, inner questioning about expectations, which is translatable to the gender narrative for anyone coming to terms with their own independence and identity. More pronounced in a foreign country, the questions about identity and freedom for Maya are universal.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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