Kusum Khemani’s Lavanyadevi is, in many ways, an unusual novel for contemporary readers. Much of today’s Indian fiction, like contemporary political discourse, wears its politics on its sleeve. Again, it tends to value narrative economy: unity of time, space, and character are treated almost as a given, producing compact, tightly structured narratives. Lavanyadevi resists both of these. It is expansive rather than compressed, digressive rather than seamless, and reticent about announcing any ready-made ideological banner. Khemani’s novel is unconventional precisely because it sidesteps the language of ‘isms’ and insists instead on exploring how memory, morality, and lineage shape women’s lives. In doing so, it unsettles the very categories by which women’s writing is usually judged, offering an ethical rather than a programmatic vision. To read Lavanyadevi is to step outside the critical comfort zone of contemporary fiction and enter a slower, more intricate, and more layered world.
First published in Hindi in 2013 and translated into English in 2024 by Banibrata Mahanta, the novel spans five generations of an aristocratic Bengali family negotiating colonial transitions and modernity. Here, women remain central, carrying the narrative through migration, reform, and self-inquiry. The triadic arc of Prabhavatidevi, Jyotirmoyidevi, and Lavanyadevi anchors the narrative. Prabhavatidevi is unexpectedly elevated when she becomes the second wife of Raja Dhananjay Roychoudhury. Her daughter Jyotirmoyidevi consolidates the family’s fortunes in Kolkata. However, it is the granddaughter, Lavanyadevi who emerges as the novel’s true centre. Beautiful and admired though not flawless, she questions herself constantly, learning from her foremothers but reinterpreting their lessons. Lavanyadevi is a resolute character whose grace emerges through self-doubt, contradiction, and the need to confront her own biases. The narrative refuses to sanctify her as a goddess-figure even while continuously framing her life against mythic archetypes.
This vision culminates in Lavanyadevi’s decision to pass her legacy not to her resentful children but to her ‘soul-children’. These reformers, the Lavanya Army, are entrusted with carrying her vision into the world: micro-banking in Bangladesh, rehabilitation for sex workers in Sonagachhi, and de-addiction programmes in Tamil Nadu. Inheritance becomes not wealth or bloodline, but ethical practice transmitted through words and commitments. Later in life, Lavanyadevi retreats from Kolkata to the mountains of Uttarakhand. The transition marks her journey from grihastha to sanyasa. Yet her renunciation is an act of responsibility where withdrawal from the household becomes a way to extend care and ethical commitment into the wider world. Unlike male renunciants in Indian novels who move towards abstraction, she carries her relationships with her. Her faith is deep but never rigid; her devotion expansive rather than dogmatic. When accused of being too tolerant towards other religions, she insists that Hinduism itself teaches such tolerance and that bhakti must remain fluid and adaptive.
The breadth of the novel is impressive, but not without cost. Its density—the digressions into mythological parallels, the layering of philosophical reflection—sometimes dilutes psychological depth and makes the narrative feel heavy. At moments, Lavanyadevi’s virtues verge on hagiography, particularly when narrated through the admiring voices of others. Yet these moments are balanced by Khemani’s refusal to offer closure to Lavanyadevi’s persona.
Banibrata Mahanta’s translation of Lavanyadevi carries a clear tension between fidelity and unease. The Hindi original, apart from the dialogues, uses a highly Sanskritized, poetic register that often reads more like an incantation than a story. Its dense vocabulary, long sentences, and elevated diction keep the narration perched on an ivory tower. For many contemporary Hindi readers, me included, this ‘high’ style can feel alienating, and relief comes only in the dialogues, where the idiom is more fluid and accessible. Against this backdrop, the translator’s fear that his English version might sound ‘too academic’ (p. 241) feels ironic, since reading the Hindi original is no less a challenge for the reader. Khemani’s preference for this elevated register may not be accidental. Her ancestors migrated to Kolkata in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the bhadralok elite valued Sanskritized Hindi and formal diction as marks of refinement. This background also complicates the claim in the Foreword and by the translator that the novel is multilingual and polyphonic, for true multilingualism appears only in the dialogues, where Bangla, Marwari, or Punjabi interrupt the prose and add liveliness. The translator’s achievement lies in carrying this imbalance into English by preserving the gravity of the narration while letting character speech puncture it at intervals. Consider this, for example:
Mahanta translates this as:
Was Lavanyadevi an embodiment of the philosopher king Janaka, who was so detached from the fortunes of his kingdom Janakpuri that he could remain as unmoved by its prosperity as when it burnt down to ashes? The perplexed bhadralok society of Kolkata began a relentless and deprecatory scrutiny of the two and kept at it for some time. However, their lack of success wore out the genteel folk, and eventually they came to accept this unusual marriage (p. 5).
Here, Mahanta deftly sustains Khemani’s double register. He preserves the solemnity of the Janaka allusion while rendering the bhadralok response in restrained elegance, so that the elevated comparison attains rhythm and clarity without lapsing into abstraction.
Yet the ceiling of Khemani’s high, poetic register often absorbs the translator’s energy. In trying to hew closely to the Sanskritized narration, a translator can slip into literalness and lose contextual nuance. For instance, see this exchange:
The translator renders the line as: ‘One day his English boss asked him in his stilted Bangla-inflected Hindi, “Are you willing to go to Rangoon, Mr. Somnath? You can lead a luxurious life there and get a handsome salary too!” (p. 6)’ This version is faithful at the level of meaning, but it flattens the playfulness and social edge of the original. Translation here becomes not only a matter of semantic accuracy but also of reproducing historical texture and social idiom.
Mahanta’s translation, the product of a long gestation, deepens the vision by balancing fidelity with stylistic sensitivity. His paratexts—glosses, introduction, and translation notes—along with devices such as italicizing letters and diary entries, give the text an enriched texture without interrupting its flow. Together, novel and translation remind us that legacies are not possessions to be preserved but unfinished tasks to be carried forward.
Works Cited
Kumar, Umesh. ‘Alternative Readings of Sita’s Story’. The Book Review, August 2021, pp. 42-43.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Cultural Pluralism?’ Philosophy and Social Criticism, 42, nos. 4-5, 2016.
Umesh Kumar is a literary translator and critic. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures and a Nominated Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK.