The six great rivers of the historical Punjab all rise in the High Himalayas, then chart their own paths through eastern Pakistan or northeastern India before coming together in a series of confluences until they are finally united in the majestic Indus, which empties into the Arabian Sea near Karachi.
This pattern of shared origin, divergent journeys and eventual aggregation forms the narrative arc of Gurnaik Johal’s thrilling debut novel, Saraswati, which takes its name from the region’s mythological seventh river, which may or may not have risen at Mount Kailash at some point in the distant past.
In Saraswati, the seven interconnected and overlapping narratives all flow from a single qissa, Punjab’s signature variant on the folk tale, which tells the story of a late-nineteenth-century couple – Sejal and Jugaad – whose inter-caste love-across-the-divide relationship is a classic of the form. As Johal has it, the couple actually existed and, after eloping downriver in a rowboat, they spent their accumulated savings on a small farm where they raised their seven children, each of them named after one of the great rivers. Over time, the children streamed out of the house, coursing in different directions: to Mauritius, Kenya and the North-West Frontier as part of the Punjabi Irregular Force.
When we catch up with their present-day descendants, they are widely dispersed, but the process of their convergence has begun. The novel opens with Satnam, a Wolverhampton-born man in his twenties, who has quit his corporate job in London and travelled to the Punjab to sell a farm he has inherited from his recently departed grandmother. On arriving there, he notices water in its once-dry well, a discovery that is taken as evidence locally – by earnest believers and political opportunists – that it sits on the former path of the Saraswati, a deified river that many want to see flowing again, to kick-start a process of national and spiritual renewal. Satnam decides not to sell the farm and throws in his lot with a charismatic local politician, Kush Bhatt, for whom he acts as an enforcer, using violence if necessary to compel farmers to sell land on the proposed river route. One of the holdouts is the New Albion Estate, once home to an English diplomat who flattened the land, first in the style of the Suffolk countryside, then as Versailles, furnishing the grounds with Grecian statues. Satnam and his friends break into the grounds and, in one of the book’s many macabre comic set pieces, use the dismembered penises of Apollo and friends to break the windows.
Johal’s exploration of the impact of colonialism on landscapes and peoples continues in the second strand, which roams from the Chagos Islands, where Katrina meets Jay, to Svalbard, where they honeymoon, then to the proposed Saraswati route, where Katrina has been commissioned to exterminate a colony of imported yellow crazy ants – “The true arseholes of nature” – which, like the British imperialists before them, ruin everything for the Indigenous population when they arrive. Locals believe the ants were inadvertently imported to the region by a team of archaeologists led by Dr Radha Johns (the “Indian Indiana Jones”), who also appears in the third narrative, which tells the story of Nathu, a Kenyan of Punjabi descent.
As the novel progresses, the interconnections multiply, in part thanks to the efforts of an unnamed writer who is working on a long read about the descendants of Sejal and Jugaad, and is keen to pull them all together: Gyan, a Canadian rock star and environmental activist; Harsimran, an ill-fated Bollywood stunt double; and Mussafir, an enterprising Pakistani teenager, desperate to get across the closed border into India.
Mussafir operates a popular Instagram fan account dedicated to Arushi, a filmi music megastar, and Kush Bhatt is a member of a political party headed by a Modi-like leader called Narayan Indra. These satirical background figures form a quiet critique of modern India, its celebrity obsession and authoritarian Hindu nationalism. But Saraswati feels less like a sweeping state-of-the-nation novel than an intricately patterned portrait of the Punjabi diaspora through which Johal can explore his central themes: continuity and rupture, capture and control, return and renewal. His characters crave a sense of connection to the past and to the land, which, everywhere they look, is being despoiled: trees felled, forests razed, rivers rerouted. In the face of this, their only solace is to be found in relationships – romantic and familial.
The author is a keen-eyed observer of both, always attuned to the compromises and concealments of coupledom, but also to the passion and tenderness. As a wise old auntie puts it: “The issue of love is that its current is too strong to be confined within social order. It flows wherever it flows”.
David Annand’s novel Peterdown won the 2022 McKitterick prize
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